Dad told us lots of stories over the years about the things he did as a child.
There was a page in Dad’s book that asked about a “clubhouse or hideaway” that they had as a child, and it asked him to describe it:
Our hideout was the metal sided garage on the back of our lot at 3117 Letcher Avenue. As far as I know, no vehicle was ever in this building. It had one window, facing the house, one standard 2-8 by 6-8 door facing the Wessle’s yard and double vertical doors facing the back alley. It was so full of accumulated junk that you could hardly move around in it. There was Dad’s large wooden chest of tools just to the left when you entered the door and wood work bench, on the Sale’s side of the building. It was here that many rubber guns, stilts, tin can contraptions, works of art, school projects, and items of general mischief were designed and brought to fruition.
Dad had good things to say about all of his brothers. He was particularly proud of the fact that three of his brothers (Fred, Gerald, and Don) received doctorate degrees. What always impressed me about that fact was none of them ever went by the title “Dr.” – their humble origins and sensible upbringing obviated the need for lording some fancy appellation over others. He remarked “Ray and I are the black sheep with zero credentials.” Formal-education deficiencies aside, Ray and Dad were pretty ingenious as children, and these traits carried over into adulthood for both of them. Some of the stories about Ray’s inventions are amusing (and occasionally frightening).
My brother Ray was an amazing inventor. He could make rubber gun pistols and rubber gun repeating rifles. Either one would raise a whelp on your butt if you got hit. Old inner tubes from service stations were cut in strips to make
Image via Wikipedia
ammunition. Many whippings resulted from misuse of the rubber guns. Also pea shooters got us in a lot of big time trouble. A pound of navy beans cost nine cents, or four and a half drink bottles, at the A&P Store up on Meadowbridge Road. With a bean shooter you could bean somebody thirty feet away. I didn’t hear about anybody loosing an eye. Momma kept telling us that somebody was going to loose an eye and get a beating to boot. We got the beatings anyway. Ray used an unarmed hand grenade, purchased from Redmond Lumber company (war surplus stuff) to wire the big swinging back gate so the grenade would blow up if you opened the gate. country matches would pop when the firing pin was pulled. He also hooked multiple transformers, or ignition coils up to the clothesline and wired them to the 110v power out in the garage. If Momma had not looked out the back door window and seen his limp body hanging from the clothesline and if she had not turned off the lights to the garage, Ray would have been history that day.
Back to the hideout, and the “diving rig”:
Ray’s hand-grenade back gate alarm, the under water diving rig (made from two-gallon Pep Boys Oil cans, a
Image via Wikipedia
bicycle pump, garden hose, and snorkel mask ordered from Johnson Smith Catalogs) were among some of the things designed and manufactured in the garage. Ray and I went over to Saunders Sand and Gravel Quarry and he and I took turns walking out in water over our heads with one carrying Dad’s heavy anvil for ballast and the other pumping like crazy on the bicycle pump to fill the oil can with an air reserve so the other could breathe under water (Jacque Cousteau move over). I am amazed to this day that one or both of us did not drown in that quarry.
In another section, concerning “things his parents wouldn’t approve of,” he mentioned the diving rig:
I do not think Mom or Dad would have approved of our trips to the sand Quarry and they would have flipped if they had seen Ray and me wading under water with Ray’s home made diving apparatus.
Kids today don’t seem to do that kind of stuff – make impromptu diving rigs from odds and ends found in their garage. Even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near a quarry. For a variety of reasons, everything outside that kids might do is too dangerous, or too likely to result in a lawsuit against somebody. Our zeal to protect everybody from every imaginable danger, combined with the increasing litigiousness of our society has made it nearly impossible for kids to engage in what my Dad and his brothers considered “play.”
He and Ray worked on other things, too:
Ray and I made a unicycle from old bicycle and tricycle parts and nearly killed ourselves trying to ride the thing on the walkway between our house and the Wessel’s.
At Boy Scout Camp, I worked on and received my photography merit badge. So Ray and I had to covnert the available space in the garage to a dark room. We stuffed newspaper in all the cracks and taped black plastic over the windows and doors. We finally got it totally dark and we did develop black and white pictures in the garage. We would go downtown to Adam’s Camera Shop, on Broad Street, to buy the basic chemicals and paper we had to have. No lasting artistic photographic work was ever produced, by we had fun working in the garage with one little red light for the prints and total darkness for the negatives.
The garage was a great place to experiment and to work, especially on rainy days when we could not play outside. I remember cookie cutters that Ray made from tin cans and once he crafted a cabin cruiser from tin cans, using plans from Popular Mechanics Magazine and an old soldering iron. Ray was able to make almost anything you could think of out of junk and if thought of it he usually tried to make it.
I mentioned that their ingenuity and resourcefulness carried over to adulthood.
Over the years, Dad concocted a number of interesting things:
- When we lived in the small house in Thaxton, John and I shared a room, and there wasn’t a whole lot of extra space in there. When we got a slot-car racing track for Christmas one year, having a place to use it was an issue. Assembling and dis-assembling the thing took a lot of time. Dad solved the problem by creating a permanent storage solution: from a 4′x8′ sheet of plywood, some eye hooks, pulleys and rope, he built a platform for the track that could be hoisted up to the ceiling when we weren’t using it. When we did want to use it, we’d untie the rope and lower it to rest on a couple of chairs.
- I’ve written before about him being a gardener. When he first moved out to Pine Forest, in Nottoway County, he
The baptistry water tower.
established a large garden, and sought a way to water it that wouldn’t put a strain on his new well. Serendipity, and a some ingenuity resulted in a solution: The church we used to attend had built a new sanctuary, and was in the process of renovating the old one into classrooms. When they offered up the old baptistry to anyone who would haul it away, Dad grabbed it. He built a platform for it to rest on, with a roof over it to keep out leaves and pine needles. Part of his property out there includes a pond my grandfather built to use for irrigating tobacco (we now use it mostly for catching some awesome bass), so he figured out how to get water from the pond up the hill -about a forty-foot increase in elevation- into the baptistry holding tank. A leveling monitor sent a signal to the pump in the pond whenever more water needed to be pumped up there. Gravity took the water from the holding tank to the soaker-hose irrigation system in the garden. A pressure tank later supplanted the gravity-based feed, but it was still a cool idea with amazing execution.
- Pine Forest being what it is (a large collection of pine trees, with their attendant needles), Dad figured out how to turn some of that pine straw into cash – or at least barter-worthy product to exchange for garden plants each spring. Using
Dunderbat's Machine
some plans he found on the internet, he built a lever-activated press that would make bales out of the pine straw. There was even a mechanism for placing baling twine in the box before the straw, so you could tie off the bale when you finished compacting a bale. He would trade the bales of for plants with the guy who owned a local garden store. Eventually, he told me that the store owner wouldn’t trade any more – he was worried about the tax consequences of the barter activity. So he had to pay Dad in cash, get a receipt for the transaction, then Dad would turn around and give him the cash for the plants. “Damn IRS,” he would say.
Industrious and ingenious – that was my Dad.
