Happy Birthday, Dad!
Dad would have been 84 today. He died 5 years ago just before COVID blasted open, last week of February 2020. I was in a hotel room for the funeral on about March 1 when the orange idiot in the white house said that there were 15 cases. It that it would be zero in a week or so. I screamed at the TV because of been watching YouTube videos of how crazy it had become in China,, people wearing all kinds of PPE to go to a corner shop to get some groceries. I had paid attention, and on the plane and airport there I saw exactly one mask, and on the way back two.
We have a new COVID strain spreading from China as I write this. I think I’ll be making up again.
Dad worked for the phone company basically all of his career after the air Force, first ar Bell Labs in NYC, then Michigan Bell when we moved to be closer to my mom’s family. He retired after 33 years but got another job for one of the new CDL phone companies cellular one and retired after half dozen years and then worked a few years move for some other phone related place. When he was done, he had three pensions
When I was young my dad did things with me like the balsa wood airplanes you used to see, flat bits, slike the wing throun a slor elevator in the back, little piece of u shaped metal at the front. We did kites sometimes.
Dad was into electronics all the way through my child hood. He made balsa wood model planes of his own, a framework with some kind of membrane over it like the early 2 seater airplanes of the first half of the 20th century. The membrane was secured by painting it with something called “airplane dope” that had a very distinctive smell.
They had tiny gas powered engines and were pretty loud if you were right next to the. We would see other airplane enthusiasts at the fields we went to.
At first we would take them out and they would be at the end of a couple strings, going around and around, up and down. No real control other than that. Eventually he wanted to do radio remote control and I’m sure that the controllers and receivers were expensive so Dad built one himself.
It was with great anticipation when we were going to try it out. The wing was carried separately from the fuselage assembled on site with rubber banda criss crossed in her the wing. He had a friend try out the new controls. He took off, flew around and landed. Handed the controls to my dad. When he took the plane off, it made a turn and crashed into a guy on crutches, cutting his arm in several places.
I don’t think my dad ever flew a RC plane again. The wing was propped in the corner of the basement for many years.
Dad was really good at making electronic things, though. He built our first color tv on the kitchen table from a Heathkit, and used the oscilloscope he’d built prior from another kit. He used to bring random stuff home from work and make it useful. He made an arc welder from a big transformer which was about a 12” cube. Took it apart piece by piece and rewound it. It worked well.
I tried to make a synthesizer when I was about 17 but couldn’t get it to work, but I let my pride get in the way and it never worked, probably because I sucked at soldering. He probably would have gotten it done in an evening but I’d decided… I don’t know how to describe what I decided, but I didn’t feel comfortable sharing import things with him.
I never really gave him much of a chance after my teens and I don’t know what it would have taken to have that be different, but I’m sure that my lack of relationship with him isn’t all on him. Anyway, I miss him now and there isn’t much I can do about my feelings towards him.
I’ll find some way to tell more stories about him sometime, but I’m thinking about him on his birthday.
