My dad was such an engineer that, because his initials were AAA, he'd
sign his designs A to the third power, or A3. It even went as far
as his car's vanity plate. He worked at Douglas Aircraft, and they had
a place where they would sell surplus goods. In the '50s, dad bought
a barrel of assorted nuts, bolts, screws, and washers, and spent the
next 20 years sorting them out into old cottage cheese containers and
coffee cans.
Later in life, as his physical infirmities worsened,
he'd try to engineer his way around his limitations. When they lived on the
second floor of a duplex in Corona del Mar, it became hard to climb
the stairs, so he tried to devise one of those elevators that go up
stairs, but it had to go around a curve. Next he was going to have
one go up to a balcony next to their garage, but that was too costly,
so he was going to do it with a basket, pulleys, and a rope. When he
started falling down, he devised an inflatable ball he could
roll himself onto; then he'd inflate the ball so he could stand
upright. The next scheme was to buy one of those cranes you use to
hoist the engine out of a car and attach a net to it that he'd role
himself into and lift himself up. My favorite, however, was when the
gutters needed repairing on their two-story duplex. It was too high
for a ladder, so he devised this scheme where I'd get on the roof,
and he'd tie a rope onto my ankles so I could slide over to the
gutters belly down to repair them-he'd hang onto the rope. I remember
calling my sister and saying, "He's trying to kill me!"
Dad was curious about everything. If he had surgery that required a
local anesthesia, he'd want to watch -- he'd actually have them rig up
mirrors. He especially loved to find out how things were made and
learning about local history. We were always going on factory tours:
tires, steel, lumber, the Hyperion sewage treatment plant, which is a
masterpiece of WPA architecture. He was also proud that the
cartoonist Rube Goldberg (if anyone here remembers him) was a
classmate at the Cal College of Engineering, which might explain some
of the contraptions he came up with.
-- Joseph A. Amster
My Dad wasn't an engineer: he didn't have the degree or the title. He
was an electrician at DuPont to whom company engineers came when their
ideas didn't work. He could tell them why, and oftentimes would provide
them with an alternative solution that wasn't in their books.
My favorite recollection was the electric trains we setup for the
Christmas holidays. Other families had their ping-pong tables topped
with mountains, tunnels and busy villages. One friend had a winter
theme train set with a curve-cut mirror for an ice-skating pond; the
train would go through the town, around the lake, into the tunnel and
then repeat the identical run over and over - except of course for the
whistle blowing.
Our train setup was less scenic - two concentric ovals linked with two
sets of cross-over switches. But in the center oval was the the real
difference between the train sets: ours had two multi-branched sidings.
Dad would place the freight cars at random on the sidings and then give
us a description of the train he wanted built - with the cars in a
particular order. Our job was to back the switcher engine in and out of
the sidings, coupling and uncoupling the cars, shuffling the order
until we'd finally built the train the way he described. The train
ready, the switcher would "deliver" the train to the big engine on the
outside oval.
Of course, this interactive model railroad kept our attention far
longer than the neighbor's train going around in circles, we had a lot
more fun, and we actually participated in play that helped us to think
and plan. His three kids all credit their trouble-shooting skills to
his subtle tutelage.
It's one of my favorite memories of my Dad.
-- Kay
I wish that my father
could have been born when I was born so that he could have been a part
of this "personal computer" world that he forecast to me as a child.
Had he been at the beginning of his engineering career in the late
sixties, he would have found his calling in life in bits and bytes and
he could have become a stable, fulfilled, dedicated human...all of the
meaning in life that he missed.
Funny, it's ironic that it wasn't that my father needed a Bill G nerd
model to make his social ineptness OK in his own mind, a gift (among
several now) that Bill has given to our culture. It was that at Harvard
and MIT Grad in his day there was no field that celebrated logical
thinking, thus enabling lateral thinking. My father instead floated
without focus, learning something about everything, absolutely
everything. That computers would become personal was just one insight
of many. That unique numbers could be read by optical sensors as in
today's ubiquitous barcodes was another. His estate held more than 25
bunches of penny stocks, all save one worthless gifts from
entrepreneurs who appreciated his listening ear. Today one of them,
something to do with the patent of a microwave's rotating plate, is the
base of the trust that supports my mother. We thought at his death that
there was nothing, just five rented office spaces filled to the rafters
with his "treasures".
I have memories of standing on a bridge over the Pasadena Freeway while
he asked me to observe the waves of stillness traveling towards us,
backwards down the highway as a function of traffic flow.
I have memories of being allowed to Go-to-Work-with-Daddy where I was plopped down at a workbench to sort and
assemble black Bakelite pieces. I have memories of a school bus,
totally gutted, sitting on our driveway that one day was supposed to
become a traveling sales office taking the electrical gadgets to the
customer where they could be touched and evaluated. (It did take my 7th
birthday party friends to the San Diego Zoo, but then never moved
again.) I have memories of my elementary school science fair contraption
featuring a bent spoon, a 78 turntable and marbles shoved off a scale
to rattle down a spiraling incline and plunk into a tin cup. If I took
the first turn, the machine would always win...simple consequences of
sets of four marbles plus one more. I didn't win the fair, but
everybody crowded around.
Most of all, when I walk into a vacuum repair shop today, the clutter,
the dust and the smell takes me viscerally back to our basement where
that contraption took shape.
It's there, I believe, that I first decided that intelligence is a
liability. Hopefully, it is also where I learned to value outside the
box thinking. Time Magazine is telling us that we are raised by our
siblings: I was raised by an engineer, both in his presence and in his
absence.
-- Cathy
When I was a little girl living in southern Indiana, we lived in an
old house (about 150 years old) with 12' ceilings downstairs and maybe 10'
ceilings upstairs. All the rooms were big, compared to today, with
nearly floor-to-ceiling windows downstairs and normal-sized windows
upstairs. Every room in the house had windows that were open in the
summer. I loved this house, but my parents were always a little less
enthusiastic - bad roof, bad pipes ... I didn't care but they did.
Indiana is a bit hot in the summer - 100 degrees with 99% humidity is
not unknown. It was sweltering, but I spent most of the days in the
city pool so I didn't care much. The nights were a different matter.
My parents had a bedroom on the first floor which was always cooler
than the upstairs where we kids lived. However, Mom and Dad both worked hard at their jobs and often
had a tough time sleeping. So, my mom was sent out to buy some window
fans (I am not sure but I don't think we knew about window air
conditioners ... and we didn't have a lot of money). These fans were
both put in my room, blowing air to the outside. My dad had calculated the volume displacement,
and determined that their bedroom would get the most air coming in if my room was used
to vent the entire house. Once the fans were installed, his room had nice
cool air blowing in all night. The hot air would all slowly rise to the upstairs
until it was blazing, and finally be vented out of my room. Basically, no
one cared if I was able to sleep! A couple of times I turned one of
the fans around to blow on me. My dad was there in an instant
threatening beatings!
-- Mike
