When I attended the Church of the Brethren in Des Moines, Iowa, as a teenager, our congregation was a rich mix of urban and rural families. Having a farm friend in that weekly location offered me an education that prepared me for later life experiences involving auto and tractor mechanics.
Having three much older sisters and no brothers, I was at a loss for other male maturation experiences like learning about sex, sports, and most importantly anything having to do with auto mechanics. My dad wasn’t a mechanic. I never knew him to ever fix anything in particular, he had a friend for that--and there was no way he was going to discuss sex and the facts of life with me--(that was Mom’s department, so you know how that went)... Sports, on the other hand, he could talk all night. What I needed was a mechanic mentor.
The fact that I had much older parents, I was expected to listen and not talk so much. Of course, I always did what I was told. My excellent listening skills proved useful much of my life even if I had to make things up on occasion. Sometimes as a kid, I was tested about listening, especially if I had developed a glassy stare at inanimate objects and was suspected to have dosed off with my eyes open.
My listening skills paid off at school, just like my folks said they would. I perfected utilizing subtle facial expressions that included smiles, eye contact, frowns combined with hand-to-chin gestures, and infrequent wiping of my eyes and nose during subject appropriate content. In some cases, burying my face-to-arm was employed if I had been sleep deprived the night before. Teachers never caught on. Fellow students imitated me but kept getting apprehended because they also failed to notice that I routinely carried wet wipes that provided real ‘tears’ sincerity.
Although the subjects of girls, sex and sports were relatively important to young men as they matured, nothing could turn heads in our church youth group meetings as the talk of tools, car and truck engine rebuilding, transmission swapping, or custom wheels and tires. The second best thing in that realm was tractor wrenching, especially conversations about rebuilding Farmalls, Deeres, Fords, Masseys, Allis-Chalmers, Case, IH (International), or Minneapolis-Molines, to name what I can remember just now. A good memory and a little note-taking too, paid off in spades, when I offered something in the range of answers that only a real mechanic might know. Even if they disagreed, they were civil about it, not disparaging, which served to build my acceptance in the group.
Then conversations might jump to water pumps, timing, gears, then back adjusting carburetor linkages, magneto problems, loader hydraulics, 3-point hook-ups, drawbars.
“Do any of you John Deere guys know about adjusting the oil pump on a A?”
I would’ve easily drawn a zero in any if these subjects if it wasn’t for my older farm kid friend, “Bob”. He was three or four years older than me and a farm kid, so add on ten more years of maturity and knowledge, for all the responsibility that farm kids were given back then, versus the pansy-arsed existence I had as a city kid, who had nothing to do on weekends except watch Saturday morning cartoons and afternoon movies and play all the rest of the time. Bob, and all the other farm kids in the world, were outdoors from morning until night, seven days a week, learnin’ this important stuff. City kids didn’t know shit.
So it was that I listened to Bob attentively, pursing my lips and nodding affirmatively when he’d say, “You know, when you’re adjusting tappets ...”
“You know, once you’ve determined the firing order, replacing spark plug wires on the distributor.. “
“The firing order is different on a Chevy V8, than it is on a Ford V-8, so I ...”
Or, “It's not a seal, as much as it’s a slinger that slings the oil back into the motor.”
I could almost imagine what it was he was talking about although I had never even lifted a 9/16ths open-ended wrench from a toolbox or at the very least opened a tractor cowling in my life. I had figured out, that even if I didn’t know a thing about it, just by listening to him, asking him about some little detail he had mentioned, engaging him in eye contact, nodding appropriately, and looking earnest, I would learn more about this stuff than if I had read a dozen books. I don’t think he ever caught on. Either that, or he felt sorry for me as a city kid who didn’t know the difference between a pulsator and an inflation--which I learned eventually, when I went to milking school at Universal Milking Machine Co., in Albert Lea, Minnesota. I kid you not!
Must have been in 1972 or so, when I was working at the dairy in Des Moines, I found myself enrolled in a school about milking machine operation and maintenance in Minnesota. There, among other individuals from small towns (like Algona, IA) in the Midwest, I learned about milk pipeline operation, vacuum pumps, parts, trouble shooting problems, and milking parlor set-up and design as it pertained to the 1970s, when automatic milkers were merely things of science fiction.
One of the highlights of this road trip was listening to George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the first time. I found this rendition on-line trying to substantiate my time-line:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDs2Bkq6UU4
I even went to the Big Show, at the Iowa State Fair, and hung around the Mid-America Dairymen, Inc., milking demonstration exhibit, (where live cows from the dairy cattle barns were milked in front of curious fairgoers) sponsoring Universal Piplelines and Mueller Bulk Tanks, looking, if not important, at least really knowledgeable, should anyone pause by the windows to ask a question. I was ready. I even had a short-sleeved uniform shirt and wore one of them stick-on name tags.
“Hi! Do you have a question? My name is Steve.”
“Did you dress yourself? Your socks are different colors.”
The best part of the gig was to be close to the 4H barns and all the farm girls who were about my age, although they intimidated me by asking questions of which they all knew the answers. Did I mention I adequately served (and still do) as comedic relief? Pained looks are part of my repertoire from my early tractor wrenching education days.
“Have you ever busted your knuckles ...?”
“Oh yeah, when does a guy ever learn not to ..?”
Having three much older sisters and no brothers, I was at a loss for other male maturation experiences like learning about sex, sports, and most importantly anything having to do with auto mechanics. My dad wasn’t a mechanic. I never knew him to ever fix anything in particular, he had a friend for that--and there was no way he was going to discuss sex and the facts of life with me--(that was Mom’s department, so you know how that went)... Sports, on the other hand, he could talk all night. What I needed was a mechanic mentor.
The fact that I had much older parents, I was expected to listen and not talk so much. Of course, I always did what I was told. My excellent listening skills proved useful much of my life even if I had to make things up on occasion. Sometimes as a kid, I was tested about listening, especially if I had developed a glassy stare at inanimate objects and was suspected to have dosed off with my eyes open.
My listening skills paid off at school, just like my folks said they would. I perfected utilizing subtle facial expressions that included smiles, eye contact, frowns combined with hand-to-chin gestures, and infrequent wiping of my eyes and nose during subject appropriate content. In some cases, burying my face-to-arm was employed if I had been sleep deprived the night before. Teachers never caught on. Fellow students imitated me but kept getting apprehended because they also failed to notice that I routinely carried wet wipes that provided real ‘tears’ sincerity.
Although the subjects of girls, sex and sports were relatively important to young men as they matured, nothing could turn heads in our church youth group meetings as the talk of tools, car and truck engine rebuilding, transmission swapping, or custom wheels and tires. The second best thing in that realm was tractor wrenching, especially conversations about rebuilding Farmalls, Deeres, Fords, Masseys, Allis-Chalmers, Case, IH (International), or Minneapolis-Molines, to name what I can remember just now. A good memory and a little note-taking too, paid off in spades, when I offered something in the range of answers that only a real mechanic might know. Even if they disagreed, they were civil about it, not disparaging, which served to build my acceptance in the group.
Then conversations might jump to water pumps, timing, gears, then back adjusting carburetor linkages, magneto problems, loader hydraulics, 3-point hook-ups, drawbars.
“Do any of you John Deere guys know about adjusting the oil pump on a A?”
I would’ve easily drawn a zero in any if these subjects if it wasn’t for my older farm kid friend, “Bob”. He was three or four years older than me and a farm kid, so add on ten more years of maturity and knowledge, for all the responsibility that farm kids were given back then, versus the pansy-arsed existence I had as a city kid, who had nothing to do on weekends except watch Saturday morning cartoons and afternoon movies and play all the rest of the time. Bob, and all the other farm kids in the world, were outdoors from morning until night, seven days a week, learnin’ this important stuff. City kids didn’t know shit.
So it was that I listened to Bob attentively, pursing my lips and nodding affirmatively when he’d say, “You know, when you’re adjusting tappets ...”
“You know, once you’ve determined the firing order, replacing spark plug wires on the distributor.. “
“The firing order is different on a Chevy V8, than it is on a Ford V-8, so I ...”
Or, “It's not a seal, as much as it’s a slinger that slings the oil back into the motor.”
I could almost imagine what it was he was talking about although I had never even lifted a 9/16ths open-ended wrench from a toolbox or at the very least opened a tractor cowling in my life. I had figured out, that even if I didn’t know a thing about it, just by listening to him, asking him about some little detail he had mentioned, engaging him in eye contact, nodding appropriately, and looking earnest, I would learn more about this stuff than if I had read a dozen books. I don’t think he ever caught on. Either that, or he felt sorry for me as a city kid who didn’t know the difference between a pulsator and an inflation--which I learned eventually, when I went to milking school at Universal Milking Machine Co., in Albert Lea, Minnesota. I kid you not!
Must have been in 1972 or so, when I was working at the dairy in Des Moines, I found myself enrolled in a school about milking machine operation and maintenance in Minnesota. There, among other individuals from small towns (like Algona, IA) in the Midwest, I learned about milk pipeline operation, vacuum pumps, parts, trouble shooting problems, and milking parlor set-up and design as it pertained to the 1970s, when automatic milkers were merely things of science fiction.
One of the highlights of this road trip was listening to George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” the first time. I found this rendition on-line trying to substantiate my time-line:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDs2Bkq6UU4
I even went to the Big Show, at the Iowa State Fair, and hung around the Mid-America Dairymen, Inc., milking demonstration exhibit, (where live cows from the dairy cattle barns were milked in front of curious fairgoers) sponsoring Universal Piplelines and Mueller Bulk Tanks, looking, if not important, at least really knowledgeable, should anyone pause by the windows to ask a question. I was ready. I even had a short-sleeved uniform shirt and wore one of them stick-on name tags.
“Hi! Do you have a question? My name is Steve.”
“Did you dress yourself? Your socks are different colors.”
The best part of the gig was to be close to the 4H barns and all the farm girls who were about my age, although they intimidated me by asking questions of which they all knew the answers. Did I mention I adequately served (and still do) as comedic relief? Pained looks are part of my repertoire from my early tractor wrenching education days.
“Have you ever busted your knuckles ...?”
“Oh yeah, when does a guy ever learn not to ..?”
Comedic relief, eh. . .? I thought that was the Chairman. You, my man, are so understated, that we never know when you're kidding, and when your stories are based in reality (as we know it - the conventional vs. the absolute). And the self-reported history you have been telling since last February - well, that's priceless! I may be one of your biggest fans when it comes to the written word. So, when's the book coming out? JP Savage
ReplyDeleteFox in socks - that's what they saw.
ReplyDeleteBro, do you know that through your writing and our correspondence I know you better than any of my three older brothers?
ReplyDelete