Images of the past week.

One of our errands last week took us to Sam’s, where as usual we bought the frozen yogurt berry parfait. The young man who served us was wearing a beard net, the first one we’d ever seen. I sneaked a photo with my phone as discreetly as I could:

On our cat porch we discovered these copulating grasshoppers. The female was twice as big as the male. I don’t know what became of them once the cats came into the lanai.

Our cat Pumpkin was limping. He had  these odd puncture marks on his foot. We took him to the vet a day or two later, but the marks had disappeared. All he had left at that point was a fever, which the doctor said would go away in a couple of days. He is doing fine now.

This is me with some friends at the entrance to the Goodwill store. But Alicia doesn’t want me telling people that we shop there, so I won’t say any more.

Friday I got assigned a quick trip to Panama City, Florida. I flew up in the morning by way of Atlanta (nearly all the Panama City travel is through Atlanta) and got a rental car. There are gorgeous pine forests surrounding the city and airport. The trees are all the same size and planted in rows. You can see the rows in this photo.

At the mission base high school my brother and I attended, seniors got Colombian minimum wage (25 cents an hour back then) and Vocational Training credit for working from 1:30 to 5:00 every school day. I split my time between the phone lab and the electric shop.

At the phone lab we maintained the three-digit system that connected the houses and offices of the base. The phones were from the 1940s, donated by a US phone company, very similar to this one:

My boss, Wes, a genial Viking from Minnesota, taught me how to

• install a new line and phone
• read a schematic and fix miswired phones
• clean the contacts on the handset’s carbon speaker and mike by buffing them on my jeans
• lubricate the phone system switch with lithium grease (the switch was a gizmo that did what operators used to do when they pulled cables from one place and plugged them into another to complete calls; the switch click-click-clicked across a set of contacts, then up, then across again to make the three-digit pairing, directed by the clicks of the phone’s rotary dial)
• check the specific gravity in the batteries that provided the power for the system (dial tone/conversation current was about 12V DC; the ring tone was 80V AC and would give you a jolt)
• put a beeper on a line and trace the beep across the base from box to box to find where the break was or to connect a new number
• use the lineman’s phone to clip onto a cable pair and make test calls from the field (usually to my girlfriend at her school library job)
• make sure the right color wire was connected to the right terminal (green left, red right, black left, yellow right)

In retrospect, I learned an awful lot about obsolete phone technology from Wes. It has come in handy since then; I ran all the phone cable for the house I remodeled in 1996, and have added extensions in various other places I’ve lived. (Of course, I haven’t had a land line for the past ten years, although the wiring in my last Dallas house was used for DSL internet.)

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Two days a week I worked for Joe at the electric shop. Joe was a Pennsylvania Mennonite, and not a big talker. My first day on the job, he handed me a packet of tools. “These are Maytag tools,” he said. “There’s a wringer washer in the back room. Take it apart so I can replace the agitator shaft.”

The agitator shaft was at the very middle of the machine, so I had to take it completely apart. It took a full afternoon, as I recall, and there were parts all over the place when I was done.

Two weeks later, Joe said, “I installed the new shaft. Put the washer back together.”

Gulp.

There was a schematic, but mostly I had to rely on  my memory. I managed to put the washer back together, and had four small pieces left over (bolts, as I recall). It ran anyway. Success!

Most of my work at the electric shop was on small appliances. I learned to splice broken toaster elements with little aluminum cylinders that I crimped down on the overlapped element ends. (This came in handy at my college dorm; the waffle iron had broken, and all the electrical engineering students were gathered around it trying to figure out how to resurrect it when I walked in. “Hey, Tim, you’ve worked with appliances. How do we fix this?” asked Carl, who is now a renowned satellite engineer and my brother-in-law. “Someone give me an old ballpoint pen refill,” I said. One was found, and I snipped half an inch off the hollow end and used it to crimp the broken element together. “Huh,” said Carl. “That wasn’t so hard.”)

Joe had me cut through a burned-out fan motor and count the wires, then rewind the motor with the same number of wraps. It was tricky getting the motor to fit back in its case, since I couldn’t wrap as tightly as the machines at the factory, but it worked afterwards.

Some of the projects would be laughed at nowadays: using epoxy to create the right shape of knob on a broken plastic shaft to make the variable speeds on a cake mixer work again; rebuilding the base on a burned-out coffeepot (I tried to use a mica insulator, which shorted out and burned a hole in my Formica work surface). But we lived a full day’s car trip or a one-hour flight from Bogota, no one was rich, and my time was only worth 25 cents an hour. (I don’t even know if the clients were billed.)

One job took me to the Wheeler house, where I noted a funny smell. It turned out that the freezer had quit. (That wasn’t what I was there to work on.) The parents were out “in the tribe” (they worked with the Sionas on the border with Ecuador), and the kids were staying at the Children’s Home, as our dorm was called. Frank Wheeler, who was a year or two behind me in school, was left with the nasty job of pulling out twenty pounds of rotten meat and scrubbing the freezer. (Fixing a freezer was beyond my skills. I suspect Joe took care of it.)

Joe and his family returned to Pennsylvania shortly after I came to the US for college. He died a short time later of cancer.

After spending the 1970-1971 academic year in the US, we returned to Medellín, and I enrolled in 7th grade at the George Washington School (where I had done grade school).

I discovered that the junior high boys had a class called Shop, taught by Uncle Harold. (All missionaries were Uncle and Aunt to us in Medellín.) He was an older gentleman; his youngest son John Mark had graduated from 9th grade in 1970 and was finishing high school at the Alliance Academy in Quito. (Harold is the father and John Mark is the little boy in this family picture, taken many years before.)

Uncle Harold taught us to use power tools and do simple soldering. But his biggest contribution was when he taught us the very basics of electrical wiring. He had us each make an extension cord out of a length of wire, a male plug, and a female.

It was so simple! Two wires, two screw terminals, one more screw to hold the plug together, and I had made something that channeled electricity from point A to point B. Outlets, lamps, appliances, stereos all worked essentially the same way: hot wire, ground wire. (I learned about earthing grounds much later.)

I went home and attached a simple ceiling light to a board and screwed it to the upper bunk so I could read in bed. Later I bought a cheap soldering iron and a roll of solder and began fooling around with stereo plugs and jacks and speakers. If the headphones broke, I stripped the wires and soldered on a new plug. I installed wall and ceiling lamps in our house. When I went off to high school at a remote mission base, I set up stereo speakers all around my dorm room. My senior year I worked afternoons at the mission base electric shop and the phone lab.

The smell of melting solder still brings back some of the best memories of my youth.

We only had Shop class for one semester. Uncle Harold and his family returned to the US at the end of that year, and he died of a heart attack a few months later. But what he taught me about electricity still affects my life today.

Much of this is repeated from a post I wrote years ago, but many of my current readers wouldn’t have seen that one.

In Pasto and Puerto Asís, Colombia, in the early 1960s, our whole family of eight drove around in a red Willys Jeep. Dad used to have to fix flats himself. Many times I watched him jack up the car, lever the tire off the rim, patch the inner tube, reassemble the tire and rim, and pump the tire by hand. I still remember the smell of those old hot-patches he would clamp on the inner tube; they had a cork back that he would light to provide the heat to melt the seal.

Dad had our Puerto Asís house built out of cinderblocks. The first ones were made with a machine; he dumped wet concrete into the hopper, two men pulled down on the long levers, and a block was squeezed into shape, which was set aside to dry. After the machine was stolen, Dad had to buy blocks at the depósito de materiales like everyone else. (Our jungle house is now occupied by a community of nuns.)

I was fascinated watching the masons and carpenters. There was no electricity in our part of town, so all the tools were manual. Dad had an eggbeater drill. When I tried it out, I broke the bit and was devastated. After I told Dad and he forgave me, I felt better.

There was a rainwater tank at one corner of the house, and a well and outhouse out back. We took turns pumping showers for each other (the pump had a metronome-like handle to jerk back and forth). Each of us had a chamberpot, to avoid going to the outhouse at night, but that meant that in the morning you had to carry the full chamberpot down the stairs and across the back yard to the outhouse, and then around to the rainwater tank to scrub it with Cresopinol.

Mom and Dad gave me a set of carpenter’s tools for my seventh birthday. I had access to the scrap lumber bin and a can of bent nails. I became very adept at straightening the nails by tapping them with a hammer while rolling them on a concrete surface. I can’t recall what I made besides wooden swords for battling with my brother.

We moved to Medellín early the next year, and were blessed with running water and electricity. When the water heater was replaced, Dad kindly let me tear the old one apart. I patiently took off the outside metal and the fiberglass insulation, and was disappointed to find that there was nothing inside but a steel tank that I couldn’t find a use for.

When we went back to the States for our second furlough in 1970-1971, Dad bought various power tools including a radial arm saw, a miracle machine that could do precise, clean cuts and had attachments for routing and dado cuts. He was very happy with his new toys and spent hours making picture frames and shelving.

Upon our return to Medellín, he bought us an old country house about three miles from the edge of the city, and remodeled it completely. Several of the old adobe walls were replaced with brick; my brother and I wheeled dozens of wheelbarrow loads of dirt and rubble out to the yard, leaving it considerably more level than when we started. A mason built a rock retaining wall at the bottom, and I helped Dad pour a concrete top to the wall so it wouldn’t come apart. (My initials are still there.)

Dad used the radial arm saw to build cabinets and shelving. He loved to create diamond-point drawer fronts and doors. This cabinet Dad built in the 1970s is still in use. (The house is now an old folks’ home run by a charity.)

He also built these shelves. As you can see, he liked scalloped edges.

I spent many weekend hours helping him push plywood through the saw, and sanding and staining the wood after it was cut. I hated sanding, but discovered its importance when I forgot to sand my parents’ closet doors. They were made of finish plywood, and the stain highlighted a multitude of tiny scratches and scars that didn’t get sanded out. Every time I saw them, I would squirm with guilt.

Over the years, I helped Dad replace a master brake cylinder and make other repairs to the truck, maintain the pump he installed to supply potable water to the house (the water plant was across the street, so there was no pressure at our house), replace large concrete drain tiles to connect our house to the sewer, install electric lights, and build kitchen cabinets. When Amerian or Canadian volunteer craftsmen worked on the plumbing and wiring and fireplace, I followed them around and learned about PVC pipe and pulling wires through conduit and the difference between fire brick and ordinary brick.

Growing up with a dad who was used to fixing and building things himself and who loved carpentry left an imprint on me. Once you’ve learned to do a few things, you realize that you can do almost anything if you’re willing to try. I dabbled in electricity and electronics in junior high and high school, and in grad school spent a summer working construction. Later as a homeowner I remodeled one house completely and made changes to several others. After my divorce, I had a handyman business for ten years.

In the 2000s I took my kids yearly to visit my dad and his second wife, and he and I installed tile in their kitchen and built shelves for his shop and the garage. While we were building his shop shelves, he chuckled. “When you were a kid, I always had to tell you what to do when we were building something. Now it’s the other way around.”