Some guys are shade tree mechanics; Harry was a backyard engineer. He couldn’t help himself. He had studied science and engineering at the Naval Academy, then when he was mustered out due to failing eyesight, he finished up at Creighton University in Omaha with a degree in electrical engineering. His first job was helping the New Deal Public Works Administration to design and build the earthen Ogallala dam across the North Platte River in northeast Nebraska.
Bringing water to a semi-desert outback must have seemed a natural fit to the young man from eastern Montana. It left him with a keen understanding of how lives could be improved by collective action. Throughout my life with him, he was always involved in some group or another and inevitably found himself pushed or pulled into a leadership role. At home, he was incessantly busy as well. He just couldn’t leave anything unimproved, and he usually had to do the improving himself.
Some kids got tinker-toys for Christmas. These gizmos came in little kits, sort of a proto-Lego affair. Wooden shapes, sticks, and wheels, which all fit into each other, allowing the enterprising young engineer to build his own fantasy world. That wasn’t good enough for Harry. He had a table saw and drill press in the basement, and loved to work with wood. So why not build the tinker toys yourself?
The more he thought about it, though, the bigger the project got. Life-sized Tinker Toys! For months, he measured, cut, drilled and sanded away at plywood sheets, one-inch thick rods, and wooden wheels large enough to fit on a tricycle. I was astounded that Christmas at the size of the presents I got – the packages were bigger than I was! I became more puzzled as I unwrapped them.
“What are these? What am I supposed to do with them?
“You can fit them together, make things with them,” Harry responded. He was eager to get me out in the backyard and see what I came up with.
The primary pieces were triangular, had holes in them for the wooden rods, and slits so that other rectangular pieces could be fit across. With more than a little prodding, I eventually pieced them together to form a passable simulacrum of an aeroplane, triangular wings on either side, landing gear wheels underneath, and even a plank on the bottom to sit on. No propeller or engine though; funny, coming from a guy who built those for a living.
The next year, Harry decided it was time for a basketball court. Again, rather than buy one ready made, he had to go out and get two fifteen foot long, two inch wide hollow pipes. At one end, he attached a plywood backboard, painted green. To that, he affixed a standard issue basketball hoop (I guess he couldn’t figure out how to easily make that himself.) He then dug two holes in the ground, put the pipes in the holes, filled them with wet cement, and enlisted the rest of the the family in raising the contraption upright. We had to hold it in place while the cement set enough to allow the rear supports to hold it firm. Problem was, the holes were a bit too shallow, and the hoop measured 10’6” from the ground.
Harry solved that problem the next year when he put in a backyard swimming pool. The year before, one of his best friends from the the original GE jet engine factory in Lynn, MA, Stan Mikulka, had invited us out to California, where he’d moved. Stan was a jovial giant of a guy from the Bronx, always carrying an unlit stub of a cigar with him. He called me “Super-super-super-duper man.” Anyway, he had a backyard swimming pool there in LA, and Harry got hooked on the idea.
All winter, he researched the possibilities, but couldn’t figure out how he was going to afford it. To get the normal cement pond, filter system and backyard amenities would have cost over $5,000, which was probably three times the cost of a new Chevy or Ford back then. A little cheaper might be gunite spray for the sides. He kept looking. Finally, he discovered a more frugal alternative. For $1800, he could get the pool site excavated (with the resulting dirt raising the rest of the backyard 6”, solving the too-high hoop issue), the bottom packed with sand, sides of unfinished concrete put in, and the whole thing covered with a plastic liner. It would look just like a real pool, and no one would know the difference.
Harry figured he could put in the concrete deck himself, and run the electrical wiring for the filter system as well. He even could afford a diving board! The “deep end” of the pool was shaped sort of like an inverted pyramid with its top cut off, leaving sloping sides and a mere 5’ x 5’ area where it was truly 10’ deep, Nonetheless, my father taught himself how to do a perfect jackknife so that he hit that spot every time.
We didn’t live in California, though, and the swimming season, even for a Montana boy like Harry, seemed to run just from June through August. Not enough time to fully take advantage of that investment. He’d also noticed that Mikulka (as he called him) had air conditioning. We had a basement furnace, so hooking in a whole house system wouldn’t be that hard. One day he brought home a huge box, shaped like a refrigerator, but nearly twice as big. He installed it in the basement, again running the wiring and the duct work himself. Voila, whole house air! No longer would my mother prepare my bed on hot summer nights by sprinkling water on my sheets, then tucking me in.
When Harry realised that the AC produced a lot of excess heat as it churned through its cooling cycle, he reasoned he could use that in the pool. He dug a line from the basement out to the filter, and expanded his swimming season from early May through October. He never did learn to flip turn, but he enjoyed plowing through that 10 yard long pool half of each year, basically during the ice skating off-season. I guess he finally came full circle, sort of a one-man Ogallala dam.