My mother was a school teacher and, for her background and time, well educated, at least in literature, which in her small-town Nebraska of the early 20th century was far more accessible than music and art. My father was a car mechanic who had only a high-school diploma, though in 1929 that was far from a universal credential, and his high-school study did include Latin. From him I learned tools and materials, both by explanation and by permission to explore what I found in our garage at home. I find it no surprise that I regard my head and my hands as equally important parts of my identity. In my academic career that pairing or fusion was most evident in the textbooks and learning software that I developed. I greatly enjoyed creating the content, by applying knowledge of the subject area and of pedagogy. But equally fulfilling was the hands-on part of using my knowledge of printing and of technology to participate in, earlier on, ink-on-paper publication and, later, to collect and process media and to program the software. After I retired I engaged the same combination of intellectual creativity and hands-on publication skill to produce my book about Bach’s German.
Another way of putting the same thing is that Greek has two words that can expressing “creating” or “making”:
Another way of putting it: poiein means to make or compose, as in “poem” and “poet”; tékhnē refers to art in the sense of craft or artisanship. Thus in the Bible Jesus’ father Joseph is, in the original Greek, a tekton; the word is usually rendered as “carpenter”, but also might be applied to a mason or metalworker.
My earliest memory of making something was of a failure. I was about five, and tried to make a kite from some corrugated cardboard and some string. No wood, no shaping, just cardboard with maybe fifteen feet of thick string strung through a hole in the middle of it. I through the thing up in the air maybe a couple dozen times before I gave up.
Aside from the usual craft activities in school, early on I did my tékhnē in two forms: making things with my Erector Set and puttering with my father’s tools and the automotive things, like voltage regulators, he brought home from the shop where he worked. Although he was not an advanced woodworker, and probably had neither the time nor the money to engage in that as a hobby, my father was capable enough with wood and tools. He helped me make my chair for Cub Scout den meetings from a nail key and some plywood; my mother helped me – or let me help her – make its cushion from scrap cloth and old nylon stockings.
Along the way, through my own interest and my parents’ encouragement, I did things like weave baskets, spool knitting, and cast and paint plaster figures for gifts to my teachers and relatives. My mother taught me a little about embroidering and knitting; when I knitted my first and only pair of handmade socks one of them was two inches longer than the other. I puttered with a series of mechanical and then electric trains. Especially valuable to learning about electricity was the transformer for my HO set. At 22v output it could not be very dangerous, but it could be diverted to many projects that needed some juice. All in all, though, the Erector Set was the environment for the big tékhnē learning in my elementary-school years, though of course I picked up generic hand-tool skills along the way. A chemistry set let me explore the lab side of tékhnē, and as well learn some academic science – enough to lead me to several failures. At age nine or so I organized some schoolmates into a rocket club, complete with flag, oath, and plans to launch our own rocket. We didn’t build anything before the Russians beat us into orbit. A while later I tried to make my own personal rocket out of a piece of copper tubing and whatever looked good for fuel from my chemistry set. It fizzled – not even that, really – on the launching pad I had made from some Erector Set parts. The chemistry set also taught me how to use electricity to divide water into hydrogen and oxygen which then, with the help of a flame, could combust and thus revert to water. And also a loud bang, which did disturb my high-school chemistry teacher when we pupils were replicating that experiment and I decided I could lead our table along ahead of the plan and touched off the mixture on my own.
Scouts was where I really got into wood. As a Cub I tried to whittle a fish for a neckerchief slide. Balsa does not whittle well into detail, but at the time I could not have known that. My Scoutmaster was an expert whittler and carver (and a wonderful support for a little fellow who wanted to learn everything but was not sure who or what he was or would become). Aside from many details of wood, he taught me the basic principle of whittling/carving: When you think it’s done, shave off just a little more and it will look much better. I whittled a lot during those years, including slicing quite a gash in my left hand with an X-acto knife at scout camp. The camp director did not feel it necessary to take me the 50 or so miles to the next hospital for stitches. So he closed the cut with butterfly tape stitches. I had to postpone my mile swim for a year, but was awarded an honorary Handcarving Merit Badge.
In my sub-teen years I made a few small electric motors out of wood, wire, nails and friction tape. In junior high I made it into the big band early, so to attend its rehearsals I had to move from A math into C math. To keep me from being bored, the school bought be a Geniac computer kit. I was given a table in a corner of the classroom and put the kit together, stopping only to take the quizzes. The Geniac consisted of a masonsite foundation board about the size of a cookie sheet, six masonite disks about the size of large saucers, wire, and a collection of bolts, nuts, thick brass connectors the size of staples, and springy brass clips. The disks had a central hole for a bolt that served as an axle, and they were drilled with patterns of holes in maybe ten concentric circles around the axle hole. The foundation board had six identical patterns and other holes for switches and lights. The bolts and clips could be mounted in various patterns on the foundation board, and then wired in various ways underneath. This circuitry served as a sort of operating system. The holes in the disks could be connected radially two at a time with the brass staples. Thus, as the disks were turned manually, the operating system received various inputs and produced various outputs to the lights. The Geniac could play tic-tac-toe, though it always had to have the first move and then always chose the center square, and also Nim. I tried to adapt it to allow other first moves, but no go – and got the same result 20 years later when I tried to change a BASIC “Eliza” program to accept German.
All this was prelude to my home-made telescope, which I made when I was 15 or so. It was a classical Newtonian reflector with a 4.25-inch mirror that I ground on our back patio on top of an oil barrel weighted down with water. I did the usual Foucault testing then sent it off to be aluminized while I built the tripod and mount from cheap wood and pipe fittings, the tube from plywood and fiberglass, and the various other fixtures and eyepieces from still other garage scrap and a few lenses from the Edmund Scientific people. Total cost $31.53, and good enough to see – in the still fairly dark skies of our little town – many lunar features, the moons of Jupiter, etc. etc. I even tried photography through it, using a fold-up bellows camera with 610 BW film, held by a rod salvaged from an automobile rear-view mirror, and its lens butted up against the eyepiece. To adjust focus I placed a piece of tissue paper in a cardboard frame on the open back of the camera before I loaded the film and checked it by looking at the moon or whatever. All that won me a first prize at the state science fair. Still no girlfriend, or rather no girl that would be a girlfriend. I could have chosen among many, but none of them would have agreed to my choice.
Later on I was mostly an armchair astronomer. I did make a manually-controlled “barn door drive” for a camera and got some decent star pictures. One of my dreams is to rent the 100-inch Mount Wilson telescope for some birthday soon and invite friends to share it with me for an evening.