Happy Father's Day

 There are, within my brain, several memories permanently etched regarding my father and stepfather. This is their day, so I am going to re-visit some of those memories.

There is the memory of the go-kart my father built for me. It was made of two-by-fours, had four wheels, a seat, and a rope tied to the front axle with which to steer it. We would take to it to the Mississippi River levee and ride down the slope of the levee.

He eventually decided it needed a motor, so he mounted a five horsepower motor to the rear deck and installed a V-belt to drive one of the rear wheels. It actually worked, and we spent many a fun hours driving it back and forth, up and down the levee. 

A few years later he bought me a go-kart that was more professionally made (from Sears, I think) with a welded metal tube frame (painted orange) and powered by another five horsepower engine. This one came with real brakes. That was a plus, not that I actually used the brakes that often. 

My dad was a sign painter, so there were always cans of paint around, as well as his collection of paint brushes of every size, and sign boards waiting to be sketched out and lettered. He also worked for a chemical plant as a piping draftsman for a while, in addition to his nighttime and weekend occupation of selling hot tamales. Come to think of it, he was always working, doing something.

Other memories I have with my dad is the Saturdays we would go visit my grandfather. His name was Joe and he lived in the lower ninth ward. His house was flooded during Hurricane Betsy. I don't remember much about my grandfather, other than his wife would always give me a Coke float when I visited.

My stepfather Tex was quite a character. He ran a service station when my mother met him, but he eventually ran a landscape nursery. He loved dogs, got along great with people, and almost ran for the city council of Waveland one time. My mother talked him out of it. I learned a lot from Tex, and I appreciate his efforts to make our lives better.

So to both my fathers, Happy Fathers Day. The world is a better place because of you, and I think I became a better person as well. 

An Array of Abacuses

 My dad collected manually-operated adding machines. His drafting work often called upon him to add up numbers, so he had at hand a hand-cranked adding machine with dozens of buttons, also one of those plastic turn wheel adding machines that you had to use a stylus to turn the wheels, and he also had three (or more)  abacuses (the plural of abacus), those featuring sliding beads that a skilled manipulator could use to add up totals very quickly. 

In fact, that is what my dad used when adding up orders and sales tax for his hot tamale sales business. Here is a picture of three of his abacuses. 

Click on the image to make it larger.

He also had a selection of slide rules of various sizes, even a circular one. Those came in handy for multiplication and other more complex mathematical calculations. His day job was a piping run draftsman for a chemical plant in Ama, La., so he did a lot of measuring and computations comparing plans for piping runs to actual as-built piping runs between processing units in the plant. 

All these were prior to the coming of electronic calculators, both the desk models and handheld kinds. I remember the first handheld calculators, they cost several hundred dollars. The "scientific calculators" cost even more. Now they give them away as souvenirs at trade conventions. 

Slide rules

Cuckoo Clock Conundrum

 In 1971 I acquired a cuckoo clock. It actually worked and kept pretty good time, so I put in on the wall and every hour it would announce the time with a little bird coming out of the swinging door and going cuckoo. 

It was powered by a falling weight on a chain, so every so often you had to run the weight (that looked like a long pine cone) up to the top so gravity could pull it downward again and keep the gears turning.

After a while I just forgot about winding it, but left it on the wall anyway. Here is a picture of it:

The clock and the cuckoo

I didn't realize it at the time, but not winding a cuckoo clock on a continuing basis tends to make it malfunction in unusual ways. 

Not long afterwards, I was listening to a New Orleans radio station, one that used the sound of a cuckoo clock as a sound effect to introduce various segments or to punch up a particular joke being told. The radio station announced that it needed to record a new cuckoo clock sound effect, and it was now taking "auditions" from area cuckoo clock owners. 

I called the station, got on the air, and told them I had a slightly-malfunctioning cuckoo clock I would like to audition. The disc jockey asked me what was wrong with it, and I told him that when it strikes the hour, it doesn't sound the first part of the cuckoo, the "kook," but it did sound the second sound, the "oou." In other words, instead of going "cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo" at the top of the hour, it just went "oou, oou  oou."

The disc jockey declined to make a recording of my clock. He said he thought he knew where the kook was. 

I soon took the clock down off the wall, since it was getting embarrassing to have friends over and all of a sudden the cuckoo clock going "oou, oou, oou."