Mom has at times asked if I wrote any of the stories of my life as a Gardner down. I have and will continue to do so. When I was asked why I wouldn’t be at GM in ’22, I said I’d spend the day at home, thinking about Dad and perhaps writing down some more of my memories. I invite the rest of my siblings to do the same.
mike
George W Gardner. October 24, 1929 Two days before the crash. I’m sure that had some effect on his life as his family struggled to survive.
I don’t have many memories before about 1960 that I can be sure are my memories, vs memories of stories I heard Dad tell. I have some visual memories of New Mexico (unlikely) and a camping trip in the mountains that might be real.
The first detailed memories with dad though are things we did, odd jobs he was on, in Ludlow Illinois where we lived while he was assigned to Chanute AFB. He was being paid to paint her house and I was given instructions, a scraper, then a paint bucket and pointed at a lower part of the house. My memory was I did an OK job – mostly because I don’t remember being told I was doing it wrong.
Now something about Dad, that he apparently infected me with, was he didn’t pass out compliments freely. I would have to judge the quality of my work based on the level of correction I received after he judged what I had done.
One of the “chores” he often enlisted many of us kids to do, was gathering wild asparagus, strawberries, or black raspberries along the railroad tracks. Sometimes we walked a couple of miles at a time. Other locations dad knew just were to stop and look. He’d pull over and send me out to pick asparagus. Early or late in the season we watched carefully as he drove down Rt 45 for asparagus heads to show up above the grass. Dad would always cut the asparagus right down to the ground – it didn’t matter how tough it was. The black raspberries (or black caps as he called them), grew on bushes with nasty thorns and often the branches rose in great arcs over our heads. Wild strawberries are small – nothing like the 1 to 2-inch ones you see in the stores. Nope, a large wild strawberry might be as large as half an inch. But each little berry packs as much flavor as a 2-inch store strawberry. There was nothing like wild strawberry syrup on pancakes or ice cream.
Now at first glance, one could say that Dad was cheap. But that way over-simplifies the situation. He grew up in the depression. Like most families, his struggled to survive. Like most people who live on farms, they learn to make use of whatever resources they have; to be creative in adapting and repairing. So, picking berries etc. was just one way to add to the resources of the Gardner Family as well as a teaching opportunity. There are many others.
Bermuda, the boat. In 1960 dad got assigned to McKinley AFB in Bermuda. When we arrived, it turned out the base had no housing for families of 6, thus we got to pick a house off-base at Air Force expense. After a short while, we moved to a larger house, just across the road from a small bay, right on the ocean. Dad bought an old boat. A heavy, old, cedar boat that was around 12 ft with a modest outboard motor. He enlisted some of us kids to scrape and paint. Fixing up that old boat was just one of a lifetime of experiences that dad “made available” to those of us kids who wished to learn. He also built a new half/cabin windshield for it. Some of us kids went out fishing quite a few times. Dad also kept lobster traps in season. He taught me how to use landmarks on shore to set locations of his traps, whose buoys were set to be around 10 feet underwater.
This memory may be out of place in the timeline. Dad had this leather tool case and one day he told me to put it on the bumper of the car. Which I did. To me, the bumper was that chrome piece that stuck out in front of the car. The part over the wheel was the fender. Dad expected me to put it on the fender where he could see it and place it inside. We took off to go do some job and the tools were gone. Boy, was he upset. But at that point, I think he realized he didn’t communicate all that well. I realized I needed to think for myself and not just follow what I thought were explicit instructions. Questioning Dad wasn’t easy, especially as a kid but as I learned in life, I didn’t do it often enough. Dad, however, didn’t mention the incident after that, ever.
When we moved to the second house in Rantoul, the Corvair bus needed a tune-up. That was my first lesson in how cars work. We changed spark plugs, points, oil etc. That knowledge served me well all my life including paying for much of my college education.
Another topic that Dad spent a lot of time with me was electronics. He was an Electronics Technician for the Air Force. Dad had a work bench with lots of drawers of resistors, capacitors, diodes – you name it. He taught me the resistor code (how to read the resistance of a resistor based on the color stripes). All the variations of ohms law and power calculations were required understanding as well. As I got older, we fixed many appliances, and I got a pretty good education in TV theory – though never quite enough for me to do much TV repair. Once TVs when digital, all that was pretty much out the window anyway. But what he gave me, quite early, was a goal: to be an electronics engineer. I was going to build on what Dad taught: I was going to design and engineer circuits, not just fix them.
One of the benefits Dad got from the GI bill was free technician level training. He chose to take a course on Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC). They would send him a booklet and a test, which he would take and mail in to the training center and then receive his graded test and another booklet in the mail. He gave me the same booklet to read and graded my test after his was returned. Thus, I learned yet another trade. Dad used his knowledge to experiment with the THERM. Simply, it was a heat pump that took heat from the firewood chimney and pumped it back into the house. From a thermodynamics standpoint, it was quite successful. From an anti-pollution standpoint, it was fairly successful. From a practical standpoint it was a complete failure. The cool coils would absorb heat and pipe it down to a condenser in the furnace, but it also condensed every bit of soot, creosote and gunk going up the chimney and thus needed frequent cleaning – standing at the peak of the roof. Three stories up! Dad and I did spend a lot of time working together on it and discussing various improvements we might make. It also gave me the experience to start working on car air conditioners right after I began working at the local Volkswagen shop.
One of the “Dad” things we did was participate in Heavy Trash Pickup Day. This was when we were living in Indianapolis. Everyone in the neighborhood was allowed one day to put heavy items out on the curb for pickup by the City of Indianapolis. Rolls of carpet, washing machines – you name it was dumped on the curb. Dad would grab one of two of us kids and we’d go snatch things from front lawns that looked useful or repairable. One of the things we learned over the years was that people would put a $300 vacuum cleaner on the curb because they didn’t know how to clean a hairball out of it. Washing machines often just need a new timer or belt. Sometimes we’d drag something back that wasn’t repairable, but it supplied knobs, screws, solenoid valves etc. into the infinitely large parts collection – that still sits in dad’s garage today.
One of the projects Dad and I built was an air compressor. We used a refrigeration compressor that had come with his HVAC class and an old water heater tank. Now just that list of parts ought to freak people out, but Dad made his own decisions. While we were putting it together, I realized that we should install a piece of rubber hose between the compressor and tank as a relief valve. Actually, we should have spent a few dollars and bought a real relief valve, but Dad wasn’t one to run to the hardware store just because he didn’t have all the right parts. I went ahead with the build. The pump worked and as long as the pressure wasn’t allowed to get too high, everything was fine. This was typical of Dad’s idea of safety. If he could use it safely, then it was ok. Well, when neither of us was there, Jim turned the compressor on to pump up his bike tires and went back into the house. Sometime later he was headed out to the garage and the water tank exploded. Jim could have been killed. There was nearly $1,000 in damages to the garage wall and roof. In typical Dad fashion, he got repair estimates, collected the insurance check, did all the repair work himself and used the left-over money to buy a new, real, air compressor that wouldn’t kill anyone. I’ve never forgotten that incident. I try to not let “expertise” overrule my common sense in situations that can become dangerous.
During my college years, Dad asked me to redo the connection between a downspout and a storm drainpipe. This was done by packing a bit of newsprint or something similar around the end of the pipe to keep the mortar that is added to create a seal from falling down inside the pipe. I mixed the mortar and fashioned, what I thought, was an aesthetically pleasing design that would let water run off the top of the mortar and also make a good seal to the drain. Dad came by as I finished and said, “nice job”. I was, in a word, astonished. Dad simply didn’t do that, not with me at least. I typically measured the quality of my work (and most of the time it was very good because he taught me well) based on whether he had some criticism or other; some suggestion on how to do it better. That, of course, pushed me to do my best to live up to his standards. Unfortunately, that trait is also one that I seem to have inherited, unfortunately.
The time frame was after the log home was built, but fairly early in the life of GM. Dad took Deb and I for a ride around the property on the tractor. He stopped on the edge of the hill, east of the house and just sat there looking over the forest and trees to the north. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he was pausing to clearly enjoy the view and the Gardner Mountain while sitting on his tractor on his land, next to his magnificent log home. It was another side of Dad I hadn’t seen. After spending most of his life moving from place to place, it seemed he was finally home.
Dad taught me how cars work, basic electronics, carpentry, plumbing, HVAC, house wiring, yard maintenance, how to cut down trees, painting, wall repair and too many more to list. He also taught me patience – sometimes by showing it, sometimes by not showing it. He taught me science was a tool, a good one. He taught me to think logically, though he and I didn’t always agree as to what was logical. But he would listen and consider what I had to say. I’ve continued that education, learning as much as I can, about how the world works, how new technology functions; how everything works – constantly absorbing as much as I can. That is his legacy in me.
I still think of Dad often. I come across an article, an invention or person I think he’d like to know about. Things I used to share, we used to share.