My parents never used the word can’t
My father was an avid reader and just about anything was interesting to him. My mother was also a reader but stuck more to reading fiction novels. As for me, I read anything and everything thinking I might get a call from the Producer of Jeopardy. I grew up in a world that didn’t expose me to television till I was 16 years old. Magazines were my father’s favorite reading material, especially Time Magazine, which he would read in the middle of the night. While reading, some obscure sentence would catch his attention. He wanted to remember that sentence in the morning so he would write a note on the margin of the Time Magazine page. I wish today that my mother might have kept some of those old scribbled-on Time Magazine pages as they were a crucible where an idea could become something tangible that you could physically build.
One example was the Pool Sweep. To this day I bet Pool Sweeps are in most swimming pools floating around with several flexible plastic hoses mounted to a floating circular head that received clean water from the filter, under pressure and this whole contraption would move around the edge of the pool dislodging in a random pattern dirt that before would have to be swept with a people operated vacuum pool cleaner.
But wait, I'm getting a little ahead of myself. First, you have to have a swimming pool. Well, he said to me, “let's build one, I'm sure we can build it ourselves.'' My mother rolls her eyes and dad asks if she might bring him the phone book. “Let’s see maybe under dirt moving contractors.” Ah yes, here's one located less than ten miles from our house. It was but 3 days later that dad was talking with our soon-to-be dirt contractor who in no time was unloading what is called a Drag Line from his low bed trailer as backhoes in the early 1950s hadn’t been invented yet, at least not where we lived. Part of my upbringing was the fact that there was no such thing as the word can’t in my father’s or my mother’s vocabulary and they always spoke with one voice. Never mind that my dad had never built a swimming pool, especially in our backyard, because can’t didn’t exist.
One day a neighbor came over to watch the goings on and asked if my dad knew what he was doing. My dad’s reply “how hard can it be to dig a hole in the ground?” You put some steel reinforcing rods around the hole called rebar. Get a guy with a Gunite Gun to spray cement on this hole and three or four cement workers to pour an apron around the pool. Next, add three or four guys to plaster the rough cement with nice smooth plaster and you have a swimming pool. Now we needed a filter to keep the water clean. Our neighbor comes back and asks have you ever built a filter before Sig? No, but if you imagine a cross-section of a creek with various lenses of sand and gravel. On top is dirty water after the first rain of a long dry summer but down several feet is clear water. That's what a creek does, it filters all the dirt and leaves out. So we built a Redwood box about two feet wide, 20 feet long, and three feet deep. Water to be filtered went in the top and came out the bottom clean and clear than over to a pressure pump to be pumped back into the pool. The principal was correct but the backwashing proved a difficult one to overcome. Not to worry my dad had a saying for this problem he said “never bury your mistakes in concrete” in other words be flexible and go buy one that does work. I’ve remembered that saying all my life and it has served me well.
After sweeping the sides of the pool with a swimming pool vacuum and sweating a lot. I think this is where and I'm sure if I could have found the right Time Magazine there would have been a drawing or a sentence to describe how to build a Pool Sweep. No sooner said and the upcoming weekend I would see my dad with several rolls of varying degrees of thickness flexible hose. He said “son if you would turn off the filter pump I’m going to take a piece of hose and tape it to the pipe where the water enters the pool from the pressure pump. Okay, I’ve got it taped and ready to go.” But first, I want to have a beer while we watch to see if the random movement of the hose, under the water with its snake-like movement will spray all the surface of the pool removing any dirt and suspending it in the pool water to then be filtered out. It only took him one more beer to announce that random movement would work but it would need a lot of fine-tuning. My dad was busy building a new company called Varian Associates so the pool sweep got swept under the rug. It wasn’t too long after I read in a magazine like Mechanics Illustrated that somebody had invented a new and easier way to clean a swimming pool using a random snake-like motion to clean up suspended dirt in the water.
The next lesson I was to learn, was how to make the best out of an uncomfortable situation. My family was now living in Garden City, Long Island, New York. WWII is raging and anything that anybody and everybody could do to help the war effort would be done. My dad's contribution besides the fact that he and his brother Russel had invented the Klystron Tube to make RADAR a reality was to move our car out of the garage and turn it into a shop with a Lathe, drill press, and assorted other tools. But it was winter time and there was some snow on the ground and at 2 o'clock in the morning, dad did his best thinking and building things that he could use at his work the next day. Getting dressed and going out to a freezing cold shop was not going to work and you didn’t just go out and buy a heater as most things during the war were rationed. We were from the warm, sunny climate of California, where many days in winter were shirt-sleeve weather.
My mother rolled her eyes again and said “okay anything for the war effort” as she had just lost one of her three brothers while fighting in Europe. So with a bit of furniture rearranging and some help from some of his friends at work, it took no time at all and the shop in the garage was now in mom and dad’s bedroom. From time to time I would awake when he would be using his lathe and something was out of round. That's when the clumping sound and vibration would wake everybody up. As for my mother, she was a gamer and never complained as long as it helped the war effort and got our family back to California. And for me, my dad taught me how to work with all those tools, another lesson that would help this future Cowboy as much as riding my horse working with the ranch cattle. To close it's nice to know that can’t is not a word but a contraction so it does not belong in anybody's vocabulary.
See Ya,
Jack
Jack’s parents Sig & Winnie