Present would have shocked father

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from June 20, 2007. Jack often told stories about his various projects and the mishaps that inevitably were part of the process. Based on this column, he was still far ahead of the curve as compared to his dad.



My father would have been shocked.

It was a Father’s Day present beyond his imagination.

In case you didn’t know my dad, you need to understand that he was — to put it very nicely — not mechanically inclined.

His brothers and his brothers-in-law loved to needle him about his ineptitude when it came to anything involving tools.

And it didn’t matter how simple the tool might be.

This is a man who, during the first energy crisis in the early 1970s, decided to do some insulating and caulking at his house in Richmond. We were there for a visit that weekend when he proudly announced that he’d finished with the caulking.

“How’d it go with the caulking gun?” asked my wife.

Caulking gun? What did she mean, caulking gun?

He’d simply squeezed the cardboard tube as hard as he could, wringing it like an uncooperative tube of toothpaste, to get the caulk out.

This is a man who, when I was about 16, bought a paddle boat for the pond at our farm in Jackson Township. He bought it mail order, and it arrived unassembled.

My job, in some unused corner of the newspaper’s building, was to put the doggoned thing together. There was absolutely no way that he could work his way through the directions and assemble the paddle boat.

I didn’t have much better luck, but I did get it together.

Unfortunately, it should have been assembled at the pond in Jackson Township. I’ve completely forgotten how the heck we got it out the loading dock door and hauled it to its launching point.

And this is a man who, also after they moved to Richmond, bought a new-fangled self-propelled mower for his lawn, simply because the guy whose company made them was a good friend of his. It arrived unassembled, of course, and I was tapped on a weekend home from college to put it together. And to mow the lawn, of course.

Perhaps thanks to all those jobs that got steered my way, things have been a little different at our house.

While I’m not the handiest of handymen, I’ve done scores of jobs my father never would have attempted. And, along the way, we’ve accumulated dozens and dozens of tools: Wrenches, screwdrivers, drills, hammers, vise grips, pliers, and on and on.

Unfortunately, they’ve usually been in a jumble in a too-small toolbox in the utility room.

That’s why, on Father’s Day, I was delighted by one of my gifts, a rolling toolchest, the kind I’d looked at in catalogs since I was a kid but never thought I’d own.

Now I do, and it’s almost full.

My father would be shocked. Bless his soul.