Happy Valentine's Day, all. May your love bring you riches.
Here's someone else for the panoply of towering intellectuals who knew the value of a buck. His name is J.J. Wormser.
He was a gifted electrical engineer and inventor whose employers read as a Who's Who of cutting edge technology companies: Bell Labs, Continental Electronics, Southwest Research Institute.
If the Internet existed and the electronics companies of the 50s and 60s had been as good at hyping themselves as the dot.coms are, he would have had a ribbon of Google hits as long as this.
As it was, he was just my dad. But, Google him: still pretty good for an old guy.
He was a work-for-hire guy in a pre-intrapreneur world, so all his patents belong to the big boys. Product of the G.I. Bill and youngest son of a ranching family, he was considered so dumb there was no money for college when it came time. With only a high school diploma and an incurable love of tinkering with radios (later TVs), he earned a place among the holy brethren of pre-digital geeks through sheer force of will.
He was also great with money. He did his own taxes year after year, keeping every receipt in shoe boxes that came down from the shelf of his closet ceremonially every January and were neatly filed in the attic on April 16. He and my mom (who had to put herself through college) put the three of us through college all the way because by God what happened to them would not happen to us.
He used to dream aloud on long car rides about crazy inventions for everyday problems, and how he'd make all of us rich. He painted oil landscapes in the garage, with only his mind for a view. He studied sculpture and drove a VW bug, sold his beloved motorboat when my mom finally made him, and loved to snap open his menu in restaurants and say to the whole assembled family, "Order whatever you want."
In the couple of years before he died in 1997, widowed and insomniac, he wrote us long emails about his will, his safety deposit box, and what he would do with the money if he won the lottery tomorrow. It was always about us.
But I digress.
In 1972, at age 50 he did something he'd never done: He left the Company. Lay-offs were afoot and he wanted to leave as his own man, get a better job, maybe even start his own company. The kids were sixteen, fifteen, and nine (me). Oh, and, yeah: there was a recession on its way.
So here was my dad's great new job: floor salesman at Levitz Furniture. My shy, wise-cracking, self-taught, Melville- and Conrad-reading father was set loose in a piranha tank filled with other desperate, underemployed, middle-aged men with kids to feed. He did it 6 and often 7 days a week every week for the 10 longest months of his life. He brought home a pittance and there was no menu-snapping.
Thing is, he showed up. Every day. And when he got a solid job offer, way below market, he jumped at it and got to be an engineer again for another decade and a half.
Showing up is what I am thinking about today. Where money and love (lack of one and consequences of the other) are concerned, the people who show up are the heroes.
Who is your hero?
[still is from Glengarry Glen Ross
]
This is just a wonderful picture of your dad, and I am sitting here with my coffee thinking, yes, "just show up" to myself, about finding my center again, with earning, with creating, with living. One of my heroes is my grandfather, who worked for PP&L as plant manager, a self-made renaissance man who also built organs and radios from scratch, wrote poetry, made his own ketchup, helped me bind and varnish my school project book report cover on Canada, and raised bees and went around sharing his passion with a traveling bee hive. I have stuff from his garage (he would save anything to be reused, everything he took apart or found, and he really DID reuse it!) Once all neatly arranged in jars on a peg board, now here in my garage in boxes, for future assemblage art that I want to make after I turn my garage into an art studio/work shop. That's part of finding my center.
ReplyDeletemiro-gal, that's just the sort of comment and story i was hoping to wake up to, too!
ReplyDeletehere's a non-OS OC for you: tell me more about him, especially his magic garage and his bees, and i'll put it up as a main post in the local heroes section (another new tag!) anytime it's ready.
mwah to you, grandpa's girl...have a great day and keep showing up.
I might even throw in his cure for hemorrhoids! It involves a bee by- product. OK, sorry, TMI :)
ReplyDeleteI just stood near an old fashioned train, the kind my dad shoveled coal into when he was a teenager, which was the cause of the emphasema he suffered from later in life. I could barely stand near the thing, much less imagine stepping onto it, day after day, getting covered in coal dust and shoveling heavy loads of coal into the maw of the piping hot engine. Of course, that was a step up from the steel mill job he had just come from. Somehow he graduated from high school someplace in between the two.
ReplyDeleteHe was quite a shower-upper, when it came to work, and I certainly will always admire him for that.
Beautiful. And it reminded me of my Dad. In his last years he had cancer and had to give up driving, ( tough for a life-long car trader ). That week he went to buy a shirt, came back with a job in the shop he bought it from. He didn't like it much though. Fortunately, a few weeks later he was shopping for a bracelet for my mum. Came home with a job in the jeweller's shop.
ReplyDeleteA great man.
aw, Andy, I love that story. what a great man he must have been. i see you have inherited his social gifts and enthusiasm for staying in the game of life. all best,
ReplyDelete