Road Signs: Looking back on 70 years

What a long, strange trip it's been...

Golly, I can’t believe I actually made it to 70 years old last year! Of course, my twin brother is 20 minutes older than me, so I was sure to remind him of the fact that he turned 70 some 20 minutes before I did.

In any case, the last day of the year is a great time to reflect on things I’ve done in the past, and things I want to do in the future. I’m hoping for another 20 to 30 years, and that’s not just wishful thinking. My grandmother was 87 years old when she died and didn’t have a gray hair on her head (Thanks, Grandma). And my dad died last year at 93 years of age and he didn’t have a gray hair on his head either (Thanks, Dad). However, I am noticing a few silver “highlights” in my hair, which my wife is apt to point out.

But no matter what the state of your hair is, or even if you have no hair left, I think that life should be about what you’ve done before and what you plan to do next. So without further ado, here are some of the highlights of what I’ve done over the last 70 years and a few possibilities for what I would like to do in the next 20 or 30 years, if the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise.

Trailer lights:

My first real paying job was hooking up trailer lights for our neighbor’s camping trailers when I was probably 10 or 11 years old. Seriously! My dad had bought a Cox pop-up camper for our summer vacations and was clueless how to hook up the 4-pin trailer connector into the taillights of our Rambler station wagon.

As many of you know, I had already been experimenting with electrical circuits starting around age 4, and I knew a little about soldering from watching my uncle hook up my train set. With a few hours of tinkering I got it all figured out on my dad’s car when I was 10 years old. He was a brave soul…

But it didn’t stop there because my dad bragged to the neighbors about how his son hooked up his trailer lights, and soon I had a little side business going. I charged $5 a head to hook up trailer lights on a half-dozen other cars in the area. Not bad for 1965, when minimum wage was around $1.25 per hour. At that point I was hooked on fixing things.

Perpetual motion generators:

My first failed invention was when I was around 8 years old. While visiting my grandmother I heard her complaining about the high cost of her electric bill. I figured I could invent a perpetual motion machine that would make enough excess energy that I could bleed off and power her house for free. I even had visions of scaling this up to power the entire city block and possibly the country.

Yes, visions of grandeur and world domination filled my head at the age of 8, but it didn’t work. The basic principle was an electric motor driving another electric motor wired up as a generator, but since the drive motor had a bigger pulley than the generator, I figured the extra RPMs on the generator would translate into extra power. Boy, was I wrong.

The idea was to have one set of switches to get the motor and generator up to speed (with the generator spinning faster, of course) and a second set of switches that would disconnect the motor from the 120-volt outlet in the basement and cross-connect to the generator. Sounds plausible, doesn’t it? Well, I did build this in the basement by myself at the age of 8 (what were my parents thinking?), so it got up to speed off the power line, but when I flipped the switches to perpetual power all sorts of things shorted out, popping some 15-amp fuses in the basement fuse box. My mom came running down the stars telling me to unplug my invention, and that was the end of perpetual motion and my bid towards world domination. Sorry it didn’t work out.

Car crazy:

When I was 14 my dad scored a free 1959 VW Beetle that someone didn’t want anymore. So I drove it around in the woods until I blew up the engine, then I taught myself how to pull a VW engine and rebuild it from cheap parts I found in the junkyard

Yes, I was installing pistons and cylinders and bearings in a VW 36 Hp engine by the age of 15. No YouTube or Internet was available at that time, so I depended on World Book Encyclopedia and the Popular Science “Model Garage” for inspiration.

Since my dad was a history teacher and my mom was a nurse, I didn’t have anyone to tell me that what I was doing was wrong. So I just kept blowing things up until I finally got it right. Not a bad way to learn, albeit a bit dangerous.

Diesel engines:

The summer I turned 16 I was working in a service station that was also a truck stop, and there was a mechanic who rebuilt diesel truck engines. Yes, like huge 6-cylinder Cummins engines for Mack Trucks. Yippee!!!

I got to help with all of it, even though scraping out the oil pans and moving around big truck tires was dirty work. But I learned how to use a micrometer on the crankshaft to calculate main bearing oil gap, the best way to polish cylinder bores, ways to torque head bolts to many hundreds of foot-lbs., and even how to use a huge cherry-picker lift to install the engines back in the trucks. When these engines started up it was like a symphony to me. I helped put those engines together and was there for their first new heartbeats.💓

By the time I was 17 I began rebuilding car engines for all my motorhead buddies, and quickly learned how to synchronize carburetors on a Triumph Spitfire or a Dodge Challenger 440 6-pack, plus I did complete rebuilds down to pistons and rings on dozens of other ’70s cars for my friends and family. How cool is that for a teenage kid who loves engines?

3-phase industrial power:

I also started my own rock band at the age of 15, but that’s another entire adventure I’ll discuss later. However, I did go to college for Mechanical Engineering and before I graduated I scored a job with Corning Glass designing and building packaging machines for an automated production line. Initially I was just a draftsman making blueprints for the mechanics in the shop, but in a few years I was rewarded with the position of system controls designer for the engineering department.

I had been studying under the tutelage of my boss who was the plant EE (Electrical Engineer) and already had been taking Electrical Engineering classes through Cornell University. So when my EE boss quit one day, I became responsible for all sorts of cool (and dangerous) 3-phase electrical power hookups and troubleshooting with a team of a dozen mechanics and electricians for a million-square-foot warehouse and 100,000-square-foot production building. I had befriended all the electricians in the shop by that time and learned a lot from them, and turned myself into a pretty decent industrial power engineer.

So in 1978 I went for my Master Electrician’s License and aced it. Mostly this was so I could hook up huge lighting systems for my rock bands, but I was officially a card-carrying Master Electrician. Even more fun.

Nuclear missiles:

My next gig was building and calibrating nuclear missile guidance systems for a military subcontractor, and I did move on to start my own board-level computer repair and integration company in the ’80s and ’90s. But more on all of that later, as this is getting too long already. But yes, one of the guidance systems we built had a failure sending an armed nuclear warhead someplace it wasn’t supposed to go. Oops!!!

Future shock:

In short, I think retirement shouldn’t be about slowing down. It should be about doing the things you love the most and giving back to the community that brought you here. So my future plans include lots more videos and articles in RVelectricity, more RVelectricity seminars around the country, and more fun gigging with my best music pals from the last 50+ years. See you on the road!

Let’s play safe out there…. Mike