The Old Man was pretty observant about things my kid brother and I did.
He was interesting in that he was a man that truly WANTED to be a father and enjoyed raising kids. I really think this is a rare commodity. It probably was then and most likely is now.
As I write this, looking at my father’s strengths and weaknesses, I truly believe that God had one simple mission for him in his life, and that was to raise five successful children and then his mission complete, he could then leave.
He did leave. He was 57 years old when he died. His youngest was in her senior year in college.
Sometimes God calms the storm. Sometimes God lets the storm rage and calms his child.
This time was different. God sent me my father to sit there and laugh at me. Sometimes I wonder about God, and it was some time before I figured out that he had sent me my Old Man to calm me down when I needed it.
I think one of the things he knew was to be worth a damn at fatherhood, he had to grade on the curve; That is to say he had to be able to watch us make out mistakes, stepping in only when things looked like they were getting way out of hand.
He also had a knack for taking stuff that was pretty dry and making it pretty exciting. I always remember the time I wasn’t doing very well in school and he thought that math was going to be important in my life.
How right he was.
It was the year I was taking plane geometry and was bored. He knew it.
One night out of the clear blue he offered to teach me to navigate an airplane. Of course, I jumped at the offer!
Dad had been a navigator in B-17s and later on in B-29s and had actually been a teacher for a while in the Air Corps. He had aerial gunnery under his belt and had been a bombardier.
Here was a chance to learn something that was worth learning to a boy of that age! This was something cool!
Dad went to the upstairs hall closet and dragged out an old box and dug through it and made a couple of notes. He then made a call to a guy up the street that was still in the Air Force reserves. The following evening the neighbor dropped off a few thick tomes.
He took a globe and explained the navigational triangle to me and although it was pretty complicated to a boy of that age, he had a way of getting me to grasp the concept of the heavenly sphere and explained that even though it wasn’t true in real life that for the sake of navigation all the stars and planets were considered to be the same distance from the earth. They were part of the heavenly sphere.
Once I grasped that, everything seemed to be pretty easy until it occurred to me that once the spherical triangle had been laid out that it had to be solved.
That was a gold-plated sonuvabitch.
I was clever. I had figured out on my own how to solve the triangle with the obsolete air tables, dated sometime during the war years. It really wasn’t all that hard when you consider that almost everything the services issued had pretty good directions to go with it.
Even the lowly P-38 can opener has instructions printed on the wrapper. Go check it out the next time you hit the surplus store.
I solved the triangles after school and waited for dad.
“Let me see your work.” He said.
I explained that I had used the air tables out of the box.
Dad wasn’t having any of that. He took the air tables and put them back in the box.
“POW!” he said. “An 88 has just gone through them and all you have is a pencil and paper.”
We spent the next couple of hours immersed in long division carrying the quotients out several decimal places, figuring out sines and cosines the hard way. It was a bitch.
The plane geometry came when we converted the celestial sphere to a paper flat map. When we were doing the map part, he also taught me to figure wind drift and how to change a compass course to overcome it.
The next part was learning to use the flight computer, which is still taught today. It’s a circular slide rule with a calculator for wind drift.
Then we did all of the other necessary figuring and after a couple of evenings of this, out of the blue he whacked me on the head.
“You stink in plane geometry,” he snapped. “Yet when you put your mind to it, you can sit here and do spherical geometry! Get back to class and knock plane geometry cold!”
I went from the bottom straight to the top of the class and a couple of times the teacher would side track the class a little to quiz me on spherical. He was amazed that I was so far ahead of the class in some things, yet average in others. I never let on that the Old Man had taught me the basics of navigation.
I’d have to say that between the plane geometry class and dad’s little course in air navigation, the two of them have really shaped my life and career.
I went into the army several years later and enlisted as an 82-C Field Artillery surveyor and there were quite a few parts of the class that I slept through and did very well in.
Astronomy week was supposed to separate the men from the boys in that tough course I had enlisted for, yet I breezed right through it. My instructor asked where I had attended college, figuring I had dropped out of some type of math or physics major program. He was surprised to find out I hadn’t.
I went through the ranks, making Sp/5 well ahead of my peers.
When I got out of the army, I built houses for a while and never went at a loss for work because I could easily frame out a chopped up roofline or breeze through a complicated dormer. Sometimes I would be hired specifically to build a stick-framed roof or dormers. The angles involved in building roofs were nothing more than applied plane geometry.
Later on when I went for my Coast Guard captain’s license, I simply read through a couple of books to refresh my memory and went in and took my entire battery of tests and passed with flying colors. The navigational problems had to be passed with a 90% or better, yet I breezed through and maxed that part of the test.
I was caught somewhat flat footed when I had to correct a course for current on the navigation test, yet I sat there for a few minutes and after a several decade absence, I recalled Dad’s lesson and it all came back to me.
If I recall, the lowest grade I had for the entire battery of six tests was a 90%, and that was ‘Deck General’. Nobody really does very well in that. It’s where I scored the 90%.
When I look back on growing up with the Old Man, I was blessed because he taught me some pretty good skills as a kid that I would find myself using constantly as an adult.
I guess it doesn’t get any better than that when you think about it.
I miss him every day. He died too young.
He didn’t cheat me and take me by surprise, though.
He gave me fair warning.
Every time he would drop me off at an airport or a bus station or even the highway when I’d hitchhike somewhere, his parting words were always the same.
“See you later, Kiddo.” He’d say.
At the airport that day, it was different. He lingered for a scant second and looked at me with a very warm smile. ”Good bye, Son,” he said.
I held the gaze a second or two longer before I turned to get on the airplane. As I boarded it, I knew that it was to be the last time I would ever see my father.
my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/
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