The Knack - Dave’s Midwestern Ohio Memories

A Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s.

The Knack

Our two adjacent neighbors on the farm where I grew up are shown on the photo above riding their hand-buit vehicle. The photo was taken well before my time in the 1930’s during the Great Depression. The guy driving is my wife’s uncle, while the one following on his bike is my uncle. They built the vehicle from scrap material around their farms.The two were very creative and it was fun growing up around them as they, along with my dad, would help each other out during harvesting season. I recall one such occasion while combining wheat in about 1955 when a cast iron part broke on the harvester. To obtain a replacement part from the implement store in Minster, the part number was needed, which typically was molded into the casting. So my dad and the two neighbors went about removing the broken part, cleaning it thoroughly in kerosene to remove the grease and searching for the part number for some time without success, when my mom called everybody in for noon lunch,. So dad and the neighbors cleaned up and went to lunch in the summer kitchen, an additional room on our farm home that had lots of windows so was much cooler in the summertime than the kitchen with the heat from the cooking stove. However, rather than go in for lunch, I stayed back to search the broken casting for the elusive part number. Once I pieced together the various broken parts, I found the part number that was difficult to see because the part broke right along the seam of the part number. I immediately grabbed the parts and ran into the summer kitchen just as everyone was finishing the meal to tell them that I had found the part number. Needless to say I was full of grease and smelled like kerosene. So my Mom shewed me out the door to clean up. As I was quickly departing the summer kitchen after receiving the appropriate reprimanded from mom, I heard her say that Dave has a "knack" for such talents, but exhibits little common sense when it comes to proper manners! Dad and our neighbors soon also left the lunch table to see the part number for themselves, as they didn’t believe a 6 year old kid could find it when they couldn’t (what’s somewhat disconcerting these many years later is why no one even missed me a the lunch table)!

Fast forward many years later after obtaining an engineering degree, working at Ford and getting married, my wife was surfing the Internet a few years back and found this Dilbert video about the “knack” that she said “explains everything”. I’ll let you be the judge.

Had my dad and our neighbors been given an opportunity to receive a college education rather than having to quit school as teenagers to help on the farm, no doubt any one of them could have been an engineer or just about anything they wanted to be. They too clearly had the “knack”. But they were extremely happy owning their own farms and raising their families in such a nurturing environment, for which I’ll be eternally grateful.