Becoming an Engineer - Dave's Midwestern Ohio Memories

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

Becoming an Engineer

A favorite Twitter site I follow is called World of Engineering, with the appropriate motto “A fun way to learn something everyday”. The site typically provides interesting and creative tidbits about engineering or poses provocative questions to it’s 2.6 million followers. Recently, the site asked when you first decided to be an engineer, which got me thinking about the subject.

First of all, as a farm kid in elementary school, the term engineer meant absolutely nothing to me; however, there were signs and indicators that becoming an engineer could be in my future. Primarily an interest in math and science coupled with my fix-it skills were prevalent at that early stage, but probably playing with my Erector set received as a Christmas gift around the 4th grade was the first true indicator of my eventual profession.

At first, building the various models depicted in the set’s instructions were the focus of my attention and a challenge as depicted in the cartoon above. It seems the instructions for each of the various models were always somewhat unclear, which meant frustration followed by creatively thinking about a solution. After literally building every model in the instructions, I started creating items on my own, most frequently farm equipment that we would use to play farm.

The Erector set was rather limited at first, but whenever a particular part not in the set was needed, I’d order it and wait impatiently for its arrival, typically a month or more; nothing like Amazon deliveries today. My allowance money of $1.25 a week was used to pay for the parts, and since there were no credit cards, and I didn’t have a checkbook, cash was sent with the order. The parts always came in and fortunately no one walked off with my money. A battery powered motor shown below on the right was not included with the set, so that was one of the more expensive parts ordered at a cost of $3.94, almost a month of allowance money! But that little motor allowed me to build vehicles that would move on their own without being tethered to a power cord using the bulky conventional motor that came with the set shown on the left. The seed for my automotive engineering career was firmly planted at that young age. Oh to be 22 again and start out designing electric vehicles.

Grade school teachers also had an influence on my eventual career choice by encouraging excellence in math and science. For example, an elementary teacher asked me to help out at the high school science fair each year, which allowed me to see and learn up close and personal the various displays and to interact with the older high school kids about their various projects. Also, growing up on the farm provided many neophyte engineering opportunities, primarily around fixing things that were broken or creatively solving problems on the fly and on the cheap. Dad was a great innovator who taught me a lot.

So was Mom around the house and garden, but she had ulterior motives by redirecting me towards becoming a priest. She always had stated her desire for me and my siblings to enter religious life. Encouraging me to become a mass server during grade school was step #1 (see the photo below), followed by enrolling me in various Catholic camps each summer to expose me to religious life.

Mom’s persuasion finally culminated in her encouragement that I enter the seminary as a freshman in high school, which I did. The experience was eye-opening in that the priests and brothers who taught at the seminary were extremely bright and enthusiastic. They exposed me to all kinds of new endeavors, especially from a math and science perspective, which just reinforced my urge to become an engineer rather than a priest. Another benefit was spending time in the gym honing my basketball skills rather than milking cows and feeding hogs! But after two years of intense learning at the seminary, I broke the news to my parents that Mom’s dream of me becoming a priest wasn't going to happen. They took it hard but accepted my choice and never looked back. Neither did I, jumping head first into math, science and athletics “with enthusiasm unknown to mankind”, borrowing a current approach by a favorite football coach. At that point, becoming an engineer was inevitable.

My wife sometimes gets exasperated at my technical explanations on how things work, so she simply walks away muttering “Dilbert” under her breath! But here’s how she really feels: Ten Reasons Engineers Make Good Partners

Merry Christmas, Fish Report readers.

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