Mechanic for Everything

And then we would be there and things would start breaking down. I’m the scientist. I was usually pretty good with mechanics so I would head for the generator, the big electric generator, take that thing, look at it, take it apart and try to get it cleaned out by the book.

I’d read the book, and after I had taken the igniters out the book it said I should send them to England to get them clean. And I said, yeah send them to England to be cleaned and reset. So I dumped them in a bucket of kereosense and let them sit there over night and the the next day I’d get them out and I’d shake them off and clean them off and put them back in the machine again, by the book, and the machine would run.

So when I started doing that kind of thing, I started being the mechanic for everything. Next was the waterpump. Same way for the waterpump, when it wouldn’t run, take something out, soak it in kerosene, and it would work. At the time we didn’t have a mainteance man. Later on we would…