A relationship with Technology

The men in my family have always sort of had a relationship with technology. I think it might have started with my Great Grandfather living on a farm until he was 105 in Kansas. On a farm you are always having to do something with building something, repairing something, planting something, dealing with weather or animals or varmints or whatever. So, this likely is where this kind of close to the land but also very comfortable with technology of all kinds comes from.

When I was 8 years old I watched Roy Rogers and other cowboy stars like John Wayne and wanted to be a cowboy. However, I wasn't allowed to have bigger pets like dogs or cats growing up so when I got into horses I never was allowed to own a horse either.

I remember Dad slapping the rental horse on the butt and it running with me away from the stables my very first time on a horse and it ran for about 1 or two miles with me at a gallop almost taking my leg off several times on fences it came too close to.

Then, when it realized I had never ridden before it ran even faster back towards the stable and almost killed me it was so reckless going back to the stable. But, I was a boy and an adventurous one at that, so since I didn't die I just laughed it off and told my Dad all about my adventures and he smiled the way that Dad's did in the 1950s that I was becoming a man at 8. But, just trying to hold onto the horse while it galloped one direction and then ran even faster back to the stables was sort of a bit much and I wondered about horses after that some. Because it wasn't as easy as what I saw at the movies or on TV. Every horse had it's own unique personality and you really had to be careful of some of them.

My Dad said rental horses are driven insane by so many riders riding them with different styles or no styles at all and this drives horses crazy pretty fast.

So, he said if you are serious about riding you need your own horse that knows you real well. His younger sister had owned several horses while he was growing up. He was more into motorcycles and so bought himself a Harley 74 when he was 14. But, he hit a german shepard dog on a gravel road with his little brother on back and it ground his leg when the dog died and his leg ground up from the motorcycle grinding his leg up some.

The doctors tried to remove his leg (because there were no antibiotics then) but his Dad wouldn't let them. The doctors told his Dad he might die if they didn't take the leg off. So, he was on Morphine for about 6 weeks. He thought he had a nervous breakdown after that but I think he was having Morphine withdrawals and people didn't know about stuff like that then.

However, he was valedictorian of his High school Class anyway in 1934.

I was raised reading Popular Science and Popular Mechanics a lot during the 1950s. I also liked Classics Illustrated which were popular stories set to comic books in a classic sense like "Lorna Doon" and other literary classics. I also liked Superman and other science fiction classics and anything that made me laugh a lot.

So, I always wanted to know what made everything work. So, I understood how cars worked and took apart my first lawnmower engine at around 10 or 12 and put it back together and it worked.

At 15 my best friend was rebuilding the automatic transmission to his 1953 Mercury. I was about the same time I think it was Life magazine or Post had the Beatles on the cover 1964 some time.

In summer 1960 my Dad started training me to be an electrician summers from 1960 to 1965. So, I already had learned a trade by the time I was 17 and could be hired by anyone as a non-union Electrician's helper if I needed to. However, I went to college instead to study computer programming and computer operations which I became quite good at.

But, remember it was 1966 when I went to college first when I was 18. There were no microprocessors or microcomputers at all. That wouldn't come until the early 1980s. But, I bought my first home computer from Radio Shack in 1978 for $600 called the TRS-80 which had 4k of memory (which means 4 thousand places of memory) compared to Gigabytes of memory today in the  hundreds.

I flew my first glider (2 man glider) at age 16 or 18 at El Mirage Dry lake in the deserts near Pearblossom I believe then. They used to have glider races from there to Arizona and back riding the thermals. I'll never forget pulling the red knob and releasing the glider from it's tow plane the first time.

The instructor sat behind me and showed me how to find a heat thermal and with the nose slightly down gain in altitude through the updrafts in the thermals. It was a very amazing experience.

I started riding small motorcycles with a Vespa in the desert that belonged to a friend of my Dad's at about age 10 or 12. This made me realize I needed to buy myself a Mini-bike by about 12. So, since I worked for my Dad and he paid me I bought myself a Wren by Bird which was a 2 1/2 horsepower about 2 1/2 foot tall Mini-bike that could do about 30 to 35 miles per hour with a centrifugal clutch and a compression brake that rubbed on the little 8 inch to 1 foot tall wheels. It was metallic blue (the frame) and I thought it was beautiful. I kept this thing until about 1985 when my father passed away at his home in the desert near Yucca Valley up on the mesa and I think I bought it at age 12 in 1960. All my older kids learned to ride a motorized 2 wheel vehicle for the first time on this thing and I even taught a younger cousin to ride it when he was about 4 or 5 on dirt and sandy roads. Technology whether it was computers as an operator, programmer or whatever all the way to being a glider and small plane pilot to riding motorcycles to driving small to large trucks to fast muscle cars I was always into from the time I was about 2 years old and sat on my first motorcycle and put my hands on the handlebars.