I tried to write a Father’s Day introduction to my dad, but gave up. The subject is just too big, like writing about “The Pacific Ocean.” So here’s a story.
I was building a Morse-code set for a school project, and had already made the sounder out of nails and wire. Now I needed a sending switch. Dad thought about all the miscellaneous objects in the garage and settled on a used distributor rotor from his ‘53 Merc.
If he drilled a small hole in the center of the rotor, and placed an electrical contact under the center end of the coil-contact leaf spring, we’d have a “normally-open, momentary-contact” switch suitable for sending Morse code. I would then connect the switch to the circuit and be in business.
But he was tired, and probably just wanted to tilt back on his black leather recliner and close his eyes. He rushed the job. That’s where our story takes a wrong turn…
He chucked the bit into the drill, and made one wrong decision: he held the rotor in his hand to drill the hole. He was depending on a deft touch to turn off the drill just as it began to break through the rotor.
If the rotor had been made of a soft plastic like polyethylene, the strategy would have been worked. But rotors are made of a hard composite plastic called Bakelite, which breaks and chips. When drilling through Bakelite, the drill bit tends to break through all at once, and is then pulled downward by the misshapen hole. In this case it pulled the rotating bit directly into his left hand.
“Darn!,” he said. “I am so dismayed that I have injured myself!”
No, that is not what he said. He let loose a rich jeremiad of his trademark profanity while searching for a towel to stanch the flow of blood. We went into the kitchen and then to the hospital.
Picture the emergency room of a hospital, c. 1964. Nurses wear white uniforms and little caps; doctors wear white coats and have unquestioned authority. Patients have little white enameled steel stands next to their beds with glass containers full of bandages, swabs, alcohol. Paperwork is done at desks with typewriters; there are NO computers anywhere. Questions need to be answered, such as:
“Name?”
“Wiman, Raymond Victor. Could we get someone to look at my hand?”
Tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap… the secretary’s fingers committed the name to paper.
“Address?”
“131 Ferson Avenue. About my hand, this is really starting to hurt…”
“Just a moment, sir.” Tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap
The secretary was not a master of the keyboard.
“Phone?” The minutes dragged by as the information being recorded became less and less relevant. By the time the secretary had reached “employer” and “please describe the nature of the complaint” my father’s hand was sending urgent signals to his tired brain. His patience ran out.
Drip. Drip. Drip… The blood spattered in droplets on the expensive typewriter. The secretary looked up. My dad was holding his bandaged hand over the machine. Blood was dripping out on the upper keycover, the platen, even the form she was filling out.
“Maybe we’d better get that looked at, sir. Please come right this way…”
With the hole drilled in the rotor, I was able to clean off the blood and finish building a fine Morse-code set. I can’t remember what grade it got. In a couple weeks, my dad’s hand was good as new.
It seems impossible to think of him not being around anymore. After almost 15 years, you’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I’m not.