My dad was not afraid to tear into anything to repair or imp

My dad was not afraid to tear into anything to repair or improve it. This is one of my legacies from him. I think besides his natural inclination toward this Dilbertian ‘knack’ he was driven by economics. We were not wealthy so if the washing machine broke, it was up to him to fix it. He was very good at it. This culminated in the 70’s when after retiring from Mobil he designed and built the lake house in Wildwood about 40 miles north of Beaumont.

He actually was formally trained as an aircraft mechanic by the US Army Air Corps - more on this later. When he went to work at the Magnolia Refinery in Beaumont following WW II, he worked as a machinist. It is my understand that he became very good at doing machine shop work and that contributed to his ‘knack’