Long Story Short: A Collection of Stories by Hal Gunardson

As I said before, my father accumulated a lot of miscellaneous stuff in the basement. Tools, woodworking and metal working machinery, an industrial air compressor, bits and pieces of wood and metal, old car parts and what not were all part of the trash stash.

When I was about fourteen, my Dad and I participated in a model airplane club where we built model planes and flew them in competition with other enthusiasts. Two of the other members were a German machinist, Heinz and his son Wolf (Wolfgang).

One day they showed up at a model airplane field meet and Wolfgang was riding a motor bike built from a bicycle. It was propelled by a small lawnmower engine and I thought this was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. I had an old Briggs and Stratton lawn mower engine and an old bicycle at home, and I decided that I would build a similar motor bike. I rummaged through the stash of parts and bits and pieces that were laying around and scrounged together about everything I needed to put the thing together.

My Dad and I with the Motor Bike

The engine sat on frame built out of scrap metal located behind the bicycle seat above the back wheel. The frame was hinged behind the engine and had two bearings mounted on it with a shaft that turned a large roller. The roller rode on the back wheel of the bike. God knows where the roller originally came from but there it was in the spare parts box. It was held against the back wheel with large springs on each side that attached at the top of the hinged frame and at the bottom to the axle of the back wheel of the bike. The shaft that held the roller protruded beyond the bearing to one side of the bike and a pulley was fastened to the shaft. A Vee – belt connected the pulley on the shaft to the pulley on the lawnmower engine.

The Vee-Belt between the shaft and the engine was slack so when the engine was running the belt would slip and no power was transmitted to the roller. A lever was mounted on the motor bracket which had an idler pulley mounted on one end and a handle on the other. When the handle was pulled forward the lever would engage the idler pulley with the belt taking up the slack, engaging the engine with the roller and transferring power from the engine to the roller which in turn would transmit the rotational force to the wheel of the bike and propel it forward. This was all accomplished with spare parts and scrap metal scavenged from the stash. No welding was involved. It was all put together with nuts and bolts, spare parts and scrap. And it worked.

When the project was completed, I took the bike outside and fired up the engine. My Dad was with me to see how it worked on its maiden voyage. I engaged the idler pulley and off I went down the street. I was so excited that I continued on down the street onto a dirt road and the off into an adjacent field to “open her up” and see what she could do.

I was enthralled it was working as well as it did and at full throttle (probably about 10 miles per hour or so) I wasn’t paying enough attention and went through a patch of tall weeds at full speed. There was a fallen tree hidden in those weeds and I hit it full on and I went over the handle bars. I wasn’t hurt, except for my pride, but no one was there to witness the “accident”. 

The bike was okay, so I climbed back on and continued back to the house. When I got back my Pop was mad as hell.  “Where did you go? Why didn’t you stay close by and check it out before taking off for parts unknown?  What were you thinking anyway?”

Well, I had no good answers to any of those questions. I didn’t mention what actually happened, but just told him that I rode out to the field and back. He wasn’t satisfied with that explanation and just stormed into the house. After about an hour everything calmed down and all was okay again. I never did tell him or anyone else about the hidden log in the weeds.

Years later, when I became a parent I realized in retrospect what drove his concern when I took off out of sight for some time and he was waiting there thinking, “Where the hell did he go, why isn’t he back, did something go wrong, was this a big mistake, what?”

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” Attributed to Mark Twain.

At the next model airplane field meet we took the bike to the airplane competition and met up with Heinz and his son and naturally we showed off the bike. Mine wasn’t as pretty as his, but compliments were exchanged all around and although my Dad always had a funny way of showing it I knew he was as proud as punch.

Of course, we raced the bikes. The dads marked off a run on the adjacent dead-end street and we lined up at the starting line. The run was a couple of hundred yards. Both of us revved up and took off full throttle down the street. It was close, and his bike was a lot prettier than mine, but I beat him by a nose. I had more horsepower. He only had 3hp and I had 5hp.That was my first drag race. It was great fun. Many years later when I saw Orange County Choppers on TV, I thought to myself, “Why didn’t I take it a few notches higher and start building choppers like Paul and Paul Jr.?” C’est la vie.

Looking back and reminiscing over my childhood amusements, there was a definitely a pattern here. My main childhood activity was building stuff. And I never stopped. It was an obsession and still is. It’s just out of control.

So long, good luck, and have a nice day!

For some mysterious reason, my folks bought me a bow and arrows when I was about twelve years old. For all their concern about my safety it was a rather odd gift. Nevertheless, I loved the bow and eventually became a reasonably good shot. A few years later they bought me second more powerful bow, a fiberglass recurve hunting bow. One thing I could never figure out is why they refused to get me a target. I really wanted one to set up in the backyard, but they told me that the targets were too expensive, and they never bought one.

Archery targets came with a stand I could have set it up in a safe location in the back yard and shot to my heart’s content. But for some inexplicable reason this wasn’t even up for consideration. Well, talk about ways to encourage me to get into mischief! This was it.

Instead of shooting at a target, I took the bow into the woods and shot at everything that moved, birds, rabbits, squirrels, the box cars on the train going down the track, whatever. I didn’t usually hit the small animals I aimed at since they were fast and agile and usually scurried out of sight before I got a bead on them. But one afternoon I got lucky and nailed a small rabbit that had just emerged from the brush.

I didn’t kill the rabbit, but I hit it in the front paw and the arrow went through the paw and entered its body just in front of the hind leg. I went over to get a closer look and it was struggling to run but couldn’t move with the arrow rendering its front paw immobile. It was bleeding from its side where the arrow had penetrated its body. I stood there stupefied for a few moments not knowing what to do next. God, I wanted to reverse time and take that shot back. There was no alternative. The creature was suffering, and I didn’t want it to die a slow death, so I took out my knife and killed it quickly. Then buried it there in the field.

I’m not against the concept of hunting for survival and I would never preach to others about it one way or another, but from that day forward I never purposely killed another creature. I derived no pleasure or satisfaction from what I had done and never wanted to purposely do it again. I’ve never told that story to anyone for sixty years. When people I’ve met over the years talk to me about their hunting exploits, I always listen politely then quietly walk away. But it never has had any appeal for me.

Well I said I never purposely killed another creature from that day on, but I exaggerated. Fish, I’ve killed fish. But I always cooked and ate them. Even so, I have to say I never actually took pleasure in killing them. I do enjoy fishing though and eventually embraced the practice of catch and release.

I was fishing for trout in Alberta with a friend one afternoon. We were fishing from a canoe in one of Alberta’s crystal-clear mountain lakes and my friend Bob hooked a good size rainbow trout. After a long fight, Bob finally landed the fish and brought him into the canoe. He immediately began to gut and clean the fish and when finished he held the fish in his hand and reached over the side to wash it off in the clear water. He lost his grip and we both watched the fish slowly sink to the bottom of the lake. I said, “Bob, I’ve heard of catch and release before, but this is the first time I ever heard of catch, CLEAN and release!” We both had a good laugh over that, but we didn’t catch another one for the rest of the afternoon. The fish angels were not looking too kindly on us after that.

Another pastime I fall far short on that also requires good hand eye coordination is pool, or billiards as it is also sometimes called. With an engineering background, I understand very well the physics behind the game, angles, velocity, spin (“English” as it’s called) but there is a huge gap between my tacit understanding and successful execution. I love Mark Twain’s take on billiards.

I wonder why a man should prefer a good billiard-table to a poor one; and why he should prefer straight cues to crooked ones; and why he should prefer round balls to chipped ones; and why he should prefer a level table to one that slants; and why he should prefer responsive cushions to the dull and unresponsive kind.

I wonder at these things, because when we examine the matter we find that the essentials involved in billiards are as competently and exhaustively furnished by a bad billiard outfit as they are by the best one. One of the essentials is amusement.

Very well, if there is any more amusement to be gotten out of the one outfit than out of the other, the facts are in favor of the bad outfit. The bad outfit will always furnish thirty per cent more fun for the players and for the spectators than will the good outfit.

Another essential of the game is that the outfit shall give the players full opportunity to exercise their best skill and display it in a way to compel the admiration of the spectators. Very well, the bad outfit is nothing behind the good one in this regard. It is a difficult matter to estimate correctly the eccentricities of chipped balls and a slanting table, make the right allowance for them and secure a count; the finest kind of skill is required to accomplish the satisfactory result. Another essential of the game is that it shall add to the interest of the game by furnishing opportunities to bet.

Very well, in this regard no good outfit can claim any advantage over a bad one. I know, by experience, that a bad outfit is as valuable as the best one; that an outfit that couldn’t be sold at auction for seven dollars is just as valuable for all the essentials of the game as an outfit that is worth a thousand. … Last winter, here in New York, I saw Hoppe and Schaefer and Sutton and the three or four other billiard champions of world-wide fame contend against each other, and certainly the art and science displayed were a wonder to see; yet I saw nothing there in the way of science and art that was more wonderful than shots which I had seen Texas Tom make on the wavy surface of that poor old wreck in the perishing saloon at Jackass Gulch forty years before. – Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Chapters from the North American Review, November 1907

No Team Sports for Me

My Mom was a capable athlete when she was a young girl. Somewhere in “the storage” there is a medal she won for first place in running hurdles when she was in high school. So, she naturally encouraged me when I showed interest in gymnastics. She was quite proud when I won a certificate of accomplishment from the US Marine Corp for fitness and gymnastics in high school. I competed in events on the pommel horse, the parallel bars and the high bar. No hand-eye coordination required for these events, only good upper body strength and timing.

She also encouraged me in swimming and diving including diving from the high board. In fact, when we took our second trip to Florida when I was about ten or eleven years old she arranged diving lessons for me from the high board at the Fontainebleau hotel where we stayed in Miami Beach.

Later she encouraged me to take a course at the Olympic Park swimming pool near our home to qualify as a lifeguard which I completed and became what was then known as a junior lifeguard. This was a lifeguard for the kid’s pool since to be a lifeguard at the adult pool required you to be at least eighteen years old whereas I was only fourteen at that time. The skills required, however, were the same for both junior and senior lifeguards. I took the training and carried out the junior lifeguard responsibilities with Dennis, my childhood friend and next-door neighbor. We both did junior lifeguard duty for two years. We weren’t paid but had free admission to the pool for the day.

As time passed I did less and less schoolwork, less and less homework and became lazier and lazier. This freed up a lot of time to pursue a wide range of interests that significantly advanced my general education but didn’t do much for my academic performance. I perfected the skill of doing the absolute minimum to slide through with just barely passing grades. Later in college I had a vague sense that I might have a really good memory. I would have said a photographic memory, but that might be a stretch. I found I could vividly recall images from memory and remember them after only a few brief instances of exposure.

According to my research recent studies indicate a photographic memory really doesn’t exist. It’s now considered only a popular myth. There is new term used to describe the ability, eidetic memory and the eidetic memory has allegedly been scientifically validated. According to the new definition, eidetic memory is the ability to vividly recall images from memory and remember them after only a few brief instances of exposure. Gee, I thought that was a photographic memory. Well whatever. With a well-developed reading ability and really good memory I successfully used the combination to just meet the minimum academic standards without wasting a lot of time on studying and homework. I followed Mark Twain’s advice.

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” –Mark Twain

In high school, tenth, eleventh and twelfth grade, there were four marking periods or semesters plus a final exam, each of which counted one fifth of the final grade for the year. The grades were based on A, B, C, D and F. Each semester I did just enough in each course to get a C or a D.  For instance, for four semesters I would have two C’s and two D’s. Therefore, entering the final exam I would have a C minus average needing at least a C on the final exam to pass for the school year. I would study diligently, cram for the final exam, and nearly always “ace” it (but a few times I slipped up and only achieved a B on the final which was still sufficient to pass for the year). This method freed up a lot of spare time to screw around, smoking cigarettes, racing cars, chasing girls, getting into all kinds of other mischief.

Of course, over the four semesters my grades were marginal at best and since we were required to bring the report card home each semester to be signed by at least one parent I would always be in trouble. Especially with my Dad. And the remarks column written by my teachers would always tell a sordid tale; “doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t turn in homework, fools around, wastes time in class, etc., etc.” To avoid this unpleasant event, sometime after the first semester of the twelfth grade I hatched the following scheme. Instead of bringing the signed report card back to school I told the teacher I lost it and they issued me a new report card. I still had the original however and for the following three semesters I gave myself grades that I thought were more appropriate. I didn’t get carried away. I issued myself mostly C’s and an occasional B. On the subsequent semesters I had friends, reproduce, in their handwriting, the original comments from the first semester and new comments that I devised for the current semesters along the lines of, “Harold is making excellent progress, much improved this semester, etc.” All went well until the final semester. I arrived home from school one day, and since I was in jeopardy of failing for the year, unbeknownst to me, the school, sent a letter home by mail that stated, “We regret to inform you that your son is in jeopardy of failing his senior year and may have to attend summer school to graduate”. Well, my Mom was livid and she coerced me into revealing the whole scheme. Her response was “Wait till you father gets home”.

When Dad got home from work Mom explained what happened and he turned to me and asked, “So, I have to sign the report card each semester, who signs the one that is turned back into the school?” I answered, I do. He then asked, “Whose name do you sign?” I said yours. The proverbial shit then hit the proverbial fan. His response was “Holly Christ, I better not look in the bank, my account is probably empty”. The later part of the last semester was a bitch, I was grounded and all that stuff, but I knew I had the school situation under control. I’d been doing this a long time and had this thing covered. I studied for the exams as usual, aced them all, passed the semester and graduated with the rest of the class with an overall C average.

I read somewhere years later the most creative people are inherently smart and inherently lazy. Since they’re lazy they always look for the easy way to do things and since they’re smart they nearly always figure out a clever way to do it. Properly channeled this can be a great asset. Improperly channeled it often leads to criminal behavior. Fortunately, later I learned to channel it properly. Although I guess it was a tossup there for a while. However, just for the record I never did “hack” my Fathers bank account. Some might call this sort of behavior devious. But I prefer to refer to it as creative.

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” Bill Gates

I can’t recall much of the fourth and fifth grades but from what I remember it wasn’t an altogether unpleasant experience. The most vivid image in my mind was the playground surrounding the Franklin Elementary School. It was unpaved and every year the township would spray the area with petroleum oil to keep the weeds and dust down. No kidding, this is what they did back then. Between the petroleum oil and the “mosquito” truck that we ran behind in the DDT fog just for fun it’s a miracle that any of us survived to see the sixth grade!

I really don’t believe that the exposure to petroleum oil and DDT, especially DDT, was anywhere near as ominous as the “authorities” later made it out to be. The anti DDT movement started with the publication of Rachael Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962. I read her book when it was first published and agreed she definitely had a valid point. However, she never advocated a complete ban of DDT but reasonable and responsible judgement in its application. She believed judicious use of the pesticide by spraying only that necessary to control the mosquito population was an acceptable trade off but cautioned against indiscriminate over spraying. A completely rationale approach. But once the politicians, lawyers and activists got gist of the concept it was grossly distorted and eventually led to a worldwide ban of DDT with a subsequent worldwide increase in malaria.

Ruckelshaus, let it never be forgotten, was the EPA administrator responsible for probably the blackest moment in the institution’s history: the man who banned DDT in the U.S. with consequences which resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths around the world from malaria.

Sure, Ruckelshaus didn’t deliberately murder all those people. But the fact remains that DDT was — still is — one of the most effective killers of the malarial mosquito; and that by banning it in the U.S., Ruckelshaus helped create a knock-on regulatory effect which deprived the world of one its best defenses against one of its biggest health problems.

A lawyer, by training, not a scientist, Ruckelshaus was the man responsible for instituting the America-wide ban on DDT. He did this on no scientific basis whatsoever. In fact, Judge Edmund Sweeney had presided over a seven-month EPA hearing, examining more than 9,000 pages of expert testimony, and concluded:

“DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man…DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man…The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.”

Ruckelshaus, who had not attended the hearings or read the report, overruled him. Which probably made not much difference in the United States. But the knock-on effects of the near worldwide ban that followed meant that DDT could no longer be used to control mosquito populations, which in turn led to an explosion in malaria, causing the death of millions.

Just what the world needed, another lawyer (sarc off). I’ve had malaria twice, once in the Middle East and once again twenty years later in Asia and it ain’t no fun. Well, that aside back to when I was ten years old.

Around this time, when I was entering the fifth grade, my family moved from Walker Avenue to a new home on Tyler Street in the same small town of Union, New Jersey. The Tyler Street home was a modest Cape Cod style brick house with a two-car attached garage in a quiet suburban neighborhood. There were several other families with young children in the neighborhood but most were either a year or two younger or older than I. A year or two makes a big difference at that young age and so I really didn’t have many friends in the neighborhood.

Another reason was that I had polio and during the time I was convalescing at home the township posted a sign in front of the house that announced “Polio Victim”. Polio was highly contagious and this warned neighbors and others visiting the neighborhood that there was a polio survivor residing there. This certainly didn’t enhance my effort to make many friends. The sole exception was our next-door neighbors, the Connell’s, whose son Dennis was my age.

Dennis and I didn’t attend the same grammar school. I attended public school and since he was Irish Catholic, he attended Saint Michaels Catholic School nearby. Nevertheless, we spent much of our after-school time together, became fast friends, and maintained our friendship well into adulthood. In fact, in our thirties we were business partners together in the solar energy field. In his late thirties, Dennis and his wife Sue moved to Taos, New Mexico and unfortunately, we’ve lost touch.

Tortoise Shell Frames to “Buddy Holly” Glasses

Sometime around the third grade my Mom realized I had poor eyesight and took me for an examination. The optometrist discovered I was far sighted and prescribed corrective eyeglasses. Not many children wore glasses in those days and it unfortunately drew a lot of unwanted attention from my classmates. It didn’t help that the lenses and frames were particularly heavy and thick. The only type available then were those thick tortoise shell frames. God, I hated those glasses! 

Later on, in high school I upgraded to the heavy black frame glasses, or as the other kids called them, “Buddy Holly glasses”. These weren’t much better than the tortoise shell ones but it’s interesting today these so-called Buddy Holly glasses are in vogue now, especially among the “Millennials”. Guess I was just ahead of my time; by about fifty years!

I recently went to the eye doctor for a checkup and the doctor told me I have cataracts developing in both eyes but they now have laser surgery that can correct both the cataracts and my poor sight. And after the operation I would no longer need glasses.

My initial reaction was I’ve worn glasses since I was a young child and they are so much a part of my persona that I would feel naked without them.  Maybe I’ll have the operation and just get fake glasses with clear glass instead of lenses. I think that would work, no?

Making “pipes” of colored paper

“Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes 12 years of public schooling and 4 more years of college to beat it out of them” Edward Abbey

Anyway, glasses aside, it was about this time in my grammar school career I began to totally lose interest in school. I eventually became a “loner” or introvert, or introverted loner. It wasn’t just the fact that I was one of the only kids wearing glasses, there were other factors in play. I missed a year of school while I was recovering from polio and even though I kept up my academic work with the home tutor I was out of sight out of mind with all my classmates.

As I discovered in adulthood, I was already naturally an introvert and the experience of rejoining my classmates after a year absence just amplified and further reinforced this innate characteristic. One result was I began to act out.

Academic pursuits became less interesting and my attention started to drift away from the formal educational process. It seemed the school environment involved mainly conforming to what I viewed then (and still do) as an endless series of meaningless rules and regulations. It seemed that getting students to stand quietly in an orderly line was their top priority.

And then, during the fourth or fifth grade, I discovered I had an exceptionally good memory and I started to become even more aloof. I learned how to do the absolute minimum to just get by “by the skin of my teeth” (one of my Father’s favorite expressions). This freed up a lot of time for pursuing other interests such as drawing, oil painting and building stuff at home in the basement where my father had accumulated a large assortment of tools and machinery. This pattern of slacking off in school continued throughout my junior high and high school years until I eventually perfected it to a fine art.

An incident in the sixth grade stands out as a sort of defining moment. It was the first time my Mom was called into the school to have a parent teacher conference regarding my so-called discipline problems. Our class was assigned to do a set of arithmetic problems in multiplication and division. And as an “incentive” we were advised those who finished early could withdraw to the back of the room where there was a supply of art materials including colored paper and glue and we could dabble with this stuff until the end of the period. I did about half of the math problems and realized that division is simply reverse multiplication. Since I had already memorized the “times tables” I was able to do the division problems without the necessity of showing all the steps. I quickly got bored with the repetition of the assignment, so I handed in the work half done as it were and went to the back of the room to fool around with the art materials.

I was busy making a model of a trumpet out of colored paper and was working out the problem of fabricating the conical section of the horn known as the bell of the trumpet when the teacher, who was the incarnation of the stereotypical “schoolmarm” (by Merriam-Webster:  a person who exhibits characteristics attributed to schoolteachers as strict adherence to arbitrary rules), marched to the back of the room and proceeded to reprimand me for not completing the assignment and wasting time. The following is a pretty accurate representation of how I remember her.

A Schoolmarm

Ms. Whatever, exactly as I remember her.  Wow, I remember now, it was Mrs. Taylor. One of my first confrontations with authority, or in the more general sense “The Authorities”.

She told my Mom I refused to complete the math assignment and was in the back of the room playing around with colored paper making “pipes”.  I protested, telling Mom I wasn’t making “pipes” but a model musical instrument, in fact a trumpet. And I was working out how to fashion the bell of the trumpet when I was interrupted by the schoolmarm. Actually, to this day this incident still pisses me off.

Mom didn’t want to hear my side as she was horrified that I was becoming a discipline problem. In short, she freaked out and for many years she would repeat this story and insist that I was “making pipes” out of colored paper instead of paying attention to my school work.

Look at this! I found this on the internet! Somebody actually finished their paper trumpet. Regrettably I never got to finish mine.

Well, as it turned out there were other teachers that let’s say more fully appreciated my interest and ability in drawing and art and by the end of the seventh-grade I was frequently recruited to paint backdrop scenery for the school plays put on periodically for parents and students.

Actually, my Mom appreciated my artistic ability and when remodeling the second floor of the house on Tyler Street she encouraged me to paint a seascape mural in oils on a blank wall. She talked it up at school when she was then President of the PTA (Parent Teachers Association) and it was featured in the local newspaper, The Union Register. Redemption, I guess. Well, partial redemption anyway.

The mural was never finished. It was about 90% complete, all but for a small portion of the seaside cliffs near the lower right corner. The reason that it wasn’t completed is I became discouraged after my Father was extremely critical and I completely lost interest. He found fault with the depiction of the rocky cliffs and crashing waves I painted. To this day, I don’t know why he was so negative. It wasn’t constructive criticism along the lines of, “Hey, you could improve the waves and rocks there near the lower corner.” It was more along the lines of that looks like shit. This was from a guy who couldn’t draw a straight line if his life depended on it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it could well have been an alcohol fueled tirade. In any case I became dispirited and never finished the painting.

“Artists fail to complete their paintings for many reasons. Sometimes outside events intervene. Other times they lose the spark of inspiration and creativity. In some instances, they may deliberately leave their work unfinished in order to make an artistic statement. Whatever the reason, incomplete paintings hold a certain allure. To art aficionados, the greatest unfinished works are evocative of what could have been.”

“Leonardo da Vinci has been affectionately referred to as a “brilliant slacker” by art historians. Although more famous for his staggering genius than his short attention span, Leonardo would often abandon projects when he lost interest in them.” 

I sure ain’t no Leonardo, but the way I look at it, good enough for Leonardo, good enough for me. I left it unfinished.

So long, good luck, and have a nice day….