A Legacy Project

In the fullness of time, I was able to put letters after my name.  First B.A. Then M.A. Then D.A.

When I was a kid, I should have had H.A. after my name.  For half ass.

Case in point, my failed science fair project. This would have been elementary school, fifth or sixth grade. There must have been books circulated by teachers in the pre-fair period. You could do this. You could make one of these. You could explain this? Yeah, well, I guess. What are you interested in? The short answer was: Nothing. 

Nevertheless, I got in the game. When fair time came, the school gym filled with projects, with displays, poster boards with headings and illustrations and neat lettering. Mine was a piece of plywood. On it I’d made a cradle, two sticks in the shape of a Y stuck vertical in the board, a metal rod, thin as a skewer, resting in the cradle horizontal to the surface of the board. In the middle of the rod was a cork two inches long, an inch in diameter, wrapped in copper wire. Somewhere I’d come up with a large horseshoe-shaped magnet. Toss in a nine-volt battery, connect the battery to two leads on the cork, and I had an electric motor.

When I hooked up the battery, it didn’t work. I thought I’d followed the directions. What did I leave out? 

I was not good at directions. I was the kind of kid, when I put a model car or plane together, I ignored the directions and let intuition be my guide. Ronnie Thurlow, a few doors down, put together aircraft carriers that probably would have floated, cruised at 2 mph in the bathtub, and fired ordinance. When my Ford Falcon was done, there were car parts still in the box. Those tubes of glue, I discovered, were highly flammable. If I was dissatisfied with what I had built (thrown together), I squirted glue on it, set it afire, and played car crash.

When the motor didn’t work I reasoned it needed more electricity. It needed a jolt, a jump start. Up in the attic I found the transformer we connected to our electric train set. I plugged it in, connected it to my motor, and gave it the gas. There was a dramatic pause, a vibration, possibly a hum. Then action. The armature made one complete revolution, and stopped. I tried again, going full power, on/off, on/off, on/off. Was that a hum coming again from my science fair project? There were no sparks, no smoke. Still, with that juice flowing on high, I had the good sense not to touch it.

About this time my dad came by to have a look.

“What are you doing?”

I might have told him, Science! But that was obvious. I said I thought my electric motor needed more power. 

“If you’re not careful,” he said, “you’re going to wind up over at Taylor’s.” 

Two blocks from our house. Taylor’s was the funeral home.     

It didn’t work. All I got from it was one revolution. If I’d written a report, it would have been a post mortem. The project was too big for airplane glue, so I disassembled it and went on with my half-ass life, quite happy.