The Muddled Male

Mentors

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

        As I grow older I find myself frequently slipping into a state of nostalgia.  Probably because age seems to enhance one’s ability to remember things that happened fifty years ago at the same time it clouds the memory of what happened five minutes ago.  You may have had the experience of getting up out of your easy chair to go do something really, really important only to find that after you were up you couldn’t remember what it was you were on your way to do.  I remember my dad saying to me once in his mid-eighties, “I spend half of my life standing in the middle of the room wondering why I am standing in the middle of the room.”  I mention this because, having spent these last few days in severe nostalgia, I have been thinking about a few of the many people who have mentored me through life.

        First, of course, are my parents who taught me the importance of being reliable, hardworking, and persistent.  Their unstated motto was to not waste time lamenting mistakes of the past.  Just keep moving forward and try to do better in the future.  They had many challenges through life but never did an “oh woe is me,” ever escape their lips.  Then there was Norm Toone who had half the kids in Croydon scared to death because whenever he saw any of us he would put his hand in his pocket and say, “Just a minute while I get my pocketknife so I can cut your ears off?”  One day, when I was about four, I got up the courage to fling a snowball at him.  I don’t know if I hit the target because while the snowball was still in midair I had already started running for home.  Norm’s mentoring contribution was to teach me to have the courage to standup for myself, but be ready to run like heck once you have lobbed the missile.

        Then there was Miss Fleming who always made me fill out every line on my dance card for the grade school dance, but turned the other way when I hid behind the cafeteria tables stacked along the walls of the lunchroom so that I didn’t have to demonstrate my lack of rhythm and inability to move my feet in the approved pattern.  Then there was Miss Criddle who tried to teach me to dance but gave up for the same reason I hid behind the stacks of tables in the lunchroom.  Even our son Tom tried to teach me to dance when I became Bishop.  His reason, however, was that he didn’t want to be embarrassed when the twelve and thirteen year old girls chased me down and made me dance just to see my face turn red when I became embarrassed and couldn’t find any tables to hide behind.  Tom gave up his mentoring when he decided that it would be easier for him to be embarrassed than to teach me how to dance.

        I received obedience mentoring in our social studies class and our civics class.  I attended school during the era that allowed corporal punishment to be applied on the spot by any teacher that caught you doing something out of line.  The social studies teacher got your attention either with a knuckle bonk on the back of the head, or a crack across your knuckles with the edge of a ruler.  The Coach was the civics class teacher and preferred to use the Board of Education.  The Board looked like an oversized ping pong paddle that was half an inch thick with half inch diameter holes drilled through, all over the paddle area.  The purpose of the holes was to reduce paddle drag so that he coach could get maximum paddle velocity as he administer a resounding WHACK to your derriere.  And that portion of your body was made more fragile by making the miscreant bend over to tighten his pants over the target area.  The holes also provided an area into which chunks of your derriere could expand to absorb the force of the blow.

        I am also indebted to my first lead man, Charlie Bock, who taught me to write by rejecting my engineering reports over and over and over until I got them both technically and grammatically correct.  And a later lead man, Dan Gunderson, who taught me to be a good test engineer.  I remember laboring away for hours on a complicated thermal dynamic calculation using a slide rule and multiple charts to determine appropriate coefficients for the calculation, only to have Dan look at the answer and quickly say, “I don’t think that answer is correct.  I am guessing that you made an error in your Reynolds Number” … and he would be correct.

        But to my friend, the professor, who has been trying to show me the difference between engineering math and real math, I’m too old.  Besides, the only way I could remember now is for you to have taught me fifty years ago.  But thanks for trying.