Grease Under the Nails

Within the Bauer family there seems to be some kind of right of male passage established by my father and now being continued with my son.  I am sure every family has their own "requirements for membership."  For my father it was learning from his father who was a machinist building complex parts for Hughes Aircraft.  While his exacting father was often disapproving in his ability, my father's striving to please my grandfather taught my father many skills.  In my case, as I reached junior high school and continuing into high school, it was a directive by my father to take Shop.  I resisted and I complained.  I was an actor, a thespian.  I was a debater, an intellectual.  How could I be expected to take shop?  My father insisted and usually when this was the case it was a battle I would ultimately lose.

In junior high school it was the "Industrial Arts."  I learned the names of tools and made boxes out of tin.  I spent a semester continuing an unfinished shop project that had been handed down from father to son.  It was a cross bow made of a wooden stock attached to the leaf spring of a car.  As a high school student my father had created the stock, it was my turn to cut and smooth the leaf spring.  Were this to have been accomplished as planned once attached one would have literally needed a wench to draw the cable back and once released the bolt would have had such velocity it could have pierced a stone wall.  Sadly I never joined the stalk and leaf spring in harmony.  A few years back my father finally accomplished the task and gave it to my son for Christmas.  His final version however took some of the thrust out of the weapon by substituting a bungee cord for the cable obfuscating the need for a wench and creating a complete yet non-violent weapon. 

By the time I reached high it became quickly apparent that in high school, shop class was a depository for those that could make it no where else.  It was home to the stoner's and the women who loved them.  I was a different breed.  Not a prep but not a nerd.  Just something in the middle that didn't really seem to fit anywhere.  The first day of class I took my stool next to three moderately attractive junior girls who had taken the class singularly to meet stoner guys.  The other students were a collection of the dazed and incoherent.  Their eyes were glossed over and the fog of their minds seemed so intense it drifted out into the class joined by the wafting smell of tobacco.

Raymond Hagen

The teacher came out and introduced himself to the class.  "I am Mr. Hagen."  He looked to be 95 years old and had a cocked eye and bony frame.  He wore dirty overalls and held a cup where periodically he launched a stream of tobacco juice.  His face was partially shaven and he seem to derive an obscene pleasure from the stoner chicks in the class leering at them out of the corner of his eye.  He placed a lawn mower engine on a bench and announced that during the course of the class we would be disassembling and reassembling one just like it.  Squinting he looked at me and wondered why in the hell I was there.

There is a scene that depicts it perfectly in that seminal high school film for anyone of the 80's generation, The Breakfast Club, when the intelligent kid breaks down.  Each of the characters tells their tale of woe and how they achieved a Saturday detention.   When it is Anthony Michael Hall's turn he talks about how he had to create a lamp with an elephant trunk in shop.  Try as he might, when he pulled the trunk he just couldn't make the lamp light.  For his failure he received a "B," corrupting his otherwise perfect academic record.

While my academic record was no where near as perfect I was as out of place in that class as Hall's character must have felt.  I don't remember if my lawn mower engine ever started but I survived shop class and actually started to get along with the stoners.  I think in their own way they kind of thought it was cool such an out of place kid would enter their world, get his hands dirty and try his best.

This year my son followed in my footsteps.  Woven in between his biology and advanced placement English classes is Introduction to Building. The stoners I once knew have now been replaced with tobacco chewing red necks and the women who love them.  His teacher is a bit more modern than Mr. Hagen but I imagine he must equally stand out in the teachers lounge.  Now Noah watches "This Old House" and practices sawing things and wiring an electrical outlet sans electricity.  I had to remind him of this fact as over the weekend I removed an electrical face plate and he started to touch hot wires.  He is as out of place in his class as I once was yet day by day he seems to be earning the respect of his confederate flag waving truck driving compatriots.

The truth is, most of these classes don't teach us much functional but they do create something more important, confidence.  This past weekend I embarked on renovating a half bathroom in my house.  I will set tile, painted, installed a toilet, vanity and other fixtures.  My son  has gone farther then I ever did with my father back in the day.  He is actually helping me.  "I want to learn these things." he told me.

Maybe Shop isn't such a bad thing after all and I will tell you one thing, when I have a grandson or grand daughter, they will be pulling up a stool and washing grease off their fingers.