The Forgotten Engineer
Today is my father’s 99th birthday. Roy Edward Dishman was born on Sept. 5, 1904, in Collinsville Texas. His own father, John William Dishman (my namesake), was 51 when his younger son was born. He was almost old enough to be Dad’s grandfather rather than his father. In some ways that difference in ages impacted Dad’s personality development, since much of his upbringing was done by his older sisters (six in all) who were old enough to be his mother.
Because my grandfather (rightly or wrongly, I cannot tell) felt that his older son had not invested his college money wisely, his younger son got nothing. Dad worked his way through OU, laboring almost 40 hours per week at the Norman Inter-Urban station while going to school full time. He almost made it. Majoring in electrical engineering, he was just shy of finishing his BS requirements when the depression hit. He was forced to leave school and take a job in Borger, Texas.
Despite his lack of a degree Dad nevertheless was able to secure a job in engineering. Primarily safety engineering with Hunt Oil Company, where he was the Safety Director. But, in addition, he was also chief electrical engineer. He performed many tasks for Hunt Oil, including the design and outfitting of the first off-shore drilling platform using surplus World War II landing craft. He also received a US patent for a safety device for drilling rigs. But he never commercialized his patent: the man who sponsored him died suddenly and the funding went away.
Dad’s greatest love–after his wife, son and grandsons–was his shop. When he died in 1984 I considered selling all his shop equipment and even had a pretty good offer for the entire lot. But I just couldn’t bring myself to sell. So all that machinery has lain dormant for 19 years, gathering dust pretty much just like he left it. The air compressor with its huge air storage tank, that catches fire when you turn it on (David likes to do this); the old Sears metal working lathe; the drill press with a nameplate telling that it was made by students at Texas A&M; the metal shaper that he was going to use to build a huge reflecting telescope out of aluminum disks; the disks themselves, still sitting on the shelf where he placed them–never able to quite figure out how to do the shaping; and scads of small tools all scattered among traces of his pipe smoking paraphernalia.
It is somewhat sad to unlock the old shop and enter in and see all the unfinished projects, and my dad’s unfulfilled dreams. Because I am NOT a shop person, and none of the grandsons has an interest in the old tools and machines, they will undoubtedly be sold or otherwise disposed of as we sell off Grandma Tex’s house. It reminded me of Ecclesiastes:
So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil.
As the “person who did not toil for it,” I feel somewhat guilty not carrying on my father’s legacy of shopwork. When I was younger I did in fact use the lathe to make a wooden (not metal) lamp for my folks’ Christmas present–but that was the extent of it. And don’t get me wrong, there were some triumphs of my dad’s handiwork: the metal and glass end tables that someone actually wants to put in their house; the incredible all metal portable stairs that dad made so he could get up easily on the roof of his house or garage (so he could take his big reflector up there to view the planets); and the all metal derrick lamp that he had hoped to turn into a million dollar sales venture–the one and only that he made is now in my own little shop here at home.
Someday, when I join my beloved in heaven, my dreams and projects here on earth will eventually be forgotten just like my dad’s. These words I’m writing now, for instance, will someday vanish in cyberspace, and those who come after me will hardly know of my existence except as an entry on a geneaological chart. Vanity, vanity—all is vanity.
Yet the promise of the new heaven and new earth, the Bible tells us, is that we will know even as we are fully known. Somehow, I think that promise implies that those memories that so easily vanish from the grey matter in our brains will be restored. Exactly how, I cannot say, except that since all that happens is in the mind of God, there really is no such thing as temporary storage. It’s all permanent. And in that day, even us forgotten engineers will be remembered.