December 07, 2008
Vise of our Fathers

DIGIKEY - 366 HEAD & 300 VISE - 396

So my hair is thinning the same way my Dad's did. I'm spending a lot of time tinkering with electronics. I remember how tall his workbench used to seem, the mysterious tools and smells when he worked on his radios. I never knew a lot about what he did at work - he had a security clearance, it was Cold War R&D on the fringes of '50s and '60s Washington D.C. - but I knew it had something to do with the space program. Yesterday I read in Airstream Magazine (I bought a '58 Overlander 2 years ago, to turn into a recording studio in the new Girls Club) that Melpar, my Dad's employer, had built the Airstream-based quarantine units that the astronauts had to stay in when they came back from the moon. Couldn't let alien moon-bugs destroy the Earth.

When he died in '92 he left his workshop as messy as ever. But while he was alive it had an animating intelligence. Afterwards it was mostly junk. But I claimed a circuit-board vise and kept it for the next fifteen or so years. It got lost in the shuffle, though, and I miss it. I'll have to order one just like it. I need it now.

Posted by Dave at December 07, 2008 07:20 PM