THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 18, 1994 TAG: 9406180004
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: George Hebert
DATELINE: 940618 LENGTH: Medium
Moreover, the list grows as the passing years sharpen distant memory.
{REST} To plunge right in: My father could ride a motorcycle and hunted and fished and swam well, dating back to his teens. He had an awesome memory for numbers, developed in a job as car-checker for a railroad; he could ride horses (Army quartermaster remount, World War I) and row a boat. He could ice-skate and he played a good, consistent game of golf.
A machinist and sometime electrician by trade, he could also tear down car engines; fix clothes-washers, steam irons, plumbing and toasters; repair gun mechanisms, and cast and paint lead soldiers. He could weld and solder and make almost anything he pleased out of metal. He built a mini steam engine that ran like all get out.
He once raised pigeons (letting me think the project was mine) and another time put together a multi-coop system for growing broiler chickens (got some to market, too). His woodworking projects were endless: utility structures; a chess set (the pawns looked like little infantrymen); inlay work with all kinds of materials, including ebony and rosewood; gunstocks which he carved to order; a pair of purplewood drumsticks that he made for me during my Scout drum-and-bugle-corps phase.
He could play the pear mandolin we had around the house, and I can still hear the tinkle of ``Over the Waves.'' Pop actually made a guitar from scratch and learned to play it a little before giving it away to somebody who already knew how.
He constructed molds, collected cinders and, with cement and family assistance, cast enough cinder blocks (Pepsi bottles were used to make the holes) to build a garage. He converted several rotary lawn-mowers to gasoline.
Nor was recreation neglected. He built a family-size canoe of cheesebox strips and canvas; he made bows of lemonwood and arrows expertly fletched and tipped with old 30-30 rifle bullets. He devised a crow call with a better sound than the manufactured kind.
He could paint pictures, on card-table tops or anywhere. He thought that writing fiction would be the living end and clattered away on an old Underwood for long spells. He took mail courses in newspaper writing, commercial art, accounting and even tried cartooning. He could do most kinds of arithmetic in his head and his penmanship was like a professional calligrapher's.
At times he was a gardener, a tailor (making coats for us kids once), a kite-maker (a marvelous box-kite on one occasion), a tanner and taxidermist.
All this, plus raising a family of four children (a fifth died), was crammed into 79 years that spanned five wars and wrestled through the Great Depression.
Though he lived into the couch-potato age, he remained an old-fashioned doer. He used to deprecate his versatility with the saying about the Jack-of-all-trades who was master of none. My verdict is that he mastered more than he didn't.
by CNB