It’s All in the Family

I had always looked at my grandfathers as doers. They had both immigrated to the U.S., one coming from Switzerland with his wife as a bi-lingual Protestant minister, the other a single man from England via Canada, sneaking over the border looking for the land of opportunity. While the Great Depression took most of Grandpa Morgan’s choices, he provided by securing steady work at a concrete fabrication shop. It wasn’t glamorous by any stretch of the imagination, but the vision for his children in this great land did not waiver – every one of the boys went to college, and my aunt inherited every bit of her parent’s tenacity. The Rev. Ernest Tischhauser was of the same mind – all six boys and girls went to college. It exhibited a special drive that was not lost on me as a boy.

My mother, Verona, had studied music, and my father, Bill, was one of the country’s first health physicist’s. He founded the Radiation Health Protection section of Boeing’s Environmental Health & Safety division. Many of my aunts, uncles and cousins ran businesses, were CPAs or highly placed executives.

Leadership and vision were apparently in the genetic code on both sides, and it was coupled with a gritty determination. They really got a leg up, however, when they learned to leverage all that with the concept of abstract thinking and the ability to create opportunities.

Dad’s brother, Dick Oliver, was a former WWII pilot who retired as Superintendent of San Diego Elementary Schools. Uncle Dick was 6’-2” and wiry with snow-white hair and an easy smile. As you might expect, he was also a real kid’s person. Whenever we would visit, it seemed most of his attention was focused on my brother, sister and me, pointing things out, giving us things to do. While physically Dad and Dick didn’t look at all like brothers – Dad was 5’-7”, barrel-chested and balding – they shared a love for kids and having a good time. Whenever little kids came over or Dad’s grandkids were around, they were his complete focus. With their own kids, however, they were both quite strict; discipline was a big deal.

My musical Mother played the piano, synthesizer, and both pipe and electric organs, was an accomplished singer and an active church leader. She also was a good watercolorist and later became an expert at stained glass, creating single windows as large as 5 x 10 feet, and multi-window pieces spanning as much as 20 feet. Dad was more a builder of things; the quintessential do-it-yourselfer. He could never sit still – at our beachfront home he built a concrete basketball court, a tetherball court, decks and a storage shed, remodeled our house, laid sewer line and french drains and built river rock fences. He even built a crane for hoisting our ski boat out of the water and a really cool raft to ski off. Decades ahead of today’s trendsetters, he was making paddleboards out of wood and fiberglass and building metal wind chimes and kinetic art. Together they illustrated sweatshirts with acrylic paints before anyone knew about silkscreening, created multi-media underwater seascapes in clear resin-coated tables, and hand-laid concrete stream beds with decorative glass, ceramic, and rock inlays. They seemed to have an unlimited level of energy. Best of all, I remember them having a lot of fun, and in one way or another, it was nearly always a family affair.

A Bird in the Hand

Dad used his creativity in all sorts of ways, not all of them necessarily productive.  He was, after all, an incorrigible practical joker. While there may have been one or two minor pranks at work, the real tomfoolery was reserved for family. He loved to target his brother Dick and my Uncle Neil. Whenever Uncle Dick and Aunt Ginger would visit, you could be sure Dad had something up his sleeve. Dick knew it, too. Half the drama was the waiting.

When I was about eight or nine, my aunt and uncle were visiting from San Diego. At the time we had a guest hide-a-bed in our TV room. My parents got them all set up in there and headed off to bed. After a few minutes in the sack, Dick and Ginger were disturbed by the sound of a chirp. A couple more minutes went by and there was another chirp. Okay, now his curiosity was aroused. A couple more minutes and there was another chirp. Uncle Dick started wondering if there might be a bird stuck in the television. So, he got up and began poking around the TV – underneath, behind, even pulling it further out from the corner of the room to see if he could discover the poor thing inside. All the while this little bird kept chirping at regular intervals. Aunt Ginger, now a bit irritated, said, “Dick, what the devil is that?”

Uncle Dick started wrestling with the back cover on the TV cabinet. The bird continued to mournfully chirp before he finally got the back off and saw something he figured didn’t belong there, but he was also not exactly sure what it was. He had it in his hand when suddenly, it chirped. All the while, of course, my aunt was becoming more and more annoyed, as this had been going on for 15 minutes or more. Suddenly, my uncle got it – Dad had fooled him again. He came hauling out of that room with the gadget in his hand, waving, giggling and exclaiming, “Dadgummit, Bill-e!! What the hell is this?!”

Dad and Mom, of course, were waiting for the reaction they knew they’d get. Dad, laughing his butt off, took it from my uncle and said, “Hey, thanks for finding that. I’ve been wondering where it went.”

“What the hell is that thing?”

“Oh, just a harmless, low level radioactive source taped to a pocket pen-sized Geiger counter. It won’t hurt you.”

“You ‘lost’ that in the TV on purpose, didn’t you?” Dick said.

“Now what would make you think that, dear brother?”

“Because you’ll do anything to get my goat,” Dick laughingly replied.

A few years later Dick and Ginger were back and my uncle was on his guard, ever wary something might be lurking around the corner. It actually took a couple of days before he was sideswiped again. They were all up early one morning to go water skiing in front of the house on Puget Sound. Now, you had to be pretty hardy to ski in that water because it never got above 48º.

They were lubricating their joints and minds with a few beers when it suddenly became time. The boat was readied and my Auntie Margaret tended rope while Dad drove. Uncle Dick was an accomplished water skier, so he was going to step start from shore on a slalom, or single ski.

Step starting required standing on one leg in knee-deep water while the single ski, bound to the other foot, rested on the surface. The boat would come close to shore, toss the rope to the skier and idle slowly away. In the meantime, the skier gathered a couple loops of slack and held them in one hand. When the boat pulled the remaining rope tight, the skier yelled, ‘hit it!’ and the driver hit full throttle. The skier dropped his slack, waited for the rope to go tight, then stepped onto the top of the water as the boat pulled him away.

So there was my uncle, rope and slack in hand, poised to execute this beautiful and exacting skill. The rope went taut, he dropped his slack, yelled ‘hit it!’ and off went the boat. We watched and waited for the rope to go tight. As it came out of the water he started to step, but stopped because he didn’t feel the customary pull. He waited, and tried again. Now the boat seemed to be fairly far away but the rope for some reason was still not pulling. It was like there was a spring or something in it. This can’t be! He tried one more time to step, but the boat wouldn’t pull him away. Finally, with the boat 200 feet out, it came to him – he’d been had once again. Dick threw down the rope in disgust, but could only manage to loudly sputter, “Oh… you… guys!!” to show his indignation.

Dad had taken the handle from a normal ski rope and attached it to 70 feet of bungee cord, essentially creating one long rubber band disguised to look like rope. When Dick finally let go, the rope skipped harmlessly along the water until it was back to its original length. Dad and my aunt almost fell out of their seats, they laughed so hard. The rest of us were standing on the beach with our coffee and donuts watching as my uncle helplessly ranted and gesticulated. It was one of the best jokes ever.

Most of the jokes were reserved for Uncle Dick, but poor Uncle Neil, having married Dad’s sister Margaret (they all called her Sis), wasn’t exempt from the shenanigans. Neil was an avid boatman and had a wonderful 41-foot Hatteras they used to spend the summers on, mostly in the Canadian San Juan Islands. In the San Juans you could occasionally spot a pod of killer whales and one such time my parents were with them. Neil got absorbed in watching and following them, and soon a discussion ensued about the morality of capturing these amazing creatures and putting them in aquariums. He thought it was wrong and Dad didn’t necessarily disagree with him but as was typical of Dad, he realized this might be an opportunity to have a little fun later on at Neil’s expense.

A few weeks after they were home, Sis and Neil drove up from Tacoma for a visit. We had a large stairway that descended diagonally down a 50-foot, tree covered embankment from the road to the house on the beach. They got to the top of the stairway and immediately started laughing. Dad had spread colored streamers, toilet paper, and banners all down and across the steps saluting the “Great Sha-moooo” and “ White Hunter of the North” and “Welcome, Oh Great Shamoo.” They both laughed all the way down those 120 feet of stairs while my parents stood at the bottom and laughed back up at them. Shamu was one of the first killer whales caught in the 1960s, and this was about the time Shamu was still a big deal. My parents had also fashioned a killer whale-shaped crown for him to wear, which he donned with a big smile.

The last joke I remember Dad playing on Dick was the result of my uncle’s own clumsiness. They were snow skiing with us a few winters after the ski rope fiasco when my uncle made a miscalculation boarding the chair lift. He hurried to reach the chair, got tangled and ended up being unceremoniously pushed off the end of the ramp into a safety net! So there he was, flailing about, a jumble of rope and arms and skis and legs, completely at the mercy of his rescuers. By the time they got him out, he had little pride or dignity left to salvage. I don’t think our laughing helped. By that point he was pretty much ready to call it a day.

Not one to let him live it down, Dad hatched a plot to shame him yet again. This time with Dick, Ginger, Sis and Neil all coming for the day, Dad pulled the old Shamu streamers and banners routine again. This time the signs said, “Welcome Netman, fighter of Indignity” “Netman, Skier Extraordinaire” and lastly, intended to mimic the theme song of the then-popular Batman TV show, “Nana-nana-nana-nana, Netman!” To top it off, my parents had fashioned a ‘Netman’ mask, cape, and shirt for him to wear, which he dutifully donned for five agonizingly long minutes.

No matter how you sliced it there was a lot of creativity and right/left brain connectivity running through our family. Though many people don’t realize it, there is a lot of that thinking in science, research and engineering, too, even if it isn’t laced with practical jokes. How problems are recognized and approached are in themselves creative endeavors.

Jokes can be spontaneous or well-planned. But always trying to think creatively in those different ways I think made for strong links between their brain lobes. It was reflected in my family’s ability to try and enjoy different adventures; they were always figuring out ways to do fun things. When you’re around people like that it wears off. I learned having a sense of humor and keeping it was often very important in helping to cope with adversity. All that right/left brain interplay also came in handy when trying to think outside the box and stay positive while running a business. Lessons often come from funny, unexpected places. Sometimes, we don’t even know we’ve learned them until much later.