When my dad was a teenager running around a coal mining camp high in the Utah mountains, the entertainment options available to teenagers today didn’t exist. This would have been in the mid 1920’s or so. In a coal camp. High in the mountains.
My granddad was the camp machinist. That must have given my dad and his four brothers access to resources that other kids didn’t have. In any case, the story goes that the brothers decided to have a contest about who could build the smallest electric motor that actually worked. And when I say, “build” – I mean carefully machine the rotor. Hand wrap fine wire around the rotor. Carefully file down carbon brushes and fasten them in place in the right position. And so forth. Not to mention understanding exactly how an electric motor actually works in the first place. Mountain coal camps in the 1920’s didn’t have “Hobbies-R-Us” where you could buy pieces and just plug them together.
Anyway … When I was growing up, the common understanding in my family was that my dad won the contest. Maybe there was a different version in the other brothers’ families. I don’t know.
My point is that my dad could build anything from a very early age. I think that if they had asked him, he could have whipped out the Saturn 5 rocket in a weekend with only a drill press and a lathe. The details that might move you closer to my opinion are for another story. This one is about rock hunting in a desert that had a habit of breaking things.
Today, “four wheeling” means driving up and down the desert hills way too fast just for the thrills. I NEVER heard of my dad doing that. When I was a teenager, “four wheeling” meant spending hours in the hot sun with a pick and shovel building ten feet of road to get across a tight place. Back then, the desert was an unforgiving place.
One of my dad’s best rockhound friends was a man named Wayne Johnston. I’ve seen Wayne quoted in a book about Utah rockhounding so he was an experienced hound too. Wayne was the most profane man I have ever known. And I was in the Army infantry so that’s saying something.
I was with my dad on the trip when the desert broke Wayne’s truck. I remember seeing it with one front wheel laying flat on the ground. Now, I’m not a mechanic but I believe that what happened is that the tie rod just broke right in two. My dad looked the situation over and then took one tail gate chain off Wayne’s truck. Then, using a bolt that was used to fasten the chain to the truck body, my dad and Wayne used the chain to fasten the wheel back up straight. More or less.
Wayne drove his truck back to civilization that way. We had to stop and refasten the chain a couple of times because when the links stretched, the chain got longer. But we made it. Wayne was in the livestock business and he claimed that he drove a load of cattle into Spanish Fork that way before he got the truck fixed. But then, Wayne was known to lie a lot.
I was also with my dad when the universal in the rear axle broke -- deep in the bottom of a pretty rough canyon. (That’s why it broke.) My dad just unhooked the drive line to the rear wheels and drove out using only the front wheels.
I wasn’t there when the truck radiator started spraying water. But my mother was and she said it was a good thing that my dad always carried a crate of gallon jugs of water into the desert. My dad’s jeep at that time was one of the FC-170’s where the engine was right between the two front seats. So they popped the engine cover open and my mother poured a jug of water into the radiator while my dad drove the truck. Here’s the way my mother told the story:
“Marvin !!! The road is that way! Where are you going?”
“There’s a formation over there that I wanted to look at.”
“Mar-VIN !!! The radiator is spraying water all over and we’re in the middle of the desert!!!!
“We’ll be OK. We’ve got three jugs of water left.”
It was pretty hard to get my dad excited about anything.
17 May 2022
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