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FOUR SEASONS SPOTLIGHT All grown up - the wages of the golden years Model-T Brain in a Space Ship World By Crochet E. Oldman I am a man of the machine age who has lived into the electronic era and it's not working out at all well. In my youth, I could look at almost any mechanical device and figure out how it worked. How the pieces fit together, moved around and did things. Try that with a hand-held computer. There are no moving parts, just mysteriously labeled (or unlabeled) buttons and electric receptacles, baffling screen displays, lights that blink mysteriously — or refuse to light — and beepers that beep unaccountably — or refuse to beep. It took me a frustrating week to learn how to answer my cell phone and still takes a start- and-stop forever to enter a name in its directory. I have to have my wife set the electronic thermostat in our house. If she leaves me, I am doomed to heat stroke in the summer and hypothermia in the winter. I recently bought a computer photo processing program which is only slightly less complicated than medical school. I have yet to produce a picture — I still have Walgreens do it. I have a computer, a digital camera, a GPS for my car, a cell phone, an Amazon Kindle for reading and cordless phones with the capabilities of a NASA communications center — and they all baffle me. I use a tiny fraction of their capabilities and find myself endlessly frustrated when they stubbornly start doing something I don't want and don't understand — or stop doing anything at all. Back in the machine age I was much more in control. Once my high school friends and I replaced the engine in a Model T Ford. We could see where it bolted to the frame, how the transmission connected to the drive shaft, where the fuel line went into the carburetor, where the carburetor sat on top of the intake manifold, where the hoses from the radiator connected to the block — stuff like that. 6 FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | JUNE 2013 | community News With no training, just good mechanical sense, we put that sucker together. Then, in a precursor of my frustrating electronic future, we realized we had no idea how to do the electrical wiring. By today's standards, there was almost none of it: no turn signals, radio, CD player, window openers, brake or backup lights — just the headlights, the spark plugs and a tail light — just one, it was an old car. And there was no starter, only a crank. Even the horn was a mechanical, klaxon-type device and the single windshield wiper worked off manifold pressure. One of us had a neighbor who was a double-dome academic whiz who understood electricity. Back then he would have been called a Quiz Kid, after a popular radio game show. Today he'd be called a nerd or a geek. He agreed to help if he was paid — if memory serves — $10. That was a princely sum in the days of fivecent cokes and 10-cent hamburgers for kids who made maybe 50 cents an hour mowing lawns and picking weeds. But we had no choice. Without the wiring, the car wouldn't move. So we each kicked in a buck or two. The nerd wired the car and after some exhausting cranking and tedious priming we got it going and drove off. I never saw him again but I'm sure, with his understanding of electrons and ability to pry cash from the impoverished, he went on to great wealth in semiconductor electronics or transistor physics. We had a great time with that car. We rigged a pipe from the oil pan so that we could send a stream of oil into the hot exhaust and cause thick, black, oily billows of smoke to erupt from the tail pipe. If we weren't much into clean air back then, we did get a lot of attention — which was the whole idea. I'm glad the valve to the exhaust wasn't electric. We could never have gotten it open. I wonder where that electrical whiz is today. I'm in great need of his skills in this electronic era. I bet his fee is up over $10.

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