Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

This past week I spent a day at the funeral of my Uncle Lawrence. We always called him L. O.

Uncle L. O. was buried in the town of Jennings, Louisiana near Interstate 10 in the southwest corner of the state. He was born and raised there and met and married my mother’s sister Irene while they were both teenagers. He lived to be 87. Uncle L. O. and Aunt Irene were married for over 65 years.

Uncle L. O. served his country during WW II. He was in the famed 8th Air Force in England maintaining B-17s for the duration. The local American Legion post sent a squad of men to the funeral. They had a ceremony with the American flag and then a 21-gun salute at the grave site. They were all old men in that squad. All old men. There aren’t many of those men left with us these days.

I didn’t know much of Uncle L. O.’s early years when I was a child. What I did know of him was that he was always a gadget guy.

In the 1960s he was the only person in my large extended family who had a Polaroid camera. Everyone else had the little Kodak Instamatics and such. Uncle L. O. would take a photo, pull this thing out of his Polaroid, and study his watch while he waved the thing in the air to help it dry. In a few minutes he would pull the thing apart and reveal the photo – hardcopy as we call it today. I later learned that Uncle L. O. had owned several generations of Polaroid cameras. Perhaps his daughter will one day display his collection.

And then Uncle L. O. had an electronics workshop. His house had a carport with a workshop attached opposite their house. In it he would have a television or two that he was repairing. He had electronic test equipment and a magnifying glass and a soldering iron. It really wasn’t much of a tech workshop, but it seemed amazing to a kid who for some reason thought all that was more interesting than what his cousins were doing.

Uncle L. O. even built Heathkits. For the young, a Heathkit came in parts – circuit boards, case, resisters, capacitors, inductors, and maybe even an integrated circuit. You had to solder all the components to the circuit board and place the completed boards in the case. Heathkits came for clocks, radios, test equipment, televisions, and later for personal computers. Building a Heathkit was the height of electronics hobbying in the 1970s when I was in high school. I once had a Heathkit catalog and begged my parents to buy me a clock radio kit that I could build. I never got that Heathkit. Instead, I went to college and earned a degree or three in Electrical Engineering.

Yes, we lost a gadget guy this week. A veteran, husband, father, and grandfather. And an uncle who helped inspire one kid from a tiny town in Louisiana to be an electrical engineer.