We did not have a garage to work on our vehicles. Dad had a small garage but it could barely hold a regular car, let alone the plethora of dump trucks, bulldozers, tractors and other equipment that always needed work over the years. He had been working on his International dump truck. We had taken the front off of it and put a bright yellow fiberglass hood from the front of a school bus on it. The truck was a bluish color with red doors and a yellow hood, so needless to say, it needed paint. Obviously, living in the middle of lots of pine trees, it was not an ideal situation to paint a vehicle. So Dad came up with a solution that we called, “The Monstrosity.”
There were quite a few trees in front of the shop at that time. He had just finished a barn job and had a few big roof trusses left. You know what’s coming next. We nailed those babies up between the trees and used stringers to tie them all together. Essentially what we had was a floating roof in among the trees and tied to the front of the shop. Then, we took long boards to create stud walls every four or five feet. It ended up being a pretty good sized “building.” So to finish this amazing piece of work, we took old swimming pool liners, big blue tarps, and lots of plastic and stretched it all over the structure, holding it down with furring strips and various boards. It truly was one of the ugliest buildings you can imagine. But he was able to park the truck in there and paint it a nice deep hunter green, work on the equipment during the winter in relative dryness.
After a while though, “The Monstrosity” began to show its age, and we tore it all down, much to Mom’s relief. Those pool liners stayed with us for a while, and probably are still around to this day.
So that was my dad, always coming up with a solution to a problem that might have been ugly but did the job and didn’t cost much to do. That was how he did things. Dad was not an excuse making guy. In fact thinking back, I don’t think I ever heard him making excuses for stuff, he just figured out what needed to be done and did it. He was a strong believer in the words “I Can” and that concept was drilled into all of us kids over the years, and I would say that all three of us are a pretty determined bunch. So thanks Dad, for your legacy of inventiveness in difficult situations and for showing us that if we put our minds to something we can do it…even if it is a monstrosity and looks ugly…there’s a greater purpose resulting at the end.