Drawing Us Out

My dad was a mechanical engineer. He was an award-winning mechanical engineer who worked his entire career for one company – the paternalistic era of Eastman Kodak Company. What does this have to do with my favorite bedtime story? Well, let me tell you…

Of course we four kids all had read to us the usual bedtime storybooks: Mike Mulligan, Babar, Curious George. But the special evenings were when Dad had time to read to us. But, you see, the secret was that he didn’t read. He drew!

My Dad seemed always to have a pencil in his shirt pocket. It was a yellow, mechanical pencil – one of those old ones with the thick leads. When he’d come to tell us a story, he’d stop in his den on the first floor and pick up a pad of paper, then climb the stairs to the loft in the attic. He’d sit down on one of my brothers’ beds, and we three along with my little sister (when she came along) would crowd up onto that mattress, eager to get a good look.

With his thick eyeglasses and the German accent that none of us kids even noticed, he would begin the evening with “Well, what should I tell you about tonight?” (He couldn’t quite pronounce the Ws, but we followed him. The accent gradually faded, and it was part of him until the day he died.) We would pipe up with ideas, each trying to outdo the other in volume of voice or inspiration of idea.

“Okay, tonight we learn about how paper is made,” he might pronounce. It would be a lesson, but in the form of a story. Gradually, step by step, from cutting down the trees in the hills of the forest, to the pulp machines and the coating machines and the rolling and cutting and stacking and packaging machines, he would draw it all out, complete with little figures of workers so we’d know the magnitude of the machines in the tale. We were as quiet as church mice, enthralled.

He couldn’t turn the page to let us get ahead in the story because he hadn’t drawn or spoken it yet. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes would go by – a long time on the timer of bedtime – and then he’d draw it to a close. He’d ask us a question or two, to see if we’d paid attention. Then he’d ask something like, “What do we use paper for?” And we’d laugh and vie for his attention while we called out answers from all angles.

If we’d been good (with scrubbing behind our ears, and brushing our teeth), we might convince him to do it all over again: with a different topic. “How do they make pennies?” “How do they make cars?” “How do they make rockets?” He could do them all. Sometimes he’d do more than the drawings and explanations. He’d add voices. With the rocket ships, he might easily mimic the voice of Werner von Braun. Oh, it was fun.

Then he’d get up from the mattress, stretch himself out a bit, and declare that it was finally time for bed. Sis would trundle down the stairs to her room. My brothers would tuck themselves into their neighboring beds, and I would walk through the hall to my own room. I don’t know what the others were thinking. Maybe they were each just counting sheep. But me? I was counting the days until I could be an engineer like my Dad.

Fifty years later my Dad died. He was in his late eighties and had had an amazing life. When I went to his house and looked through the things left I the drawers of his desk while my siblings helped my Mom with something else, I found some small vestiges. They would have been ignored by anyone else cleaning up. I found a couple of those strange paperclips that only Kodak used and my Dad used to clip his drawings into a scrapbook. I found a pad of the quadrille paper he’d used. And I found one of those yellow, mechanical pencils.

I had to sit down in his chair for a minute, just to catch my breath. Those memories came flooding back, like ink spilled from a bottle onto the paper.

When my own three children were small, I did for them what my Dad did for me. I tried, at least. Yes, I am an engineer, but since I chose electrical engineering and kids don’t want to know how transistors and tubes and calculators are made, I had to brush up on the mechanical stuff. My Dad got it right. I’d like to think I’m as good an artist as he was, and I try to mimic voices although my German accent is secondhand.

I still have that yellow pencil. I hope to use it with my grandchildren. I hope their requests don’t stump me.

Copyright @ 2021 by William Altmann