You must understand that I was born with an undiagnosed birth defect which affected my thinking because it was hormone related. My point of view regarding my parents, most authority, and even my relationships with my peers, was somewhat askew.
Once the defect was discovered and I started receiving drug treatment for it, then my understanding leveled out as I discovered the pleasantness of life.
Wally was a practical man who understood machines better than he understood people. The first occasion when I saw his mechanical ability was after we had purchased a used Plymouth 4 door sedan. There was something wrong with the motor, Wally either felt it or heard it or both.
He took the car over to the vehicle repair shop run by Sid Scott at Wilcox Corner and asked Sid to fix it. Sid was unable to find the problem to do the repair. Wally took the car back home and worked on it in our driveway until he found the problem and repaired it himself.
The Oliver Chronicle had a temperamental Linotype machine which seemed to break down just before the paper was scheduled for printing. The Chronicle would phone Wally and ask him to come and do the repairs. Wally had his own newspaper office at one time and I suspect he did all the repairs himself, so it was natural for him to be available locally.
Wally dropped what he was doing and drove to town to breathe life back into the beast. Sometimes he worked all day, other times he worked all night to get the machine up and running. To my recollection, he always was able to repair the Linotype.
With people though he didn’t have the same patience. One time the son of one of his friends came over to say hello. This young man was a smoker, Wally was a reformed smoker and did not tolerate anyone smoking in his house!
The visitor was sitting at the kitchen table chatting when he took a cigarette out. Wally told him he couldn’t smoke in the house. The visitor ignored Wally and put the cigarette between his lips and dug out his lighter.
Just as he was going to strike the flint, Wally reached over the table and grabbed the cigarette from the man’s lips and restated his case. The fellow did not want to smoke in the house after that and I’m not sure he stayed to visit after that.
Wally was a man who would do things just to show people that he could do them. Someone called him a cripple, because he had a limp caused by polio, and said he would never be able to play tennis. Wally took up tennis and practiced until he was good enough to beat the person who said he couldn’t play.
Wally was a compassionate man too though. He once hunted big game locally but quit the day he saw a man dragging two bear cubs by the feet and excitedly exclaimed that he would return for the mother bear who he had also shot and her body was still up on the hill.
While DDT was a great insecticide in the fruit orchard, it also killed all the birds. The robins, the bluebirds, the hummingbirds, the king birds, all nested in the fruit trees. When Wally saw how much damage the DDT did he quit using it and sought alternative sprays. That was during the mid 1950’s.
During the 1960’s all the aforementioned birds nested in the fruit trees. I remember thinning apples and being dive bombed by the king birds protecting their nest.
Every spring Wally burned the ditch area between our farm and the highway. He did this because smokers would toss their butts out the car window. The smouldering butts landed in the dry grass igniting it. Wally knew this was a hazard because he had done it himself once and lost some trees in the mishap.
With the burning, Wally took every precaution to make sure that the ditch fire didn’t get away on him. He had a 45 gallon steel drum filled with water and the hose hooked up to it was powered by the PTO, he had a bucket of water with a soaked burlap sack in it, and shovels. All these items were on the farm trailer which was towed by the tractor. For man power there was Wally and Laird.
Wally seemed to have a reasonable vision about the future, where the Valley seemed to be headed, what might happen to the Earth with over population, to name a few of his concerns. But he hadn’t a vision for his own transition from working to retirement.
I offered to take over when he was in his early 70’s and so did one of my sisters when he was in his late 70’s, but he rebuffed us both. He responded like we were invading his territory. I can see how he felt that way because he spent much of his life protecting what he had. I guess old farmers feel they can just go on forever.
I can relate to that, if it wasn’t for the 2 TIA’s that struck my body last year, I’d still be working and thinking that I just need a little more money to live out my days. Just a little more work to take me just a little bit farther.
Thankfully the health issues opened my eyes to a better reality, which is something Wally didn’t get the chance to choose after his health crisis carried him into his death.