ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
HELLO, MY NAME IS TERRY AND I AM A MECHANIC.
If we were at a meeting of the fictional Aircraft Mechanics Anonymous (AMA), this is where you
would say, “Hi, Terry!” In the spirit of AMA, I wasn’t always a mechanic. I once had hair, clean hands and fingernails. I came from a little farming town in the Midwest and grew up in a relatively happy middle-class home where both parents worked. I might have been left alone a little too much but I don’t think that caused my problems. My dad was a mechanic and my mother was mechanically inclined. She later admitted to tinkering around the house while she was pregnant with me, so my addiction might be genetic. Maybe you can blame it on boredom, curiosity, lack of
supervision or peer pressure, but I began experimenting with tools at a very early age. My dad always left tools
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HelicopterMaintenanceMagazine.com June | July 2016
lying around the house and he never locked his toolbox. I guess I started by taking a tool here and there and he didn’t seem to notice. I started wrenching on toys that needed tweaking or my old bike that always needed repairs. You know, just recreational use at first. Later on, the lawn mowers, the snowblowers, the old car in the driveway that was never going to run — I tried them all but I never got the buzz that I sought. I realize now that these were “gateway” projects. When I got old enough, I got a real job at a gas station to at least be able to hang around the cool guys and possibly get a little grease on my hands. You know what I’m talking about. I’d watch the cool guys bent over the grill, looking in the engine bay at the running engine. I wanted to try it so bad. It wasn’t long before they asked me if I wanted to take a little look.
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