Prompted by his daughter, Bill admits he’s pretty darn clever. Did he inherit his cleverness? “Can’t really tell you. I was number ten in the family and the baby. I worked in the general store at Fischer Station, stocking shelves on Saturday mornings for an ice cream cone. We worked high price back in those days,” jokingly. At the end of the Depression his dad was employed at a furniture company. “I ended up there too before I went into the army. We were fixers, crafty, scrappy and extremely resourceful. I can remember one time watching my dad repair a fuel pump on a 36’ Ford. He took a spring out of a mousetrap and made it work.” We call that ‘thinking outside the box’. “Back then people had to work outside the box because they didn’t have the money. You know, I lived in a big family with five sisters and three brothers”, adding humorously, “I used to tell my sisters, ‘It wasn’t fair. They had four brothers and I had three’”, chuckle. “We also had my mother’s parents and an aunt living with us. One day I saw my neighbors house up for sale and I asked, ‘How come?’ he said, ‘Well, I have a wife and two kids and one bathroom.’ I said, ‘You’re leaving on account of that?’ he said, ‘Yeah’. I told him, ‘Gosh, we lived in one house with fifteen people and we didn’t have any bathrooms.’ I think he laughed all the way home.”

We need to give our minds space to activate ingenuity/cleverness. Now-a-days we immediately run and purchase the solution or remedy, never rising to the challenge before us which could stimulate and stretch our minds. Back then it was a necessity to workout a solution and through that endeavor a man learned and became aware of things about himself he would otherwise not have known. Generally it is said, man only uses a small portion of his thinking ability.

Bill said he went to the college of ‘hard knocks’; another words, no college. He learned all on his own. He worked hard. “We lived on a truck farm. Dad would say, ‘That patch of green beans better be hauled and loaded by tomorrow.’ Whatever had to be done we did it, we tried, succeeded and found out we were capable. But if you never try, you’d never know. We weren’t afraid to take things apart. If you can take it apart, you can put it together.”

His daughter assured him admiringly, “You knew how to fix stuff. Still does.” Unlike today, you just get rid of it. Get a new one. “Dad helped throughout the neighborhood. Neighbors would say Bill does everything. He’s a tinkerer.”

Bill tackled every opportunity that presented itself and would have cut down the thirty-five foot tree in his front yard had he been a few years younger. He’s been restoring his daughters three story, 1910 home, from structure to plumbing, even transforming a left-handed door into a right.

“My little car is my toolbox. If you got to do a job you need tools.”

Not only is he known as a ‘fix-it-man’, but he demonstrates the admiral quality of stick-to-itiveness. If not satisfied with a completed job he will strip it all down and start over. There is an inner drive concerned with detail. Go the ‘extra mile’ and find true satisfaction. Bill worked for Steelcase recalling, “If my boss asked me to do something I did it. If it needs to be done I do it.”