Tinkering at Tinker – Part 3

Author © Scott D. Zachary

       Privett was frazzling my nerves, so I decided to channel my frustration into frazzling his, instead. Six paces from Privett’s bedroom window, I occasionally bid him sweet dreams by whacking the outside brick wall of my garage with a one-by-four slat in the wee hours of the morning. Just once each time. I also started calling Privett’s house randomly in the middle of the night. I let it ring once. Privett had an outside telephone ringer so he could hear it when he was working in his garden. After a few weeks of my random calls, I noticed the outside ringer wasn’t ringing when I dialed. He must’ve changed his phone number. Hmmm.

       I borrowed a Tandy computer from a friend and programmed it in assembly language to dial all the numbers in the two prefixes for Midwest City and ring once on each phone number. (This was in the very early days of personal computing when such a contrivance was inconceivable to the average schmo.) My program had dialed more than 12,500 numbers before I heard Privett’s outside ringer ring once. Bingo!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Doug Robbins, a Boeing consultant to the AWACS Wing, came into work one day, moaning that the frame on his captain’s chair in his van had broken. He could barely drive the van. He told Bart and me that he had stopped at a body shop, and they wanted $350 to fix it!

       I said, “I’ll do it for a case of beer.”

       “You know how to weld, Scott?”

       “Sure, not a problem. Follow me down to the auto hobby shop after work, and I’ll get you fixed up.”

       I had seen their welder and always wanted to learn how to weld.

       Doug, Bart, and I drove to the auto hobby shop after work where we disconnected the captain’s chair and removed the cushions. I went to the supply desk and got a couple of welding rods for a dollar apiece and checked out a welding helmet. Doug and Bart were hovering over me. “You guys need to go out there in the parking lot because the UV flash from the arc will blind you without eye protection,” I declared.

       Once they were out of sight, I connected the ground cable, dialed up the power, and flipped my visor down. Here we go! My first attempt melted the broken bar. Oops! I turned down the power. I held the welding rod up to the bar and tried again. I melted another segment of that bar. Now I had a two-inch gap to fill. I turned the power down again. The welding rod flowed nicely into the gap, and I rebuilt the bar from those two welding rods plus two more. When finished, Doug stared at my fix. “What the hell?”

       I checked out a grinder and smoothed my blob of weld. “Good as new!”

       “I thought you knew how to weld?”

       “I do, now.”

       I spoke with Doug a couple of years later after he had returned to Seattle. He never had another problem with his captain’s chair after I fixed it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       I rapidly became adept at computer programming while working at Tinker Air Force Base developing software for the AWACS, which is a BOEING 707 loaded with state-of-the-art communications, surveillance, radar, and weapons software, but I had only attained theoretical knowledge of computer hardware. Mr. Wizzle gave me a practical problem that I could solve while teaching myself the basics of electronics. I ordered the book The Art of Electronics and dove in. I went to the electronics store in downtown Oklahoma City and bought the diodes (resistors), light-emitting diodes (LEDs), special-purpose transistors, semiconductor wire, a miniature soldering iron, solder, and an oscillating motor. A couple hours of soldering and my “pseudo surveillance device” was done. I still giggle when I recall Privett standing at his property line glaring at my garage window adorned by my realistic monitoring device with its flashing LEDs, seemingly sweeping a view of his shenanigans like a submarine periscope, back and forth, back and forth.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Dan asked me if I would help build his shop behind his house. I figured that it would be another excellent opportunity to learn from him. Little did I know that I would be teaching him as well. I watched him “eyeball” the angle where the rafters would meet the ridge board and then watched him rip a sixteen-foot two-by-ten while glancing up at the ridge board. He measured the distance from the ridge board to the top plate with a tape measure, and then cut the notch that would rest on the top plate by eyeball as well. When he rested the rafter against the ridge board, there was a half-inch gap at the bottom.

       “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Dan. There’s a better way to do this,” I declared. “You got a calculator?”

       He retrieved a calculator and handed it to me.

       “Give me a few minutes to dredge up my trigonometry.” I went into his kitchen, sat down, and played with formulas for a while. From the height of the ridge board and distance to the upper plate, I was able to calculate the angle of the rafter and the angle that the rafter should be cut to meet the ridge board flush. That same angle would snug it up against the top plate. I asked Dan’s son, Daniel, if he had a protractor. He brought it to me, and I proceeded to instruct Dan on how to properly frame his shop’s roof with tight-fitting joints.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Privett installed a privacy fence along the length of our properties. I noticed that he didn’t cement his posts. Silly man. I waited until the first night when the notorious Oklahoma winter winds howled. At 3:00 a.m., I pushed the whole length of his fence over so that it leaned at 45°. (I’m tearfully laughing as I write this slap-stick tale.) Instead of fixing it right, he propped it up with two-by-four support braces every ten feet or so along the fence.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       The Army Corps of Engineers was selling thirty-year-old heating and air conditioning units that they’d ripped out of base housing at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a hundred miles down the road. They were asking $150 apiece. I bought two sets, one for me and one as payment for Dan to charge the Freon in my copper compression lines after I installed it. Each of the systems included the heater unit, evaporator coil, and condenser unit.

       I ordered the Popular Science book, Rewinding Small Motors, and set my sights on rewinding the copper induction coils in the heater fans and condenser fans for both systems. I sanded and painted the rusted heater boxes and condenser boxes for both as well. I installed my system, soldering the Freon lines as Dan had taught me. I attached a thermostat to my living room wall, leaving the wires dangling near the mess of relay units on the front of the heater. I called Dan and told him that I was ready for him to charge my system with Freon and wire the tangle of relay units.

       Dan charged my air conditioning system with Freon as he had done thousands of times, but he was stymied by the dozen electrical relays. The engineers had chopped the wires from the electrical relays attached to the face of the heating units, leaving no clue as to where the dozens of wires should be connected.

       Dan studied it and studied it and studied it. He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve never seen anything like this, Scott. I don’t know what to do. I know I promised you that I would make it happen, but this is beyond me.”

       We went across the street and talked to Lynn who had worked in heating and air conditioning for twenty years. He confidently entered my garage where the heating unit rested. Lynn studied the tangle of relays, frowning, shrugging, and grunting. “I don’t know what you’ve got going on here, Scott. All of these switches and controls are built into one box nowadays with handy-dandy labels on the connections. I’m stumped.”

       I was distraught. I tromped around my house and shop trying to figure out how I would get my heating and air conditioning system working when the experts couldn’t figure it out. Alas, it dawned on me that this was just logic like I’d been trained to unravel in computer science! I spent eight solid hours pouring myself into figuring out how to control all of the motors and the gas burner using the thermostat wires and the dozen electrical relays. I mapped all the logical variations of the twelve electrical relays using my ohmmeter, charting them on sheets of construction paper until I found the one that satisfied all the heater and air conditioner functions. Lastly, I invited Dan and Lynn over for two hours of training. We connected all the wires, and everything worked perfectly!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Terry and I are using brooms to add texture to my newly poured concrete driveway apron when Privett and another man get out of a car in front of Privett’s house. Both men are dressed in spiffy suits with drab ties. I supposed that the other man was Privett’s preacher. Privett stopped before entering his house, turned to face me, and wagged a finger in my direction as he decreed, “All you care about is money!”

       “You think so?” Pointing my finger appropriately as if to showcase the obvious, “With your witness there and mine here, all you have to do is call my boss, Captain Jones, at Tinker and tell him that you lied about me, and I will drop my slander suit against you.”

       Privett humphed and proceeded toward his front door.

       “It’s all about principle,” I declared. “The money is to teach you a lesson.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Dan Mayo and I wanted to landscape our front lawns. He, Terry, and I shoveled topsoil for two solid days. I was filling my pickup truck bed, and they were both filling a trailer that Dan had fashioned from the bed of a pickup truck. After hibernating for the winter, I thought I could shovel like I did when I was a fit teenager at the cemetery. At the end of the second day, my back gave out completely. I ripped all of the muscles in my lower back and was flat on the floor for three weeks. Getting up and going to the bathroom was an hour-long ordeal.

       After I recovered, I carefully laid the landscaping timbers, framing a multi-tiered diamond in the middle of my front lawn. I decorated it with beautiful flower arrangements on each level with an ornamental flowering bush in the top tier. I also arranged landscaping timbers all around my house two timbers high, forming a flower bed that I filled with topsoil, and then planted multi-colored petunias all around.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Privett’s lawyer was doing everything he could to delay my slander suit and to cost me money with inane interrogatories that required my attorney’s time at $75 per hour to address. Revenge coursed through my veins, so I again dressed in all black. This time, I snaked along the ditch that paralleled the street in front of our houses at three in the morning. I slid underneath Privett’s pickup truck, pulled my oil filter wrench out of my breast pocket, and tried to loosen his oil filter. Even in the dark, it was obvious that his engine was caked with so much oil that my wrench couldn’t get a grip on his oil filter. Plan B: I returned my oil filter wrench to my pocket and pulled out a half-inch ratchet. I spun around and removed the check plug from Privett’s rear-end differential. I put the ratchet back in my pocket along with my souvenir and crawled back to bed.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       My neighbors weren’t laughing at my garden that third year. Jealous glares replaced their laughter. Besides canning hundreds of quarts of green beans, tomatoes, jalapeños, corn, and pickles in the spring and summer of 1984, I gave away many dozens of bushel baskets of vegetables to all of my co-workers in the AWACS Wing.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Deciding to move into base housing for the remainder of my assignment, I put the house up for sale. The realtor squawked when I told her that I didn’t want a “FOR SALE” sign in my yard. She clamored that there were thousands of houses on the market since the logistics end of Tinker Air Force Base had shut down a few months back. She warned me that it would be difficult enough to sell without stifling its promotion. I stood firm, believing the dozens of improvements I made would make the difference.

       And they did. I had two offers within a week. One of them was from a Jamaican couple. The lady went bonkers over my window box. I accepted their lower offer because they were Jamaican. Back when Privett and I were on speaking terms, he had often said, “I’m a good Christian, but...” when he referred to people of color. I knew this would rile him. Besides, the husband was a junk dealer, and the wife wanted dozens of animals: pigs and goats and chickens and dogs and even a cow on their two-thirds of an acre.

       What more could a rotten next door neighbor want?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       The first thing I did after moving into base housing was to call civil engineering and request a dump truck load of topsoil. Even though I knew we’d only be living in base housing for a short time, I applied my mania to landscaping my yard: a split rail fence, a raised flower bed surrounding my house outlined with landscaping timbers that I filled with a rainbow of flowers, and a multi-tiered flowerbed in the middle of my front yard shaped like a diamond splashed with flowers and ornamental bushes on the points. All that in one long weekend.

       The gals in the housing office were stunned. They said it was a pity that they had just given the “House of the Quarter Award” along with lots of prizes to the winner. The ladies said I would’ve easily won. It didn’t matter. I was happy with their having awarded me the title “The Diamond Man.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       On the morning of Privett’s trial, my attorney Ned advised me that I could change the amount I was suing for, and the jury would not be apprised of the original amount. Since it was likely that I would never recover any substantial amount from Privett, and I really didn’t care about the money anyway, I told Ned to reduce the punitive damages to $10,000. Besides, I was only after one thing: To hear the jury declare to the world that Privett had viciously wronged me when he called my boss and lied about me.

       Jack Privett was first on the stand. He tried to elicit the jury’s sympathy by bringing up irrelevant accusations after the fact. I could tell from the jurors’ faces that Privett calling me a “hotshot officer” didn’t help his case any. I had suspected that Privett’s contempt as a retired Army sergeant toward my Air Force commission played a warping role in this hullabaloo, that is, along with his stated contempt for my wife’s religion. His cockeyed animosity was all about self-righteousness.

       Ruby took her turn on the stand. About the only thing I could relate to was when she grumbled something about the rear end of her husband’s truck clunking down the road. The jury couldn’t have understood her insinuation, but I did!

       Bart, who had taken Milton’s place as my boss and who was dressed in his Class A dress blues, looked like a million dollars. He talked like it, too. His testimony painted me as a paragon of hard work and virtue. I wondered if the jury could detect my blush.

       The two neighborhood men who had volunteered to be my witnesses corroborated Privett’s tendency to defame me. Now, it was up to me to take it home. Before I got on the stand, Ned sternly whispered, “You’ve done a fantastic job of legal research, Scott, but it’s my turn to be the lawyer. Just answer the questions. Nothing more.”

       I was on the stand for nearly an hour before lunch, answering Ned’s questions. After lunch, Privett’s lawyer sunk his teeth into me for well over an hour. It became evident that his goal was to make me erupt. As I answered his badgering probes, his tempo and volume gradually increased. I played along, intentionally matching his increasing bluster, waiting for just the right moment. And then I turned and calmly appealed to the judge, gesturing toward Privett’s lawyer, “Is this necessary, Your Honor?”

       “No, it’s NOT necessary!” stated the judge emphatically. Addressing Privett’s lawyer, “You, Mr. Hamilton, will restrain yourself. Understood?!”

       “Yes, sir, Your Honor.”

       It was all I could do to restrain from displaying a great big smirk as I thought, Naa-na-na-naa-na!

       The jury was out for what seemed like forever. Ned and I sat on a bench in the hallway, waiting for them to return to the courtroom. At last, they entered the courtroom, and we were summoned. Before the verdict was read, I could already tell from a couple of the jurors’ glancing smiles in my direction that I’d won on all counts.

       Afterward, several of the jurors walked over to me and congratulated me. In Oklahoma, nine of the twelve jurors must agree that the defendant is liable in a civil lawsuit and, if so, how much is owed to the plaintiff. One of the jurors was the wife of an Operations Officer at Tinker. She confided, “Only one of the jurors declined to give you the full amount that you were seeking. The rest of us would’ve awarded you a lot more.”

       “I wasn’t interested in the money, ma’am.”

       “That was obvious, Scott,” she concluded as she hugged me.

       When Bart and I got back to my house at Tinker Air Force Base, I saw the sparkle in his eye. “I’ve got a good one for him, Scott.”

       “Nah, we got him, Bart. I won.”

       Upon returning to work after the trial, Bart’s boss, Captain Lawrence said, “I would’ve just moved away.”

       To the reader: Would you let someone maliciously destroy your name without standing up for yourself? Not me.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Thanks, Bart, for getting me started!