After growing up in the rural Tallahatchie County town of Charleston, my father graduated from high school and went to Coyne Electrical School in Chicago.
When he came back home and married my mother, he went to work for The Phone Company.
My dad was a man of gadgets, a trait I inherited. My brother, Cecil, was the builder, and he helped my father add a den and a workshop to the rear of the house.
My father owned a 1931 Model A that sat in the backyard until the workshop could be built.
Unfortunately, he had so many electrical parts and pieces that he filled up the workshop before he could get the car inside.
He converted the laundry room to a makeshift shop, where he kept all of his repair work and extra parts. The Model A was given away later to a relative that I hope made good use of it.
For my father, The Phone Company was his life. Naturally, it became our lives too. For the most part, The Phone Company was good to my dad, except when he had to put in extra work during outages and union disputes.
Of course, his sudden departure from the company not on his terms still sticks in my craw.
My dad was a “fixer,” too. Neighbors, co-workers or relatives would bring him something that was broken and needed fixing.
I saw him fix things like a drugstore cigar lighter, a weed whacker, a lawnmower, brakes on a 1964 Ford Falcon and replacement of a six-cylinder motor with a V8 in a 1960 Chevrolet Impala.
He also had a hankering for computers, what type there were at that time. He had a Radio Shack version that stored programs on a reel-to-reel tape and used the television as the screen. To run those monstrous programs, he attached a 16k expansion pack to a port in the back.
When Radio Shack was closing at the mall, he bought all of the expansion packs they had at closeout prices, thinking he might be able to connect them all.
It wasn’t unusual that my brother, Cecil, and I would get interested in computers as we got older.
Apparently, the trait has trickled down to my two sons – the youngest, Alex, is a computer engineer, while his brother, Steven, is an attorney with an affinity for videogames.
I often wonder what my father would think now if he saw how the world of telephones has transformed people’s lives. He would love the fact that he could carry around an entire computer in his pocket, with more than 7 million times the computing space than that old Tandy computer. Of course, I just used an app to figure that out.
I’ll bet that he wouldn’t be as aggravated as I was last week when I tried to find a way to replace the battery in my iPhone 6, which apparently has become an antique.
Phone companies want to sell you a better phone; I have to make a reservation at the only big-box electronic chain store in the state to get a replacement (waited too late); or I get wise advice from my wife on where to find the right place.
Seeing how the telephone has improved exponentially since my father passed away has been kinda heartbreaking.
He would have loved it.
Buster Wolfe is a veteran newspaperman who has worked at community newspapers throughout the state of Mississippi.
