How I Got Here

I was the man of the house when I was age 10. I started to learn plumbing on Thanksgiving Day when Mom would shove all the vegetable peelings down the disposer all at once. 

I put in my first water heater at age 16. My brother said I wouldn’t be able to do that, so he wouldn’t even help me get it down to the basement. Somehow, I found a plumber who loaned me his threader and buckets of fittings. He said he knew them all, so, “Don’t try to cheat me!” He was just an old curmudgeon taking some pity on me. It was a gas heater, and I had to reverse the supply—no leaks! 

I worked construction in the summers, mainly at a truss and wall panel factory so I knew where everything went. My scoutmaster was like a second father, and I can do anything with an ax and rope. I have made many improvements on each of my three houses—the current one is an 1850s farmhouse.  

My plan was to be a doctor like my father, but his was the style where he would come to you with his black bag and wasn’t always paid, or sometimes it was in-kind, like a new floor or eternal permission to hunt on the patient’s property in Illinois. Also, I had far too many hours waiting in hospitals for him—that smell!

During college in the 1970s, there was a large fear of not having enough food. Seems we have to feed people before we can cure them. Then came the “Green Revolution,” with advances in breeding drought and pest resistance. The biggest overall progress was made when micro-loans were given to women instead of funding huge infrastructure projects.  

I also spent a semester abroad in Costa Rica documenting pesticide poisonings.

Then, I became an agricultural economist and worked at USDA for awhile. There I had some absolutely crazy bosses. And I lived and worked in two other foreign countries. 

The Philippines was my favorite, as I built a demonstration farm there while in the Peace Corps. The goal was to take risks that local farmers couldn’t. Yet, the I was the man of the house when I was age 10. I started to learn plumbing on Thanksgiving Day when Mom would shove all the vegetable peelings down the disposer all at once. 

I put in my first water heater at age 16. My brother said I wouldn’t be able to do that, so he wouldn’t even help me get it down to the basement. Somehow, I found a plumber who loaned me his threader and buckets of fittings. He said he knew them all, so, “Don’t try to cheat me!” He was just an old curmudgeon taking some pity on me. It was a gas heater, and I had to reverse the supply—no leaks! 

I worked construction in the summers, mainly at a truss and wall panel factory so I knew where everything went. My scoutmaster was like a second father, and I can do anything with an ax and rope. I have made many improvements on each of my three houses—the current one is an 1850s farmhouse.  

My plan was to be a doctor like my father, but his was the style where he would come to you with his black bag and wasn’t always paid, or sometimes it was in-kind, like a new floor or eternal permission to hunt on the patient’s property in Illinois. Also, I had far too many hours waiting in hospitals for him—that smell!

During college in the 1970s, there was a large fear of not having enough food. Seems we have to feed people before we can cure them. Then came the “Green Revolution,” with advances in breeding drought and pest resistance. The biggest overall progress was made when micro-loans were given to women instead of funding huge infrastructure projects.  

I also spent a semester abroad in Costa Rica documenting pesticide poisonings.

Then, I became an agricultural economist and worked at USDA for awhile. There I had some absolutely crazy bosses. And I lived and worked in two other foreign countries. 

The Philippines was my favorite, as I built a demonstration farm there while in the Peace Corps. The goal was to take risks that local farmers couldn’t. Yet, the Peace Corps mainly produces some goodwill across borders and a good education for Americans. A bomb was found on a Peace Corps vehicle just before my tour was up.

Plan C was always to be a science teacher. I taught in four schools, spending 10 years at my latest. I wrote my own curriculum, continued overseas projects, and did lots of gardening at school. 

My success as a teacher depended on support from the administration. The easiest thing to do as a teacher is to give easy grades and duck. I couldn’t do that. I challenged my students. They were 7th and 8th graders; I was helping them to cultivate discipline and literally grow up, which is a lifelong process. New pressures like cell phones and lax parenting make teaching very difficult now. I spent 10 years trying to get a discipline system in place at my latest school. We finally had consensus from all the teachers, but the chief wasn’t going to implement it. He said his strategy was to obfuscate and duck! 

So, it was time for dinosaurs like me to leave. 

In six weeks, I completed all my practice inspections and a home inspection license. I am now free from any boss. My standards are high, so I probably get fewer jobs, but I work with many faithful real estate agents. 

I take joy in my work. It clears my head of everything else. I smiled with pleasure the other day as I found a house with an extremely old deck where they had power washed the underside and replaced all the hangers and bolts—which has to border on criminal, when all the structural timbers were well over 40 years old. It was deliberately sabotaged, really. 

Eleven years in, no one can tell me I’m too old for anything (except my wife). So, now I teach house science.