My Experiences

Growing up I had a lot of difficulty reading but mechanical things and electronic things I excel at. A lot of times I would look at problems and find a solution easily as a necessity to get a job done. My first project was Mom's toaster which had a nichrome wire detached from its mounting. I reattached the wire and Mom's toaster worked far into the future. The next project was rebuilding the motor in the vacuum cleaner. Later it was Dad's drills and Dad acquired special brush cleaning stones to make my work easier. All through grade school I tinkered with electronics and tube theory. In third grade I was taking old AM radios and building transmitters out of them. Around 7th grade while in school at Assumption, Mrs Lankas had us do a science project building our own electric motors completely from scratch. See the banner picture above which is very similar. I got to cut out my brushes from plates of copper, cut plates of steel to create the magnetic core which I wound the wires on, construct a shaft and bearing mechanism and wrap to field coils. You might think that this is a lot of work but it really isn't, it's just meticulous. I used to wind all of my own antennas. I rewound motors, my grandpa would make special wound phase shift coils for amplifiers…coils are powerful. There's some pictures below.

My grandfather worked with electronics so my grandma's basement was full of tubes and radio equipment. This allowed me to have a hands-on experience to an array of different things to think about and try to understand. I painstakingly took years to learn electronic terms and built many electronic projects. On my 11-year old Christmas I asked for an electronic dictionary which helped greatly.  With some help I started an explorer communications post through the boy scouts. I was treasurer and I was 13. I was able to attend an auction at the Holiday inn on 72nd and buy circuit boards that we removed the gold from, and helped purchase all the TVs from Midlands Hospital, which we converted into portable TVs which we sold and gave us enough money to buy a military teletype, transmitters and receivers to fully outfit our explorer post. AT&T or we would call “ma bell” gave us access to the basement of the repeater station on 84th and Harrison. I was licensed to inspect the batteries that were upstairs. Mostly if there was a problem we would report it. There were acid batteries that ran that relay station. There's a picture below of an old telephone system relay. We also at the same time started with R.E. A.C.T. (Early storm chasers) and we had several side band and CB radios. I attended lectures and classes on identifying tornadoes and funnel clouds from storms even at night. We sat up at Hummel Park and a few other locations during tornado storms; however, never saw anything to report. I continued to learn more tube and transistor theory and started the basics of computer learning in grade school with binary ASCII and hexadecimal. Later I took an electronics class at South high where we learned basic electronics, transistor theory and simple network analysis. With the aid of my teacher and funding from OPS we were able to get digital oscilloscopes and started and completed the first computer program at South High. 

I started working doing civil engineering work at the Union Pacific corporation before I even receive my diploma at South High. My computer skills, drafting skills, surveying skills and electronics math skills all aided me in my work as engineering support for built to suit and light industrial parks throughout the entire Western United States. I also created a numbering system for their land inventory which I also was responsible for as well as over 90% of the entire land description transfer documents of all railroad subsidiaries. I was in charge of an audio-visual room that had a 12 ft Barco rear screen projection monitor. I had parametric EQ'd microphones and speakers in the ceilings and I could hold multi conferences and protocol with other people's computers, this was prior to the internet. I also worked on the construction drawings of Pipal Park for a member of the Omaha Rotary as volunteer work. It was first proposed to have a wood structure which I greatly protested and it ended up with a concrete structure in case of a tornado. I'm mostly responsible for the plumbing schematic drawings see picture below. I could name so many other things, it would take up pages.  All these things you learn on the job because you have basic logic skills to come up with solutions. While I was still working at the railroad I did a lot of part-time work in construction. I ran across a guy that was really a truck driver. He tried to be a painter, went back to truck driving and would come to Omaha and drop all these homeless teenage kids off at his house he would find on the road freezing to death. These young adults had more challenges than any of the kids I have seen in our neighborhoods. Of course you can't just let them lay around like a bag of potatoes so we were able to find work usually to keep most of them employed and give them skills and other options to the less than legal ways of making money. I even taught basic electronics to several kids that were in their teens with no high school education. One ended up being a communication specialist for the 10th mountain division. One thing I've learned teaching so many different things over the years is if someone's interested they can learn just about anything you give them a chance to learn.

I cannot believe that this isn't still going today, especially since it's so necessary. A program like this should be started and implemented within our local school system or community groups like Boys club and Girls club which I was first going to approach with this idea. I thought that they could help build a model city and even the cars. I bought one of the stem project cars and built it myself and thought we could lay out a track at Southroads with little city buildings and show everyone. See the video below. 

The cost of these stem projects are extremely cheap. They practically teach themselves.

Learning logic skills in one category, especially sound basics skills, help someone fix, build and learn creative new ways to solve problems.