I took aviation shop in my sophomore year of high school (1967-1968) and it was a bitter disappointment. (We took two shop classes per year. You could choose one shop, and one shop was just given to you. That one was given to me.) The shop might have been interesting in the heady days right after WWII, but the war surplus aircraft engines and other parts we were supposed to study were increasingly broken down and useless, and the teacher was clearly counting the days until retirement. He didn’t ask much of us, and we didn’t ask much of him. Mostly we sat and chatted.
We were arranged alphabetically (roughly) by last name. The guy to the left of me was Dave Ebenstein, and the guy to the right of me was Ray Fitze. They were both interesting individuals in many ways, but the really odd thing was that they were both excellent artist/cartoonists. They could dash off a sketch in seconds that I assumed would take half an hour of careful handwork.
We sat in left-to-right rows of one-armed-charlies, and being in the middle, my writing surface was ground-zero for anarchic drawing competitions between the two of them. Fitze would dash something out, and then Ebenstein would add a monster in a corner, or a quick sketch of the Gray Mouser drawing his sword, or caricatures of the other kids in the class. Fitze would then add more monsters, guns, bombs, or bizarre superheroes, with captions like “Suction Man Sings Songs from the Twenties.” There was no particular sense to it, but the drawings were incisive and sometimes hilarious. For no reason I could name, I still have a folder full of papers from high school, running from Spanish quizzes to trigonometry exercises, plus a couple dozen sheets saved from aviation shop, full to the edges of vintage Fitze & Ebenstein.
I was starting work on my big 10″ Newtonian telescope at the time, and had sketches with me most days, and when things got too snoozy in class I tinkered with them, to Fitze’s great amusement. When he asked how much the damned thing would weigh, I shot off a quick estimate of 600 pounds. Well, that was the last straw. In what seemed like a minute or less, I was Duntemadmann!
On the back of the sheet was a message in big block letters: DEAR GEOFFREY: YOUR POWER MAD DREAMS WILL BE YOUR DOWNFALL. YOU CANNOT BUILD 600 POUND TELESCOPES. GIVE UP THIS FARCE, THIS LUNACY. THESE DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR WILL KILL YOU!! SINCERELY, LOBACK PAINE.
In odd corners of the sketch were a box labeled “Books for Madmen” (with a strange creature hiding behind it) and a single book entitled “Advanced Everything.”
The drawings are a living testament to the chaotic energy that veritably boils out of 15-year-old boys, energy that I sure wish I still had. And the guys? Ebenstein is now a biologist at a university in Vermont. Fitze I haven’t seen since high school. I don’t think either of them had ever studied art, and the two of them were the first time I realized that there is such a thing as born talent. (They wouldn’t be the last.) Certain skills could be learned–I got pretty good at machine tool work with practice and the excellent tutelage of Carol’s father, a master machinist–but certain skills just Are. The music and art genes were two that I didn’t get, though (oddly) my mother had more than a touch of both.
Tomorrow: QSL stamps.
