At Orange High, I took mechanical drawing, known today as “engineering drawing”, for three years. Basically it’s a way of putting on paper enough design information about an object or machine part to enable its manufacture. The drawing below is not my own, I got it off the internet and don’t know what it is. It looks like some sort of metal wheel, 8 3/4 inches in diameter, made of two separate parts bolted together. There’s a side view and a front view that together provide enough data to enable someone to go to a machine shop and get one made. But what is it? We don’t know; without a name or description on the drawing, we’ll have to ask whoever comes back to pick it up. I would guess it’s part of a boardwalk amusement ride, but that’s the way my mind works.
Our classroom was on the Lincoln Avenue side of the school, on the third floor toward the rear, at the top of a flight of stairs that led nowhere else – not a room you’d ever wander into by accident. It had high windows that opened onto a flat, narrow roof with a wall around it about two feet high.
There were usually about 12 or 14 students in the class, all boys. One year there was a girl. I don’t know anything about her or what her story was, but good for her. Maybe she was sent from the future.
Our instructor was Ray Smith, who had a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute. He was a fine teacher, easy to understand and follow. Ray did not tolerate misbehavior in his class; if you acted up or did something particularly stupid, he was likely to punch you, punch your arm. How hard the punch was depended on your offense. Because he had grown up in Orange as friends with my Uncle Bert, Ray expected more from me, and paid me extra attention. One day he punched my arm so hard he almost knocked me off my stool. I don’t remember what it was I did, but I know I deserved it.
I don’t think Ray ever gave me an ‘A’ on a class assignment, because my descriptive lettering – the final, boring fill-out-the-form step necessary to complete a drawing – was rushed and sloppy. When it came to lettering, a downgrade to a ‘B’ was fine with me.
Some teachers punished bad behavior by sending the offender out to stand in the hall, with the next offense bringing a trip to the principal’s office. Ray’s approach was to raise a window sash and with a gesture usher you onto the roof, then close the window behind you. I was banished to roof isolation once, and it’s a strange feeling to be outside, alone and empty-handed, looking in as your classmates work on their projects.
One exile found a lost “spaldeen”, the lively pink rubber ball used in stickball and handball. He fought off boredom by bouncing it against the building, taking the return on the fly. It took Ray a while to figure out what that thumping was.
I kept my best work from Ray’s class for years, including my all-time favorite, a beautiful and perfect rendering of a small steam engine. Each time I changed jobs, I brought those drawings to my next house, in their cardboard box with my stock charts, childhood treasure maps and book reports.
We hired a well-reviewed company, Windsor Moving and Storage, to move us from Princeton, where I had just finished up my last contract-programmer job before retirement, to the Jersey Shore. I whimsically labeled that cardboard box of mementos, useless to anyone in the world but me, “Valuable Historical Documents”. Somewhere between Princeton and the Jersey Shore the box went missing; it was a year before I realized it was gone. I’m sure its contents were a great disappointment to someone.