Grandpa Meyer did not understand very well how things worked. One time, the handle broke off my coaster wagon. My grandfather offered to reattach it. Instead of attaching it so that the handle curved back over the wagon, he did it in reverse so the handle curved straight up against the front of the wagon. Since it could not be taken off, as a result the wagon could be pulled, but it was impossible to ride in and steer it at the same time. It remained that way until we finally took the wheels off for a soap box derby car.

Another time, he decided to sharpen my father’s reel lawnmower. However, he very laboriously “sharpened” the four edges on the reel that turned rather than the one cutting edge that remained in place so his efforts were useless.

The roof on his woodshed started leaking. Rather than starting to lay the roofing sheets from the bottom up so the resulting joints directed the rain over the top sheet first, he decided to do just the reverse. To make matters worse, he started near the top of the roof since it wasn’t leaking at the top. Thus, the joints trapped the water on the way down, and always tended to leak.

Grandpa’s brother purchased an early model car from Sears and Roebuck in the early 1900’s. It was delivered to the local freight station by train. Supposedly, Grandpa’s brother later had trouble with the transmission, and he and my grandfather took it apart, replaced the faulty parts, and reassembled it. The story is that the car then had one slow speed forward and three speeds in reverse, until they disassembled and reassembled it again.

He had a metal goose neck light that he put on his kitchen table for reading. It was fully adjustable so the light could easily be directed anywhere. However, he had it set up so the light was thrown to one side, rather than on the newspaper so he actually read in semi darkness. One time, I tried to adjust it for him, and he became very upset, saying that I would break the goose neck if I moved it around.

At one point, he bought a new folding ironing board. He was impressed with its strength when the salesman flung himself on it with all his weight. He decided to demonstrate its strength to us and set it up in the middle of his kitchen, but failed to click in the base properly. As a result, when he flung himself on the ironing board, both he and the board crashed to the floor.

The night of the 1938 hurricane, a group of us were cutting up the branches of a huge oak tree that had fallen in the street in front of his house, taking down all of the wires leading to Grandpa’s and our houses. Since we did not know whether the electricity was off, we were careful not to touch any downed wires. Suddenly, we saw Grandpa rolling up a loose wire he had found, and warned him that it might be live. He replied, “No, no, I know it’s telephone wire,” and proceeded to follow it into his house—that never had a telephone.

He did fairly well with his garden as long as conditions were good. He thought that if he watered lightly each night, he would save water as compared to my father who gave his garden a good soaking. This worked until we hit a hot, dry spell. Since the roots of Grandpa’s plants were near the surface—as a result of the watering—they quickly dried up and died. One year, he was having trouble with cutworms cutting off his tomato plants. He circled a piece of tarpaper around each plant to keep out the cutworms, but the heat of the sun reflecting off the tarpaper killed the plants anyway.

He once came home and reported that he had just seen a bad accident on Holyoke Street where “two cars ran together.” I asked whether it was a head-on collision. He replied, “Yes, and the rear of one was all stove in.”

Not one to rush into new things, he first had electricity installed only on the first floor of his house. Why have lights upstairs when you only sleep there?