A MAN FROM MISSOURI

Back in the 1960s when I was drinking heavily and falling into ruin, I worked in this building in downtown Dayton, Ohio. I drank in the Magic Carpet Bar located on the first floor of the building. Occasionally, I drank in the alley behind this building with the stevedores who unloaded produce trucks in the district when much of the first floor was inhabited by small Italian-owned produce businesses. My experiences in and around that building will, from time to time, show up in what I write! The building is now called the St. Clair Lofts. It's been converted out of all recognition of my past life.

I've just roughed out a character sketch of the man from the The Greatest Generation who owned the company I worked for in that building. I plan to write several stories about the men from his generation I met while working in this building. Following are three paragraphs from that character sketch:

Born and raised in rural Missouri, Bruce was mechanically brilliant, a tinkerer and inventor as good as Edison but never able to come up with his own “light bulb”. Like so many engineers, Bruce Roberts couldn’t spell cat. I asked my father one time how Bruce managed to get a college degree as ignorant of the English language as Bruce seemed to be. Roughly paraphrased (as is most of the dialogue reported in my reminiscences), my father responded, “He’s brighter than you might think. I don’t know exactly how he got accepted into college but he did. Someone must have seen his potential. It’s not a full four year degree, I don’t think. Earned himself a two year degree in engineering from a Polytechnic college. In Indiana I believe.”  
   My father told me about Bruce’s anti-gravity machine. Bruce spent years and unknown quantities of dough putting it together. With my father as his sole witness one evening, Bruce stepped onto a round metal platform, threw a switch and waited. After a few moments, he stepped back off the metal platform and with genuine bewilderment, arms akimbo, exclaimed quietly, “It should work!”

Bruce was more than a wild eyed dreamer. He invented a successful throttle for the static testing of jet engines and sold it to General Electric in Cincinnati. His throttle ran more than 100 hours before needing repair. The throttle it replaced needed repair every 5 hours. My educated guess is that Bruce’s throttle kept Central States afloat through the years I knew him and long after I left Central States and Ohio for good.