Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

An Odd Event

Blogging Circle of Friends
29 December 1012
An Odd Event

After retiring from the military I returned to the home site of what had once been the family farm. The house had burned down and the outbuildings were ramshackled and well past the ends of their service life. I had not been prepared by my upbringing for living on a farm and everything about the culture of my forefathers was totally foreign. One area where I was totally lost was on agricultural equipment and machinery.

As a result I enrolled in Midstate Technical College in Wisconsin Rapids, in the Diesel Technician Program. Here again I was thrown into a culture where I had very little frame of reference and not only was I the oldest student but certainly the most inept. Still I struggled to learn and with persistence became more and more familiar with how my diesel tractor operated.

One of the phases of the course required the students to rebuild a diesel engine. A two-person team was assigned an engine and we tore it down and put it back together again. My partner had been raised in a farm shop and had a great interest and aptitude for what we were doing. I was his assistant. As the semester neared its end everyone in the class was anticipating the day when our work would be complete and we would find out if our engines ran.

At lunch we were in the classroom, finishing up with our brown bags. The instructor, Jim Koehntop, was getting ready for his lecture when out in the shop we heard a rumble. Since everyone was in the classroom, Jim wondered who could be there working and we all followed into the main shop area to find out.

There on the shop floor was an engine on its stand. It was one that nobody was assigned to work on and it was running. At first I thought it was a bit of foolishness, but nobody fessed up. Jim got serious and demanded to know who was behind the practical joke. It got utterly silent in the shop. He carefully examined the ignition for evidence of some sort of remote starting device. There was nothing irregular to be found; just the engine, droning with that heavy diesel resonance, smoking and filling the shop with fumes. Now I had gotten to know these fellows (12 in all) pretty well and practical jokes of this sort were not part of the shop culture. If Koehntop was behind it (He was certainly no stand-up comic) he deserves the Academy Award.

Several years later I ran into him in Walmart and the conversation turned to that mysterious engine startup. He shrugged, looked me in the eye and said in all seriousness. “I don’t know how it happened but it was one of the darndest things I ever saw. “