Paul Strandberg and I were driving mom’s aging luxury Oldsmobile, large and somewhat bodacious for mere high school juniors, and even my modest mother. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were in elementary school, but we were already qualified new drivers that spring day, a peaceful Sunday afternoon on the Hiway 29 straight-away approaching Carlos, Minnesota.
Endowed by our creator with certain random hormones, heavy testosterone levels and lots of bad judgment, we decided to just let it out and “see what she can do!”
She responded faithfully, giving us her best. But sadly it was not enough. Adrenaline jolted the two teenagers to a new sound: The insistent tap, tap clatter of a thrown piston rod. We had never experienced such a sound when driving with mom and dad, but it would later be introduced to us as the logical conclusion of an engine that has been pushed to the end of its useful life. She was a goner, but we still had naive hope.
As we eased the wounded warrior into Paul’s farmyard with a new found care, we desperately grasped at solutions, alibis, explanations, fixes, but nothing occurred.
Paul died a tragic death some years ago and I remember him with fondness. But I also remember his possible creative solution that day. “Why don’t you turn it off and turn it back on and see if it goes away?” he suggested. So we did.
“Tap, tap, tap,” she answered back, when we started her up again. “Tap, tap, tap.”
Paul was ahead of his time, way before the vaunted Gates and Jobs became the lords of creation. For although it didn’t exactly work out that day, I will always remember dear Paul as the original inventor of the now dependable re-boot.
