I can't believe that it took me till this Thanksgiving to find out that my late grandfather was an expert welder, along with his brother and father. They ran the Terrano Iron Works in Queens, hand making fire escapes, railings, and the lot. I knew my grandfather was a salesman for a welding company, but never knew of his training previous to that - no one in my family thought this was important to tell me either. I chalk it up to my Dad similarly not teaching us too much about dry cleaning and tailoring trade (he was 3rd generation) because he didn't want us to enter the trade...
I'm pretty upset with myself about this too. I spent a tremendous amount of time with my grandfather, whether it be car shopping (he really got a kick out of fighting with salesmen), building balsa wood model airplanes, helping with yardwork, or just being around for Sunday fun days (an Italian thing) and never really knew that much about his past. On the the contrary I know tons about my other Grandfather's past (German side of the family), which could be because I'm seemingly drawn to German stuff and was generally more interested in the genealogy of that side of the family.
I could've been making expert welds since I was 6 if I had known about this instead of making average ones at 28. Instead of making model airplanes we could've been brazing tanks and learning all the old school methods of welding various metals. I got really sad after finding out all that family history, but at least I know now.
On a positive side, check out my buddies' blogs, they do much cooler stuff than I do
Shane von Cycles and his Asphalt Redemption
who just conquered the East Coast on his BMW R100GS P/D
and
Chris von Kool with Rust is Gold who besides owning a shit load of cool machinery, is now building another pre-unit Triumph
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