I've never been a big tool guy. I grew up in a house with two screwdrivers (one a Phillips head), a pair of Vise-Grip locking pliers and a hammer. That's it. If we had to take off a bicycle tire or hang a picture frame, we were good. Anything more complicated than that sent us flipping through the Yellow Pages.
If my former Army sergeant father couldn't find one of those three essential tools immediately, he'd hop in his 1957 Buick Special, head to Western Auto in downtown Columbia, Tennessee, and buy a new one. He was impatient. I think there were about a half-dozen pairs of "lost" locking pliers in the cabinet under the kitchen sink.
Mark KennedyI was aware that most of our neighbors were better stocked with things like quarter-inch electric drills, chainsaws and the like. Long after most people had bought string trimmers, we were still attacking weeds with a sling blade. We also had an all-purpose yard tool called a grubbing hoe - sort of a horizontal ax - that we used for digging up subterranean rocks and extracting gnarly shrub roots.
It was ironic to me that Daddy made me dig up rocks in the backyard, yet we would get in our Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser and drive to nearby Swan Creek, where we would collect creek rocks in paper Piggly Wiggly bags to decorate the front yard - which, I imagined, some unfortunate kid would someday have to dig up all over again.
I remember envying one neighbor who had an electric hedge clipper. I would sit on the porch and watch slack-jawed as he trimmed the waist-high bushes around his house.
Just because we didn't have a good tool supply didn't mean I didn't have to work. I remember painting the whole exterior of our house with gloppy, oil-based paint when I was about 16. I paneled my bedroom using a hand-saw when I was about the same age. It was green-tinted wood-grain paneling, which pretty much sums up the the early 1970s aesthetic.
When I became an adult, purchasing tools was still not a high priority. I inherited a small red toolbox from my mother and it contains the implements of my youth, a couple of screwdrivers, a hammer and a pair of locking pliers. Somehow this frugal-with-tools gene did not get passed down to our two sons. They seem to take after their maternal grandfather, who has a whole barn full of woodworking equipment, where he hand-crafts beautiful chairs and tables.
Our 11-year-old son has a particular fondness for cutting wood. He loves severe thunderstorms because of the chance that wind-blown tree limbs will rain down on our yard. I have to issue threats to get him to pick up his room, but he will saw dead tree limbs all day long.
Recently, he had become impatient with the dead tree branch harvest, so he began looking for low-hanging limbs to cut before they fall. I came home the other day, and he was wielding a broom handle with a handsaw duct-taped to the end.
"What the heck is that," I said as I pulled into the driveway.
"Look at the tool I made," he said.
"I see," I said. "Good luck with that."
Sensing my sarcasm, he set his jaw and went to work sawing branches about the width of his wrist.
Meanwhile, our older son practically lives at Ace Hardware. He has also discovered Harbor Freight, a discount tool store where he hangs out to feed his tool collection.
His toolbox is about three times bigger than mine and includes implements I would never have dreamed of owning. He has Dremel bits and socket wrenches and Allen wrench sets. He has probably a dozen screwdrivers, from the size you use to work on eyeglasses to ones with handles big enough to whip a grown man into unconsciousness. There are also rubber mallets, bolt cutters, crescent wrenches and needle-nose pliers.
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Last Saturday I spent an hour cleaning up an upstairs room. My son immediately used the cleared floor space to reorganize his toolbox. When I walked in, it looked like a Home Depot had exploded there. (He has since put things away.)
Our older son uses these tools to work on his collection of air rifles. And recently he has started to take his car apart. Anything that can be unbolted, removed and cleaned has been unbolted, removed and cleaned. The other day, I arrived home from work to find him scrubbing brake calipers with a wire brush. Another time, he had removed a headlight assembly to try to remove a few drops of condensation behind the glass.
"I wanted it to look perfect," he explained.
Actually, no explanation is necessary. Show me a young man who is obsessed with tools and labor, and I'll show you an emerging adult that never has to worry about missing a meal.
In the world of work, there's no better toolbox than, well, a toolbox.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.