Willoughby: What makes it tick

We diligently recycle, especially our plastic and glass. In the 1950s, recycle was not a commonly used word, but there was a different form applied in Aspen. My parent’s generation scrounged unused metal, especially brass keys, for the war effort, faced rationing for items like gasoline, and cautiously consumed many products to aid the cause. 

By the time I was old enough to notice, those wartime habits had continued taking a slightly different form. If a new item was bought, the older one was given away, donated to the Thrift Shop, or stored away in the garage or shed, often with the thought that the parts could be used for something. Fisher the Fixer — Freddie Fisher’s business — took in all forms of “junk” that he piled on shelves inside his store and heaps of items outside, a used parts stockpile where only he could find anything.

In those years, the dump was up Maroon Creek, closer to town than today. Few locals considered their broken or used items garbage, but if they did make it to the dump, people picked over the piles and took home anything they thought might be of use. Since most hauled their own garbage to the dump, there were many eyes perusing the most recent deposits.

Many saved their magazines, and when they ran out of space, instead of taking them to the dump, they passed them on. I was the beneficiary of that thriftiness, receiving several years of back issues of Popular Mechanics. 

Popular Mechanics began publication in 1902 in Chicago, and for a half century, the tag line was “written so you can understand it.” That certainly applied to me: A young boy who wanted to figure out what made things tick. The magazine had large-size illustrations of the inner workings of everything I was interested in and even more that I had never seen or heard of.

I was blessed because our family had a shed behind where we lived, the Cowenhoven Building, that stored many items my father saved after the Midnight Mine shut down. At that time, he was transitioning from miner to plumber working on his journeyman’s plumber’s license.  He had to master difficult pipe joints that involved using melted lead. That helped when I made lead toy soldiers. He also had his assay equipment stored in the shed with many small assay cups that I could use for projects.

Go-karts were the rage in Aspen in those years. Most of us could not afford to buy one, so we built our own version using cast-off parts. The most important item was a motor, easy to acquire since people bought new lawnmowers and did not want to haul their old ones to the dump.

My parents had great patience with my projects and encouraged me on most of them.  Wanting to know how something worked, I would often take it apart to figure it out. Putting it back together was much more difficult, and I often ended up with a few extra parts, mostly screws, nuts, and bolts.

Our family car stopped working, and since we could walk to nearly anywhere we wanted to go and my father had access to the plumbing truck, I decided to see how a car motor worked. My buddies, Barney and Gary Bishop, and I opened the hood and began pulling out a few parts. My father discovered us in the process — fortunately, I had Popular Mechanics to wade through during the penalty phase imposed on me for my looking for what-made-something-tick adventure.

Tim Willoughby’s family story parallels Aspen’s. He began sharing folklore while teaching at Aspen Country Day School and Colorado Mountain College. Now a tourist in his native town, he views it with historical perspective. Reach him at redmtn2@comcast.net.