Handy Men

Among the books and magazines from my childhood I have found in my brother's house -- the house in which we grew up -- is the April 1951 issue of Science and Mechanics, a magazine with a wonderful subtitle: The Magazine That Shows You How. In that proudly American phrase I hear echoes of Emerson, Thoreau, William James -- and my father, whose magazine it was. He read these pulpy, optimistic journals, and by the time I was old enough to read they were stacked in the hallway on the second floor.

I am the least handy of men. I'm not helpless but I take no pleasure in fixing or building things. Tedium overwhelms me when I have to paint a wall or hang a picture. My brother, a picture framer by trade and polymath by avocation, inherited the gift for fixing and building. The only things I know how to fix and build are words on a page.

But I loved these Popular Science-style magazines when I was a kid. They seemed to signal a variation on the aesthetic bent I already sensed in myself, as well as an impossibly competent adulthood. The articles were aimed at men who remained little boys. The titles of the articles tell the story: "Do Your Picture Framing at Home," "Tying the Trout Fly" (Part 2), "Plug-In Atom Bomb Radiation Alarm," "Tele-Tenna Beamer," "Make Your Darkroom Fit Your Needs," "Putting a Home Made Thermostat to Work," "Building Your Own Home" (Part 1), "Paneling That Brick Fireplace," "Servicing Your Air Cleaner," "Putting Your Drill Press to Work" Only one article features a woman: "Feather Tapestry is Her Hobby."

Read these words in the context of Emerson's "Self-Reliance": "The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky....His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have lost by refinement some energy, by a christianity entrenched in establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue."

The ads are as good as the articles. Most seem aimed at the thrift, self-reliance and insecurity of readers: Print Your Own Postcards," "FREE BOOK -- On Rectal Troubles," "Don't Pull Hair From Nose (May Cause Fatal Infection)," "Become an Expert in Traffic," "How to Stumble Upon a Fortune in Gems," "Make Crime Your Business," "Rupture Torturing You?"

I still recognize one of the ads: a room of men in white jackets and caps sawing away at carcasses: "Learn Meat Cutting." The copy says, "The steady dependable trade of Meat Cutting taught easily in 8 short weeks." The National School of Meat Cutting, Inc., of Toledo, Ohio, assures all fledgling butchers: "Pay after graduation."

There's even an ad for The Thing, the schlocky Howard Hawks sci-fi movie. It shows a stern-faced man in a lab coat, standing beside a microscope and racks of test tubes, saying, "As a Scientist, I say we must destroy it or it will destroy us!" In other words, standard Atomic Age, McCarthy Era fear and paranoia.

I left my mark on the magazine, too, though it took my brother to decode it. The front cover features a painting of a suave, silver-haired man wearing black racing gloves, seated at the helm of a yellow, futuristically streamlined automobile. The accompanying headline reads "General Motors Builds 300 HP Super Sportster." On the vast yellow hood are penicled these words, all in upper case: "DRAFT HORSES." I didn't recognize my writing and assumed the words were a witless comment on the reputed horse power of the car's engine. Instead, my brother says it was a variation on the sentiment found on an antiwar poster, circa 1968: "Draft Beer, Not Students."