| Robert Hoskins |
| Mr. Hoskins was the industrial-arts teacher who got me checked out on knob and tube wiring. Perhaps our school was backward. It was built in 1936. He taught me lettering and drafting. My present employer compliments my lettering regularly. Thank you Robert Hoskins. |
| I kept having Hoskins teaching the classes I was taking. I could swear I even had him for PE! He was the stern type. I remember him drilling me personally to factor a quadratic equation, in front of a class: My voice went higher and higher as I succeeded. "Why is your voice going higher and higher?!" he demanded . . . . I just about died. I should have cited stress. He had penetrating eyes. |
| So I did take some shortcuts. Yes, I kept jumping fences, well after my junior high school officially released me. Purely incidental was that Mr Hoskins and I were moved from the junior high to the high school the same fall. I always took metal shop, which he taught. One day, I was cutting across the bus-yard and through the aero-shop yard, to get to his class. As I slid down the drain-pipe, into the metal-shop courtyard, I saw his feet. Plap! My feet hit the ground. He had been basking in the sun. Now I looked the marauder. I don't know how I withstood his disappointment. I was his helper in metal shop. He was a smart, honest, hard working guy. His initiatives were contageous. We did fabrication, preventive maintenence, and repair. There were big jobs too: my cohort, Theodore Borley, sheared a pin in the big Le Blond lathe. I was like the private. Hoskins was the man of steel. He immersed himself in it and got it going. That was impressive. |
| Our algebra class was in a portable classroom. We were all shocked--on the first day--he was calling upon pupils to work problems onstage. He never let up. |
| Someone recently asked me how to interface Romex to a knob and tube system. I felt like I drifted into a dreamworld as I described how to do the pigtail splice. I'd flashed back to seventh grade as vividly as if it had been yesterday. It was Hoskins' shop class. |
| He made us braze. He made us cast. We milled. We shaped. We spotwelded. We welded. We stamped. We did tempering. We did surface grinding. It always appeared these operations were necessary portions of routine maintenence. Most of the equipment came from World War II. |
| I seemed to prefer the Le Blond 13" lathe. Ted liked the Le Blond 17" |
| One semester, my worst nightmare came true. Auto-shop teacher Oro Mitchell stood-in as the metal-shop teacher. Utterly authoritarian, he did reluctantly let me do what I wanted. He expended substantial mental energy trying to find fault with my ideas. Mr Hoskins' focus was on the mission-critical. Adaptability was his bag. Mr Hoskins absence was disastrous. |
| Davy Downs and Harley Hilborn were the other 7th grade shop teachers. |
| There was a gas-fired furnace in the welding room. I'll never forget the howl of those big blue flames shootin' in there. Hoskins was gently increasing natural gas flow and the air control rheostat simultaneously. He watched everything intently, but emotionless. His moves were deliberate and measured. My heart was pounding. That thing was radical! It was my first sensation of industrial firepower. |