A Consummate Maker

The little projects with my dad were not so little.

At least they were large in my heart.

When I look back, some of the deepest intimacies we shared did not happen through long conversations or dramatic father-son moments, but through projects—things built, tuned, carried, tested, improved.

My father loved making things for his children.

And I mean that literally.

He made things into being.

Some of them practical.

Some extravagant in effort.

Some absurdly overbuilt.

All of them, now, feel like forms of love.

He was my softball coach from first through sixth grade, and for most of those years he made sure my sister Helen and I landed on his team.

There was a draft each season, and he loved telling the story of the year the announcer called, “Don Krumpos,” and I stood up, offended and correcting him.

“No. It’s Donny.”

I had no idea what a draft was.

No idea my father was maneuvering behind the scenes to freeze me and Helen and our friends onto his roster so we wouldn’t be drafted away.

That seems so characteristic now.

Quietly arranging the conditions under which childhood might feel safer.

Because I was nervous about softball.

Truthfully, I did not much like going.

The games made me anxious.

Performance did.

I cannot imagine I would have kept at it had my father not been the coach, our family friend Galen the assistant, and half my friends already clustered on the same bench.

Even the bench was my father’s doing.

He built a long wooden one and every Saturday we loaded it up and brought it along so our team would have a place to sit.

He made and stored the backstops in our garage too, which meant arriving early each week to set them up.

Even recreation, in his hands, involved fabrication.

Infrastructure.

He did not simply coach.

He built the conditions for coaching.

Only much later did I see in this his quiet role in the Bayshore community. As a child, he was just my dad. I did not notice he was also a local citizen in the old sense—one of those people who make communal things happen by hauling, fixing, organizing.

I learned softball, yes.

But I learned something about civic generosity too.

Then there was Pinewood Derby.

And here “little project” becomes almost comic understatement.

For a few years my father and I became serious.

Possibly too serious.

We built multiple cars each season.

We studied previous winners almost scientifically.

Which designs ran truest?

What nose shapes cut best?

How should weight be distributed?

He built a testing track in our basement.

A testing track.

We would race prototypes against each other, alter variables, converge toward a final design to bring to the official race.

Looking back, I suspect most of this was his idea.

But I was happily enlisted.

And what he taught me there feels now like an apprenticeship in method.

Graphite scrubbed painstakingly into axle channels.

Plastic wheels filed and glazed so they rode with minimal friction.

Pins driven at axle points so the wheel touched metal, not wood.

Burrs sanded off.

Weights hidden in carved cavities under the chassis, lead sinkers pressed into putty until we came in just under the official weigh-in.

The precision of it.

The delight in optimization.

The belief that small variables mattered.

I see in all this the same mind that later rigged farm equipment and repaired impossible things.

The chess-club intelligence again, redirected through toy race cars.

And I still have some of those cars.

Battered now.

But survivors.

One year we built one almost purely for beauty—a 1920s classic with fenders and a soft top, inspired by the Matchbox cars I collected.

I think that little car taught me something about form and materials long before design school ever did.

It was sculpture disguised as Cub Scouts.

Then there was the Hoth base.

After The Empire Strikes Back, some magazine—Popular Mechanics, maybe—had instructions for building a replica base from white craft foam. The kind that sheds static-charged pellets into every corner of existence.

I can still smell the solvent glue he used.

Still remember the little foam slab with notches where Luke in Hoth gear could hang upside down by his feet.

He built the whole thing.

I mostly watched.

But watching was part of the education.

I learned what glue could do.

What foam could become.

That imagination could be fabricated.

And then the Christmas he made me a scale model of our own barn.

This may be the most moving of all.

A toy version of the gambrel-roofed barn outside our real window.

With removable roofs.

Doors that opened.

An interior I could reach into.

A farmstead made portable.

I played the living daylights out of that thing with my miniature tractors.

Even now it feels almost mythic that a father would build his child a playable model of the child’s own world.

It was both toy and cosmology.

And he did the same for Helen.

When my parents could not afford the famous Barbie penthouse condo, he made one.

Four feet by four feet at the base.

Four stories high.

The top nearly brushing our ceiling.

An impossible homemade skyscraper.

I used to hide inside it during hide-and-seek.

Even the toys he made became environments.

Worlds to enter.

That may be what moves me most now.

He did not merely make objects.

He made worlds.

For his children.

And he made them with a seriousness often reserved for paid commissions or fine craftsmanship.

No half-measures.

No “good enough.”

Even play deserved engineering.

And perhaps this is what I mean when I call him a consummate maker.

Not simply that he could build.

But that he poured imagination into utility and utility into wonder.

The same man who rebuilt chimneys and tuned machinery also made a Hoth base, a toy barn, a Barbie tower.

There was no hard border in him between practical making and enchantment.

Both belonged.

I sometimes think my own life in art, fabrication, and world-building begins partly there.

At basement race tracks.

At pinewood axles dusted with graphite.

At foam snowscapes.

At a child crawling inside a handmade Barbie condo.

That is where materials first became magical.

Because he made them so.

People often speak of parents giving values.

Mine did that too.

But my father gave something more tactile.

He gave methods.

He gave objects.

He gave evidence that if you could imagine a thing, you might be able to make it.

And what greater gift can a maker give a child than that?

The little projects were not little.

They were an education.

They were companionship.

They were, in their handmade way,

love with screws and glue on it.