Dave fixes everything

Uncle Dave taught me to:
1. Make new tools by saving and combining good handles and good implements
2. Pick up telephone wire ties and use them for everything (kind of like duck tape.)
3. Change the air filter in a car that had oil bath air filter.
4. Fix a toaster oven

Dave was also responsible for helping me along at two early stages of my sailing career.

My second boat (I was about 15) was a junked Barnegat Sneakbox.  My dad helped me spend a summer filling the seams with a mixture of varnish and sawdust, fiberglassing, etc.  Well here I was with no tiller for the boat.  Uncle Dave salvaged a telephone pole cross tie (I don't actually know what salvage meant in this case) and knew enought that under all the grime it was a gorgeous piece of walnut.   He fashioned me a gorgeous tiller from this wood.

Several years later I was keeping this boat at the Perth Amboy Boat Club.  Unfortunately  a truck somehow ran over and broke the large oak boom for the boat, Dave said no trouble.  He cut the ends out of a tin can, sliced it end to end, folded back a flange on each part, drilled the flange, and then used this flange to strengthen and join the regluing we did with the boom.  It worked great.   I did have to watch out for the flange and screws, though.  

Dave was a gentle soul.   My mother would have loved him for himself.   But the fact that when he came to visit, he and my father would get to work fixing anything broken or needing improving in the house didn't hurt his popularity with her.

PS:  That's how I got to be a Jewish fixit man too.   Same with my cousin Ted, who spent even more time with Dave.  Cousin Mark also got a good deal of the "handy's" as well.