My brother, the Inventor
I’ve been told that I resemble my brother Lou.
I guess I do, so much so that even today someone will ask me if I’m still on the mail route he had. (Usually, I explain that Lou passed away a few years ago after having been retired from the mail route for about 20 years.)
I was very close to Lou, who was 15 years my senior. I was about 5 years old when both of my brothers entered the service during World War II. Lou joined the Air Force and Kenneth joined the Army. When the war ended, Ken and his family settled in Ohio, but Lou stayed in Dawson.
I admired my brother on several levels and learned critical life lessons from observing his honesty, compassion and inventiveness. That last part was a trait Lou groomed and grew over most of his life. After being laid off from the P&LE when the coal and coke industry began to crumble, he aced the Civil Service exam. Then he took on the mud, ruts, snowdrifts and tire chains of a rural mail carrier as his career. But tough times were not a challenge for “Jay,” as we called him. He routinely built his own furniture, grew his vegetables and made do with what he had. Never owning a new car, he would buy only what he could pay for with cash. But with a small camping trailer, Jay and his wife and son toured to National Park sites all over the U.S.
I could go on about my brother’s exploits and accomplishments, but a good example took place years ago when he was a youth.
Probably for Christmas, Jay got a Gilbert chemistry set. Although designed for young experimenters, it would, by today’s standards, be akin to handing a kid a stick of dynamite and a match. Along with an assortment of chemicals, the elaborate metal folding case contained a Bunsen burner, several lengths of glass tubing, and believe it or not, a bottle of mercury.
While we did not live on a farm, I believe most German/Scotch families had an agrarian gene in their makeup. My mother’s survival instinct led her to make her own butter, churned by hand from cream off the milk. At that time, milk was delivered to homes daily in glass quart bottles with a push-in paper lid. All the milk that was delivered to our house was whole milk. It was not homogenized, so cream floated naturally to the top of the container. My mother would scoop off the cream to make butter and buttermilk. However, the scooping process would disturb the division, and it was difficult to extract all the cream from the top.
Enter the young inventor.
Using his Bunsen burner, some of his glass tubing and an eye dropper, Jay fashioned a siphon that penetrated the cream to the exact bottom. The tubing was filled with cream from the eye dropper, then hung over the side of the bottle. Within seconds the cream would be siphoned In its entirety from the milk. Mom would accumulate the pure cream for a few days, put it in a container and literally shake the butter out of it.
Before my brother could patent his invention and make millions, milk became homogenized. With the milk and cream no longer separate, the ingenious cream siphon became, well, a J shaped piece of glass tubing.
Roy Hess Sr. is a retired teacher and businessman from Dawson.