By: norm on June 21, 2009

A brief story with one of the small reasons I love my dad:

At some point in high school, a group of friends and I built a potato gun.  One weekend night, we took the gun and a sack of potatoes out behind the high school and blasted away.  Being somewhat geeky, we did not attempt to damage anything (Except for the poor, unsuspecting potatoes), but we did shoot a couple straight up into the air and timed them from launch until splat down.  I took our times home with me.

When I got home (most likely around 1am or so after a typical late night visit to Dennys), my dad was still up watching something on tv.  I told him about the gun and the potato launches and our times.  He immediately stopped watching tv, got a scratch piece of paper and pencil and sat down with me and started doing physics.  With no internet or book to help with formulas and no calculator to help with math, he calculated the initial velocity of our cannon.  Then, he calculated the maximum length we could shoot a potato.  By the end of the night, I had information on which yard line we could stand on and shoot a potato through the uprights for a potato-field-goal.

I certainly owe a lot of who I am to my father (the good stuff, mostly).  I don’t say it often but I love him very much and appreciate the influence and example he has been to me throughout my life.

And, I’m boning up on my newtonian physics for the day Jax or Tyler comes home with potato entrails splattered on his shoes and some measurements.

Jun 21, 2009 | Categories: Family, Journal | Tags: blog, lolo, norm | Leave A Comment »