When when I was young I knew my father was not like other fathers. Sure he drank beer and watched the Bears on Sundays, but he also melted metal in our garage on weekends and ran a DIY book publishing company out of our basement. We’d play catch in the backyard when I asked him to, but we’d end up at steam engine fairs instead of Cubs games. 

While my father certainly enjoyed revisiting the industrial revolution, these excursions had more to do with work. To this day, Lindsay Publications sells a line of technical books that borders on the arcane—turn-of-the-century machine-shop manuals, construction kits for high-voltage electrical coils, schematics for vacuum tube–powered radios (which my father restores as a hobby). 

While you, dear ReadyMade reader, probably consider yourself a well-adjusted individual, my father’s readers are anything but. These were the boys who asked for slide rules for Christmas and got them. They are 40 and up, avuncular, and career bachelors. (Recognizing this, my father added tip books on dating to the catalog. I’m told they sell well.) 

Dad falls into this demo himself. When my grandfather died, in his basement we found the ruins of a crude, circa-1962 computer my father built out of telephone switches when he was 16. I like to think that if he weren’t such a curmudgeon, he could have toed the line in corporate America, and I’d be thinking up ways to spend my IBM-bred trust fund. 

Despite my father’s daily spiel about the creativity and individuality that underlies building stuff, neither my brother nor I inherited the DIY gene. Instead, by high school I was writing poetry ripped off from T.S. Eliot, and today I write personal essays about my dad.

Now, I share with you a recent phone call, less Q&A than the same old monologue. 

Father: Hello? 

Son: Hello. It’s your eldest son. 

Father: What do you want? 

Son: I’m calling on behalf of a new DIY magazine. I want you to tell them about the lonely, middle-aged men who build Tesla coils for fun. And since that pretty much describes you, too, I want to know how I ended up being an effete writer and not an engineer. 

Father: Simple. You create with words to transfer ideas from your head to others. Artists use paint to put something that is in their heads on canvas. My guys do the same thing, but they are using materials to create machines. You are bound by your ideas, by what’s in your head. These guys are bound by the laws of physics. You create something that entertains people; they create something that drives down the road. 

Fifty years ago, you could open a copy of Popular Mechanics and it contained all kinds of articles on how to build things. Today, it’s a picture of some 4x4 to go out and buy. People who build things are interested in the tangible. The reason they do it is the same reason you like to write. They’re walking in the shoes of the great engineers—Ford, Edison, Westinghouse, James Watt, and Robert Stirling. And bravo for them. They are among the elite, because they are interested in creation. I joke that this is a society that doesn’t know how to fix its toilet. These people are scientists; they take the laws of physics and chemistry and create something. What they are is amateur engineers. And an engineer is a cross between an artist and a scientist. 

Son: But why are they so old and so male? Is an interest in steam engines something you grow into? I think the people reading this magazine are just a tad younger than you’re used to. 

Father: You’ve got to remember this had a lot to do with wealth. Back when the Boy Mechanics [a compendium of DIY projects for knickerbocker-wearing adolescents] were published in the 19teens, those were actually meant for boys. I don’t think most men could build that stuff now. Those kids didn’t have a daddy to go out and buy them a $1,500 computer. They didn’t have a pot to piss in. They didn’t do anything except play baseball and maybe throw rocks and break windows. That’s why it’s old men who buy my books. 

Also, you’ve got to remember that in the early 1920s the hot technology, like the Internet today, was broadcast. Radio was the newest, hottest thing. Because of that, little boys didn’t want to become spies or things like that. They wanted to be ham radio operators. Back then, when the technology exploded, you couldn’t buy a radio—you had to build one. Popular Science was filled with articles on how to build radios and amplifiers and microphones. 

That began to change in the 1970s, when electronics became cheap. When that happened everyone could afford to buy, so they stopped building. In 1958, there was no such thing as direct distance dialing. You had to call an operator to place the call for you, and that was expensive. Being an amateur radio operator allowed you to throw a wire out your radio and talk to people hundreds of miles away for nothing. 

But right around 1970, manufacturing advances allowed integrated circuits to be produced cheaply. The glamour was gone. People didn’t want to be in amateur radio anymore. It didn’t stroke their ego. But those who had grown up doing it took pleasure in building these things. That’s why I still do it. 

Son: So why did this tinkering gene skip me completely? 

Father: I don’t think it did. Remember the huge suitcase full of [Fisher-Price] Constructs? You were interested in building things with those just like I was with Tinker Toys when I was your age. When you’re a kid, you don’t have the tools or the intellectual capacity. As you got older, you branched into verbal. You used words to express ideas. I drifted away from the physical into mathematics, a subset of physics. 

Now, you draw up ideas in your head and use your imagination, and I use mathematics and mathematical models to conjure up circuit boards. If you and I didn’t have that kind of intellect, we would be doing things that are far more physical. I’d be curious as to what kind of intellect sculptors have. But that’s why I kept buying you Constructs like they were going out of style. I always wanted to build bigger and better things myself.