One of our childhood friends is Kit W. There’s no doubt in my mind that he is indeed a mechanical genius.  I have not watched any “Network” T.V. since MASH ended because, in my opinion, real TV comedy ended when that show ended. As a result, I’ve never seen the program MacGyver. They say MacGyver can make anything with a jack knife with any material lying around. Kit is out of that same mold too. I think he could take a jack knife, go into a garage full of junk, and build a Boeing 747! When Tim and I were kids our special “gift” was wrecking things as opposed to building them. When we were in the midst of wrecking any of our toys by playing too roughly with them, our mother would always yell at us and say, “Why don’t you just take a hammer to it?” Hmmm, Probably because there weren’t any hammers within reach, I guess!  When we were kids and had “The Roost”, (click to read story) Kit built all kinds of neat and practical things for us. One thing was that he took a heater motor out of our wrecked 1951 Dodge “Puddle jumper” and made a fan to circulate air. He also took a track switching conrol board from our electric train set and an old doorbell we found, and made an electric doorbell! Both these things worked off an old auto battery we “dug up” somewhere. If I recall correctly, we swiped it from our barn, or was it Kit’s barn??? It was also his idea to build a basement in “The Roost” which kept us very busy for a few weeks! He showed us how to build “Spoke guns” (click to read story) which really gave us a lot of entertainment and fun!  I think his “crowning achievement” was the “Upside-down Bike” he built (see pic below)! I’m not sure if he had plans or guidance from somewhere else, or if he just thought of it and put it together on his own. (Hey Kit let me know). I’ll bet he thought of it and did it on his own. He flipped a frame from a regular bicycle upside down, added handlebars from old table legs, and spun his magic for the rest of the mechanical details. There was a lead pipe, if I recall correctly, for the seat stem and he bent it to make it comfortable to pedal. Kit, Tim, and I had a blast riding that bike down the road and seeing people’s reactions!!!! We needed a running start to push the bike as fast as we could, then put our left foot on the pedal then boost ourselves up on the seat. One time we put the hand bars i.e. “Ape hangers”, on our regular bikes just for the fun of it! I remember riding my bike down Collins Road with those giant “Ape Hangers” and getting a real kick out of it!!! I always looked forward Kit would ride into our driveway with his Upside down bike! I remember the first time he rode it to our place, it “blew my mind”!!! We would always hear Kit yelling “Yip Yip Yip Yahoo” to acknowledge his arrival. His genius really added some practicality and envy to our kid life!!!! Would that Tim and I had had the gift of building vice wrecking. If we had than our parents probably wouldn’t have drank to the extent they did!!! J