The Eagle Has Landed (Part IV)

Enter the ‘Son In-Love’
In 1973, Rockwell transferred Ed to their new base of operations in Seal Beach, in Orange County California, just south of Long Beach where I lived. He was hand-picked by the U.S. Air Force to be the launch propulsion test expert on the initial round of the top-secret Global Positioning Satellite initiative.

I obviously didn’t know him during his days at Cape Canaveral, and I’m sure he was wound fairly tight back then as well, but dude, I’ve gotta tell ya, he was a pretty imposing figure when we first met in 1978.

Maybe it was the pressure of keeping a lid on the details of his work — still years away from becoming the household name that GPS has now been for more than a decade.

Perhaps it was that the stress of his job was being multiplied by the constant travel to and from Vandenberg Air Force Base — all the way up in Santa Barbara County — the site of the testing and initial GPS launches, and more than a one hundred fifty-mile trip, one way, from his home North Orange County.

All I knew was that he was a big, intimidating man, and it was in my best interests not to piss him off.

Ours was the typical ‘prove-to-me-that-you’re-good-enough-to-marry-my-daughter’ dynamic early on (or at least that’s the way I perceived it), but thankfully, things got much better a few years into the relationship, sometime after he and Michelle’s Mom were transferred back to Cape Canaveral in 1982, where Ed would finish out the remaining five years of his career before retiring at age 55.

We talked about that during our extended time together, that Sunday, a week before he died. Although any tension between us had long since passed, I’d always wanted to know what he really thought of me back then.

I knew that they accepted me, but I always sensed there was something about me that Michelle’s parents just didn’t trust. No one ever said anything to my face, but I sure as hell felt it.

I now wanted to know if the vibes I had received from him in those early years were real or just an emotional mirage on my part, exacerbated by my own raging insecurity and me-against-the-world attitude of my early adulthood.

He hadn’t minced words at any point during our five-hour confab, but in this particular instance rather caught me off-guard when addressing the question of how he first assessed his new son in-law.

“I saw you as a guy who worked in a grocery store, and I was concerned about that,” he said matter-of-factly.

In all fairness, Ed had no reason to see me as anything else back then, as it was more than ten years after Michelle and I were married before I actually went out and got a ‘real job’ — the Art Director position at the Record Company I held from 1990-92. If the shoe had been on the other foot — particularly in view of what I now know from my 15 years’ experience as a freelancer, I’m sure I would have felt just as — if not more — uneasy than Michelle’s Dad did.

However, happily, the apparent uneasiness on either side of the relationship would fade as the years passed, particularly so following Ed’s retirement and subsequent heart attack (resulting in the first of two bypass procedures that he would undergo).

I don’t know if it was the relief of the pressure he felt previously in such a high-intensity job, now mitigated by retirement, or if perhaps it was meeting death squarely in the face by virtue of the heart attack that changed him, but by the mid-80s, Ed was a different man; a kinder, gentler soul; a man I could now identify with and friend instead of fear.

I guess, to be absolutely fair, the process began even before Michelle’s folks returned to Florida in 1982, on Ed’s final reassignment to The Cape. It was sometime within a year prior to their departure from SoCal, when Michelle and I attended church with them one sunny Sunday morning — the same church in which my bride and I were married.

I don’t remember whether it was before or after the service, but we were outside in the courtyard, mingling with the other parishioners, being introduced to friends of Michelle’s folks. At one point, I made the proactive move of introducing myself to one gentleman while everyone else was otherwise occupied. As I was shaking his hand and introducing myself as Mr. & Mrs. Carpenter’s Son In-Law, Ed turned to the two of us just in time to correct me, mid-sentence, in trademark Big Ed style, booming, “No, he’s my Son In-Love.

Yeah. He really said that. And yeah, I >really was floored.

Was it for show; something to say that sounded ‘right’ on a Sunday Morning at church? Perhaps; but in the nearly 30 years that have passed since, I don’t think he was just making nice — not based on the man would come to know in later years.

It took a long time for me to completely overcome the inferiority complex I felt around my In-Laws, but If they truly hadn’t accepted me, I’m quite sure I would have known it in no uncertain terms. I believe the perceived ‘problem’ was much more about me than it was about them.

And things would indeed get better; much better.

An Unlikely Guru
In years of observing not only my own circumstances, but that of other married men I know, there’s a single consistency in most Father in-Law/Son In-Law relationships: The FIL wants his little girl to be protected — regardless of how independent and capable she might be — and the SIL wants to prove that he doesn’t need to be told how to accomplish that task.

It’s a Battle Royale of male egos, no matter how amiable things appear on the surface. I’m sure it goes the same way on the opposite end of the gender scale with Mothers and their sons. But unfortunately, since my natural Mother was gone and the relationship between my Step Mother and me was still distant at best at that time, I only saw one half of the equation. And it really ate me up.

But then in the late 80s, something happened that changed everything: Personal Computers.

I began working with computers at what nowadays seems like an ancient age of 34 years old. My friend, Randy had offered to set me up, support, and train me in a desktop publishing business he wanted to try to develop In Southern California. Attempting to scratch his own creative itch; he only needed an artist, and believed that the two of us could make it happen.

I hadn’t done anything to deserve the favor — the least of which was show and aptitude for computers. In fact, we weren’t any more than just ‘church friends.’ I didn’t even really like the guy all that much; I thought he was kind of a blowhard. But it was just another example of why you should never judge a book by its cover.

I’ve written plenty about my gratitude to Randy for launching my career as a graphic designer, Art Director, and later, Web designer. However I don’t think I’ve ever given him proper credit for also providing the means for the relationship I would later enjoy with my Father In-Law.

Yep. Hard to believe it, but if it wasn’t for what Randy did for my career, my relationship with my In-Laws might have been completely different — I know my friendship with Ed Carpenter would have been.

Sometime in the late 80’s-early 90s, Ed bought a personal computer. Now I would have thought this to have been a marriage made in heaven, Ed and his PC. After all, we’re talking about a rocket engineer who was among the first class of people to even work with computers. I would’ve thought he’d know ‘em inside and out, but surprisingly, no, no he did not.

In fact, the computers that he knew and used — you know, the big ol’ UNIVAC-type — the kind that filled up an entire room and worked with punch cards and tapes? Well apparently those things were a lot bigger in size than they were in computing power.

I was absolutely floored the day that Ed told me about those late 60s-early 70s computers that he and others worked with to send the Apollo astronauts to the moon. My jaw hit the floor when he revealed that they in fact had LESS computing power than a circa 1989 IBM 386 PC.

By the time we moved to Tennessee in 1992, I had been building my own PCs (with plenty of telephone support by MY guru, Randy), for more than 3 years. I was fairly competent, but no expert by my own estimation. Ed Carpenter would beg to differ.

He would call me constantly to ask how to do this or that, and how to deal with the sometimes buggy Windows 3.1 operating system. I would walk him through steps in DOS to partition and/or reformat his hard drive. I sent him boot-up floppy disks to use whenever his system would crash — which happened at an alarmingly consistent rate.

He just seemed amazed that I nearly always had the answer to his computer problem. I was glad to help, and more than just a little embarrassed by the fact that he seemed so helpless on his own. Had he not lived in Florida at the time we would no doubt have spent hours on end together at his house, troubleshooting his ‘puter.

But to his credit, although it never seemed to keep him from having more (and sometimes, the same) problems again later on down the road, he was usually able to resolve the problems on his own, after a little coaching from his unlikely guru.

Diff’rent Strokes
That, I believe was the breakthrough in our relationship. He never looked at nor treated me the same after the mid 90s, following the dawn of our ‘new’ roles. He finally seemed to respect me for who I was now, rather than who he thought I should have been earlier.

And please understand that I have never held any avarice or cynicism toward Ed in regards to the ‘computer guru’ thing. I was and always will be grateful to God (and Randy) that there was something — anything that could develop a true common interest between us.

We were, quite frankly, cut from completely different cloths. He was a self-starter, having forged his career out of a love and interest in electronics as a boy in the 1940s. He studied, built crystal radio ‘kits,’ became an aficionado of early television technology, and then parlayed it all into an Army career as a radar technician.

Following his four years in the service, in which he served at the top-secret Nevada Proving Grounds, where he was engaged as a ‘Ground Zero’ atomic test soldier, he stepped right into the new and burgeoning U.S. Space Program, and began a 35-year career with the company that would become Rockwell International.

Compare that to me: a passive, shy, athletic-but-non-aggressive artist/introvert, who’d never had a full-time job (and never wanted to), who was somehow going to supposedly support his stay-at-home wife and two young children.

I’ve been an athlete and a pro sports fanatic my whole life; Ed never played any kind of organized sports, and was much more at home doodling in his garage than watching a game on TeeVee.

Ya see what I mean?

The fact that we were ever friends was really a minor miracle. Oh, I could be cordial with a turnip, but to say that we actually enjoyed hanging out together…well that’s a pretty amazing statement right there.


Next: The Right Stuff