Today, our little online muse came up with something that puzzled me. I wondered if someone had been digging into my background and discovered my family history. The challenge was to come up with a crazy business idea. If my dad were still living and working, he would have created a dozen.

Da was a mostly self-taught engineer and borderline genius. According to a psychiatrist friend of his, the borderline aspect of his genius was driving him crazy.

While the shrink may have been right, Dad’s instability did not stop him from being inventive, slick-talking, and convincing. He helped develop one of the most successful aftermarket automobile air conditioning systems around in my grade school years.

Later, he got into the news business and was what a newspaper photographer friend from that era called a film shooter. That meant he took black and white film footage instead of still photos. That experience led to the idea of shooting commercials to show in movie theaters along with the previews.

His final big idea was the first we know of a burglar alarm that would call the police when someone broke into a building. It worked beautifully, but like his previous endeavors, it went into the dustbin of history and business.

Dad had other ideas, some of which people helped him try and lost money. A few others cost us money but were too crazy to bring investors. With that said, as we now know, the only problem with some of Dad’s ideas was technology. The technology at the time would not support his ideas.

Today, almost every crazy idea my dad had in the fifties and sixties is making money for big corporations and their investors. So, where does that leave me?

It leaves me sitting here watching the news and weather forecasts about the coming cold front, writing a little memoir while waiting to go to choir practice. That’s about as crazy as I get these days.

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