160620 June 20, 2016

My Wax-On, Wax Off Moment

by Tommy Towery

LHS '64

        The Karate Kid is a 1984 American martial arts drama film starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki "Pat" Morita and Elisabeth Shue. Daniel LaRusso and his mother Lucille move from Newark, New Jersey to Reseda, Los Angeles, California. Their apartment complex's repairman is an eccentric but kind and humble Okinawan immigrant named Kesuke Miyagi.  It is an underdog story where Daniel's training starts with menial chores that he believes only makes him Miyagi's slave. When he becomes frustrated, it is explained that these actions have helped him to learn defensive blocks through muscle memory. 

        Although the movie was released well after our high school days, I made a mental comparison to it and one of the skills I learned, almost unconsciously, when I attended Lee.

        The other day I was working on a hobby project which required numerous steps to be repeated in order to complete the venture. It made me wonder exactly where I had acquired the talent to set up an assembly line operation efficiently to accomplish the task. My thoughts took me back to the first time I remember doing so, and that was when I first started working on Lee’s Traveller in the 10th grade. My fellow journalists and I not only had to collect and write the articles for the paper, we also had to print and assemble it for distribution during those early days, before we finally had the finances to send it off to a commercial printer. Henry Ford may take credit for inventing the assembly line, but we felt we discovered it for ourselves.

        After laying out the paper by cutting and pasting the stories onto a template, Bob Walker, LHS ’64, would type them onto a stencil which we attached to the mimeograph machine to print. The machine printed only one page (and one side) at a time so we had to turn the pages over and run them through the machine again to print the back side. Once all the pages were finished we then created our assembly line. We walked down in a line picking up one page at a time and assembling the paper until all the pages were stacked together. We then stapled the copy together, put it in a stack, and then marched around to get back at the end of the line to do it all over again. Working in a constant stream, it was an easy task for a group of us to assemble the hundreds of copies to sell.

        I never thought much about the organization skills I was learning at the time, much like Daniel never thought about what he was really learning during his “wax-on, wax-off” exercises. The physical task actually took a back seat to the mental process we were both learning without thinking.

        A few years later in my life, those learning skills became essential to me when I was preparing bombing mission packages for the B-52 bombing missions in Vietnam. We needed to construct a package for each of the aircraft's six aircrew members. Each mission normally included three B-52 aircraft in a “cell.” When the bombing of Hanoi began in 1972, each target was attacked by a mission involving multiple cells. All the packages had to be done without hesitation and completed on time, which required doing some tasks almost mechanically and without having the time or luxury to stop and think about what you were doing.

        In a way, the skill set I learned working on Lee’s Traveller in high school became an instrument for helping put an end to the fighting in Vietnam and freeing the prisoners of war being held by the North Vietnamese.

        The same demand for such organizational skills was later put to use in 1986 when I was stationed in England and helped prepare the mission materials for Operation El Dorado Canyon, the strike against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in retaliation of the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing. The concept of setting up an assembly line in an orderly and logical fashion was instrumental in the completion of the paperwork required to successfully complete the operation.

        Today, those skills are used for more humane purposes. Sue and I belong to a Sunday school class which helps out feeding the homeless by providing meals for them. Once again I called upon those principals I learned in school to help organize an efficient assembly line and we can fill and box close to 100 meals in less than 15 minutes. If you were to observe the operation, you would find a close correlation of the actions of the Lee’s Traveller staff walking through the construction of the school papers and the Sunday school class filling the Styrofoam boxes with meals to feed the unfortunate.

        So, like the Karate Kid, my life was changed as I learned skills which I never thought about at the time. I find myself wondering if any of you might have made similar observations you might be willing to share.