MATTHEW BURNETTE

Staff Writer

Any great improvement that’s ever been made in the world stems from a person finding a unique solution to a problem and thinking in a more unique way than the others that came before them thought.

Ingenuity sent astronauts into space to walk on the moon when no one else had before.

Ingenuity led Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler from Iowa, to invent the world’s first bread slicing machine, setting a benchmark for new things that’s still referenced today.

Ingenuity led the vacuum companies to switch from bags to those clear plastic containers to collect dirt so you can see just how filthy your house is.

Ingenuity is one of the greatest tools a mind can have… when it works that is.

The downside to any ingenious idea is that it also requires a flawless execution. You can come up with 100 intellections in your lifetime, but if you can’t figure out a way to make it a reality, then it doesn’t do much good.

The person that immediately comes to mind on this subject is my great-grandfather, or Pop as we called him. I’ve written about him before, namely about his pet parrot Sam and the time he bought me a pig for my fifteenth birthday.

I spent a lot of time with him on his tiny makeshift farm that he started after the passing of my great-grandmother.

There’s something about tending to animals that brings out the most creative parts of your brain. Pop was a mechanic by trade for most of his life, so he was well-trained in scoping out a problem and finding a solution.

Was the solution always the best? Probably not. At least once I saw him replace a belt in his car with a shoelace. It worked but probably wasn’t the safest option.

In his defense, he was good with his hands. He raised a flock of chickens for a while, and in the process of preparing for the pack of poultry, built a large coop to house them in. Naturally, as a teenager with nothing better to do in the summer, I helped him.

When it came time to put the door on, he didn’t bother with going to the store and spending money on some fancy hinge. Instead, he found an old piece of sturdy but pliable rubber that was in his shed to cut and use.

It kept the door closed when it needed to and opened just the same.

Of course, that is forever seared into my memory because prior to nailing the pieces of rubber to the door he asked me to hold it for a second and before I could even ask why he was cutting it with his rotary grinder about three centimeters away from my left thumb.

Pop thought OSHA was how a southern debutant says, “Oh sure.”

But as mentioned before, not all of Pop’s ideas were executed flawlessly.

After finishing constructing his brand-new coop, Pop decided that he didn’t like the location he placed it in. He wanted to move it, but the structure was rather large and a little too heavy for us to carry.

You could then see the light bulb go off over his head, metaphorically of course. There were no lights in the chicken coop, and I don’t know that I would have survived helping install them.

Pop’s new idea was to take his car, a small four-door sedan, and drive it into the corner of the coop and gently scoot it across the yard.

The main problem here was that he was notorious for having a lead foot and gently wasn’t really a word in his vocabulary. He accelerated towards the coop, and as soon as you heard fiberglass hit wood, it was obvious there was an issue.

One corner of the coop was pushed inward and bowed the whole structure. All of the chickens went flying out, and the whole thing played out to the soundtrack of Pop shouting his favorite curse words.

He backed his car up, the coop settled back to its original position (mostly) and now we were tasked with catching about ten chickens.

Another opportunity for a Pop innovation.

He found an old badminton net that we used to use at family picnics. He handed me one of the poles and he had the other, and he instructed me to run alongside him as we caught them in the net.

A good idea on paper, but Pop was nearly 80 at the time and considerably slower than I was. So as I ran, he briskly walked, leaving a large amount of slack in the net. As we approached the first bird, it saw what we were trying to do and promptly and quite easily hopped over the net.

We ran around his yard with that net for at least 30 minutes and didn’t catch a single chicken with it.

We eventually gathered all of the chickens back into the coop, and he fixed any damage that had been inflicted by his car. As the sun started to set, we sat on his back porch as he smoked a couple of cigarettes, and I wiped the sweat off of my face.

“I’ll think of another way to move it tomorrow. Will you come back tomorrow, and we can try it again?”

That was the best idea he had had all day.