We both grew up in the Spokane Washington area. I went to John Rogers and Judy went to Mead High School. Here we are 45 years later, and out in the middle of North Carolina we have been having a Rogers class of 1960 class reunion. Two of my good buddies from school live or work in the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina. As we drew close we made contact and for the last four days we have been reliving all of the old pranks and science experiments that we together conducted “Long Ago, and Far, Far Away.”

Let me introduce Eddie Mauget, better known in this area as Lewis. He lives in the Raleigh area and works here as a contractor this fall in Winston-Salem. We didn’t get to meet his wife, Carey. From Ed’s description she sounds like a wonderful gal. Another good buddy was Bob Parry. Bob and his wife Pat live in King SC, on the fringes of Winston-Salem. Bob commutes to Charlotte NC to work five days a week. We visited with Ed on the evenings of Wednesday and Thursday, then we hung around to visit with Bob and Pat on Saturday.

What did we reminisce about? Lots of back yard experiments. How about the water pipe ram jet? This was a one foot chunk of one inch water pipe, a six inch piece of inch and a half pipe and two bell reducers. We ground the tip of a ball point pen cartridge until the ball fell out. We washed out the ink and drilled a press-to-fit hole for this fuel injector in the top of the bulged out part of the ram-jet.We then hooked that up to a model airplane gas tank with regular gasoline in it. Now here comes the innovation. To make a ram jet go it has to be flying at probably a hundred miles per hour. Now we were under sixteen at the time so we couldn’t mount it on the side of a car and go out and drive a hundred miles an hour while pouring gasoline in this thing, so we did the next best thing. We hooked Bob’s Mother’s vacuum cleaner up to the front of this and sent a blast of air into the combustion chamber. We started the fuel and touched it off at the end of the exhaust pipe. We had a flame coming out a foot long. It was fantastic. We tried the experiment a couple days later and forgot to switch the hose on the vacuum. It took us a few seconds to figure out the flame was going down the hose and into the vacuum and we had to shut it all down. Yes, the vacuum did survive. Electrolux made a good product back in those days.

I know this sounds like we are all ledgends in out own minds. There is one thing for sure, we were geeks before they coined the word. We all three have had long careers as engineers. It sure was fun comparing notes and remembering the past.

Good bye from North Carolina. Judy and I send our love to our friends and relations.