March 12, 2025
Tribute to Eugene Woodbury: The Tinkering Gene
Family memories regarding Eugene Woodbury's teen years coalesce around his hands-on projects. Growing up, he was a tinkerer with televisions and go-karts. He wrote about TV Wars on this blog: his ongoing hunt for tubes to fit into televisions of the 1950s - 1970s.
He also constructed go-karts. The Bill Cosby routine below almost perfectly captures those experiences, despite our family living in the suburbs, not the city. A similar freedom infused our childhood from oldest to youngest, despite the gap in years (15) between the oldest Woodbury child (Ann) and youngest (Kate). Eugene is the third oldest sibling.
Our mother's rule was "you have to be able to hear me if I call." Otherwise, we were free to roam our suburban neighborhood, which in the early years was filled with kids ready and willing to play games and dare the laws of physics. Eugene spent a great deal of time outside or in the garage, building stuff.
It is fitting that, like our father, he owned one of the earliest home computers, back in the days when a computer could do little more than act like a typewriter and cost three times as much as a current Smartphone.
Posts on Eugene's time in Japan and Eugene's writing will follow in April and May.
Feel free to comment on this post about Gene making stuff!
Labels: Tribute
