I am astounded by the  news that  the the new President at   Boeing  is  from  Renton and  started from the  bottom as a mechanic like  I  did many years  ago.

I might have been President if I had been more patient and worn a hardhat.

I was new there, working at the Marginal Way plant  drilling holes in the bulkhead structure . Right above me  was a girl as a rivet bucker for a riveter partner securing  the  pilot's housing  structure. Somehow the  girl above lost her grip on a heavy chunk of steel called a  'bucking  bar' and it fell directly on my hatless head , knocking me flat on the  floor, bleeding like a stuck pig from a crease  on my forehead. She looked down when I yelped and ran someplace for help.

Pretty soon  the  foreman and others crawled under the bloody scene, told me to stop howling got  me out , wiped my forehead and told me  go to a first aid station. The girl rivet bucker never did  come  down and  inspect what I thought was a fatal wound and would be disfigured and perhaps have a huge lump above my eye forever.

The boss came down, yelled at me for not wearing a hard hat and tied a towel or  something around my head and sent me  wobbling  down to a first  aid station in the tunnel below the assembly floor.

Amazingly, I was passing the company cafeteria and suddenly my fairly new bride who at that  time was working  the same shift in the Button Room was in the tunnel and shrieked  when she saw her bandaged hero. A nurse explained to Bow Wow, (her nickname given by fellow workers when they discovered that her maiden name was Bower) that I was not fatally wounded and would only be scarred after awhile.

She relaxed and went into the cafeteria and brought me a peanut butter samich.

I rested in the nearby first aid station and she drove me home at shift end.

She knew how  to drive  my '29  Model A Ford. She knew quite a bit about that car.

I had  it when I was dating her before W.W. II  and one night I was driving us home from Jantzen Beach in Portland where we had gone to a dance. It was our first real date and I was feeling amorous so as we wound down a leafy back road. I had this  great idea that I would fake a reason for pulling off the  road and cleverly turning off a gas valve under the instrument panel.

A minute later  the engine coughed  and  announced that we must be out of  gas. As I began to slide over toward her  she said," I don't  think we are out of gas. Better turn the valve back on."

I don't know how that guy from Renton got to be president of Boeing but I doubt he ever got skulled by a woman dropping a steel bar or embarrassed by a girl who knew all about old cars.