“With all due respect to journalists,” my father told me at an impressionable age, “lawyers hang their mistakes, doctors bury theirs, but architects and engineers fix theirs.”
In the early 1960’s my dad was commissioned by Leon Frazier to design at the foot of the Rocky Mountains a free-standing triaxial elliptical dome, 240 feet long, 160 feet wide, and 40 feet high to serve as the “tortoiseshell” of an ice rink called Winter Garden. Skaters played broom hockey beneath it. Dump trucks drove atop of it. My brother Roger and I rode our bikes up and down its wavy ridges. Eventually, shoppers got five-cent hot dogs and 10% off groceries within it. Without the aid of computer simulations, my father and his team first built a 1:12 model of the turtle in our yard by piling up sand in the shape of a giant pie and then spraying concrete atop it like a sugar glaze.
When the concrete cured, too cramped for adults to maneuver shovels much beyond the, my brother and I crawled in to dig out the bulk of the sand with kid-size garden tools. Once Tom Sawyer’s friends got wind of the adventure, they scrounged serving spoons from kitchen drawers to finish the excavation.
After we crawled back out for the last time, the team stress-tested the shell by piling on dozens of cinder blocks and setting us kids free to jump all over it. And then, one morning, we awoke to a pile of rubble no one could explain.
Afterward, my dad taught me an essential lesson about creative responsibility.
“Lawyers hang their mistakes,” he began the old saw, “Doctors bury theirs. But Architects and Engineers fix theirs.”
The turtle’s prework now in ruins, he and his team went back literally to the drawing board to start on the rework.
Once the dome was root-caused and redesigned, if my trigonometry serves, they must have hauled 12**3 times the sand in our yard onto an ancient clay deposit once mined for a brick at the foot of Squaw Peak. Learning from the baby turtle incident, and after the pie was rolled and patted, they poured reinforced concrete over all of it that, given a month to cure, withstood not just bigger bricks but, to my six-year-old mind’s eye memory, life-size trucks chock full of them.
Speaking of creation, I’ll leave you with a nod to some ancient prework that tops anything my earthly father ever designed.
These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth. —Genesis 2:4-6 (emphasis added).
This post is from a LinkedIn Newsletter called Human Changing. You can access the entire series here.
