Dennis Peterson: Makin' Do

From BBC Radio 4, Britain's biggest paranormal podcast is going on a road trip. I thought in that moment, oh my god, we've summoned something from this board. This is Uncanny USA.

He says somebody's in the house and I screamed. Listen to Uncanny USA wherever you get your BBC podcasts, if you dare. What's up this is your boy Lil Duvall and check out my podcast Conversations with Unc on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Each and every Tuesday, Conversations with Unc podcast feature casuals and in-depth talk about ebbs and flows of life and the pursuit of happiness. Unlike my work on stage, I tap into a more serious and sensitive side to give life advice and simply offer words of encouragement, yet remind folks to never forget to laugh. Every Tuesday, listen to Conversations with Unc hosted by Lil Duvall on the Black Effect Podcast Network, our hard radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by AT&T. Connecting changes everything.

It is Ryan here and I have a question for you. What do you do when you win? Like are you a fist pumper, a woohooer, a hand clapper, a high fiver? I kind of like the high five but if you want to hone in on those winning moves, check out Chumba Casino. At ChumbaCasino.com choose from hundreds of social casino style games for your chance to redeem serious cash prizes.

There are new game releases weekly plus free daily bonuses so don't wait. Start having the most fun ever at ChumbaCasino.com. And we return to our American stories. Up next, the story from our regular contributor, Dennis Peterson. Today Dennis shares with us the story of something his father did called make and do.

Here's Dennis. It surely had something to do with his having grown up on a farm and during the Great Depression but daddy expressed few desires for things and he seldom made impulse purchases. He bought only what he needed. If he needed it but couldn't buy it, he made it or did without. He was always looking for the better deal on what few things he did buy. Daddy hated debt.

He had built his own house on his own land. The only debt he incurred was for the drilling of a well on his property, something that he was unable to do himself. He paid his brother-in-law, my uncle Dylan, $10 a month until the total was paid off and he never owed anyone a dime after that. Rather, daddy saved money.

Actually it was probably mother who saved it but daddy certainly was behind her efforts, never fighting against her on it. I recall that every time the Knoxville News-Sentinel raised its subscription rate, daddy threatened to stop the paper but mother always found some way to trim the household budget, usually through getting better buys on her grocery purchases and saved enough to pay the higher rate and keep getting the paper. For years, home delivery of the seven-day subscription was only 50 cents a week but if daddy needed something, he saved for it, not making the purchase until he had the cash in hand to pay for it. That's what he did when buying a car or truck.

He saved and saved over a long time. Then, when he was approaching the amount needed for the purchase, he began shopping around for the best deal. When he thought he had located the vehicle he wanted, he sat down with the salesman and stated his terms, 90 days, same as cash. If the dealer wouldn't accept those simple terms, daddy simply got up and walked out. That's how he bought every car and truck he ever owned. Daddy was not tempted to exceed the top amount he had determined to spend by any dealer add-ons, options, or extra features or enticements. He wanted no luxury features, no radio or air conditioning when those features were optional. He did get them when they became standard. His trucks never had radios.

They were work trucks, no wide white sidewalls if it was extra, no fancy hubcaps or wheels, no more chrome than was standard, and those were the days before most of the cars were made of plastic. Daddy saved more than money though. He seldom threw anything away.

We might need it someday. He would offer as a reason for hanging on to something. Many a time when I had nothing to do when I went to work with him or on rainy or cold days when we could not work, he had me pull nails from scaffold boards that had been nailed together. After I removed them, he instructed me to straighten them and store them in a large coffee can or jelly jar or old wooden box. He might need to reuse them later. He also had a similar collection of old assorted sizes of screws, bolts, nuts, washers, and rubber gaskets. Then when a need arose for one of those items, it would be available. He wouldn't have to run to the hardware store to buy one. He would, however, spend an hour or so searching through endless cans and boxes and other kinds of containers until he found the right item for his current need. This was all part of what he called making do.

But to make do, you had to have a ready supply of material and tools to make do with. That's why he saved not just money but everything. But I was impatient. I couldn't understand Daddy's thinking. Daddy, I sometimes tried to reason with him, you save all these nuts and bolts and washers and screws to save money.

But then you'll spend an hour or more hunting through the whole collection trying to find the right one. Don't you know that time is money? He couldn't see it that way.

I'd resigned myself to his never changing. The problem was that it was often my time, too. The place where Daddy's make and do concerned me most was on the job site.

He sometimes improvised in ways that clearly were unsafe to himself, me and other workers. For example, when I was so young that I could carry a maximum of only three bricks at a time, I was working with Daddy on a house that on the upper end was one story tall, but on the lower end was three stories. The pile of used bricks that had been dumped on the upper end meant that I had to transfer them as needed on the scaffold all the way to the other end of the house. Daddy rigged a two by ten walk board running from the brick pile to the uppermost scaffold. I was to carry my three bricks up that board and along the scaffold walkway to the other end of the house. My problem was that with both of my hands on the bricks, I had no way of balancing myself on the walk board.

I would fall off. Listening to my complaint, Daddy conceded and agreed to put a hand rail on one side of the walk board. That sounded to me like a safer solution to the problem, but after he added the rail and I tried it out, I discovered that the rail made the walk space on the board even narrower, forcing me to walk toward one side of the board. Daddy insisted, however, that it was safe. I tried to make it work and promptly fell off the side without the rail and into the pile of bricks below.

Daddy's make and do once just about did him in too. He was working high on the scaffold and the gable end of a house. He used two walk boards nailed together with 16 penny nails to span the central part of the scaffold. Is that safe? I asked with genuine concern. Of course it's safe, he responded, sounding a bit hurt by my doubts.

I built it, didn't I? He walked across it once and then recrossed it, bouncing up and down on it a little to demonstrate his point. Over the course of the day, however, his repeated walking and bouncing across the gap caused the nails to begin working loose. Near the end of the day, the board suddenly separated as Daddy walked across them and down he fell about 20 feet into a wheelbarrow of freshly mixed mortar.

Other than a skinned shin and a bruised ego, he was uninjured. But what would have been the result of that fall had that barrow of mortar not been there to cushion the fall. On another occasion, when Daddy made do, he nearly burned our house down. We had been having some trouble with our water heater not being able to meet the demands of a family of six. One Saturday, we asked Daddy to look at it and see what the problem was. Upon examining it, he determined that one element had burned out, but he thought that he could jury rig it so that it would still produce heat. I don't understand electrical appliances enough to know exactly what he did, but I think he somehow bypassed something and rewired some other thing. And it worked. Problem solved.

Or so we thought. On Monday afternoon, we drove into the garage when we got home from work and for some odd reason, I happened to look toward the opposite side of the garage where our water heater was. I saw one side of it blackened from bottom to top. My eyes followed the direction of the rising soot stain to the ceiling joist. They were charred and the insulation between the joists was blackened.

Fortunately, the fire caused the circuit breaker to do its job, cutting off the power and preventing further damage. That's what can come from make and do. But Daddy remained a make-do man all his life. And a great work as always by Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to Dennis Peterson. And you can go to DennisLPeterson.com to hear more of his stories, the upsides and the downsides of having a make-and-do kind of dad or mom or anyone around you.

And I've had enough of them around me in my life and sometimes they're a joy and sometimes they'll kill you. The story of Dennis Peterson's dad, so many dads around this country like him, here on Our American Store. I'm Katja Adler, host of The Global Story. Over the last 25 years I've covered conflicts in the Middle East, political and economic crises in Europe, drug cartels in Mexico. Now I'm covering the stories behind the news all over the world in conversation with those who break it. Join me Monday to Friday to find out what's happening, why and what it all means.

Follow The Global Story from the BBC wherever you listen to podcasts. It's time for today's Luckyland Horoscope with Victoria Cash. Life's gotten mundane, so shake up the daily routine and be adventurous with a trip to Luckyland. You know what they say, your chance to win starts with a spin. So go to luckylandslots.com to play over a hundred social casino style games for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Get lucky today at luckylandslots.com.

This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. eBay Motors is here for the ride. With some elbow grease, fresh installs and a whole lot of love, you transformed a hundred thousand miles and a body full of rust into a drive that's all your own. Brake kits, LED headlights, whatever you need, eBay Motors has it. And with eBay Guaranteed Fit, it's guaranteed to fit your ride the first time, every time or your money back. Plus at these prices you're burning rubber, not cash. Keep your ride or die alive at ebaymotors.com. Eligible items only. Exclusions apply.