I am astounded by the news that 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 hard hat.

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 pilots’ housing structure.

Somehow the girl 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 and ran some place 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 took 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 be only 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 WW 2 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 turned 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 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.