Marshall Thomas Joseph Garlinger, my mother’s first cousin, was bigger than life for his generation at 6’6” tall. And he definitely was not skinny. He had worked at AT&T and then during WWII was in charge of engine repair for all army boats that came into San Francisco. This is one of our favorite Marshall stories.
Marshall had contacted Valley Fever, so he was staying with my parents to recover. For some reason, he never got dressed – but paraded around the farm in striped pajamas looking like an escaped convict. One day, the telephone company was laying a cable to our home to replace the overhead wires. Marshall wandered out to talk to the driver and told him that he had invented the cable laying machine. The driver clearly thought that he was nuts. Marshall asked him to look at the patent number on the machine. Then he recited it for him. To say the least, the driver was completely nonplussed.
This wasn’t all that Marshall had invented. When we would comment on a recent invention, he would often say I invented that years ago – but never applied for a patent. And he had the paperwork in his home in one of the hundreds of boxes of papers that he squirreled away. He really was a mechanical genius.
aginggratefully 