The day we broke my Dad’s Vice.

I don't know why I have been thinking about this incident lately, but for the last couple of days it has been on my mind. This was the angriest I had ever seen my dad where I was the object of the anger. For a long time I thought that was the worst thing in the world. I had to get much older before I could actually disappoint him, and that turned out to be much worse, but that is another story.

It was the summer of 1971. I know this because in the garage we had our new, 1971 Pontiac Parisian. Four door, blue metal flake paint, it was the first car we ever owned that had air conditioning. My mother had put these nasty plastic seat covers on the seats. Plastic seat covers may not have been a bad idea normally, but we live in Medicine Hat. Medicine Hat has two seasons. Hot and brown which runs the better part of half the year, and cold and brown, which consumes the other half. This meant that plastic seat covers either gave you blister raising burns or frost bite that would deaden skin. To combat this, a blanket was put over the plastic seat covers. I remember when we sold that car, the seats were in pristine condition. I remember telling my dad that I was glad we had kept the seats in such pristine condition for the new owner to enjoy as we had never got to enjoy them. The next car didn't have plastic seat covers. But I digress.

It was summer 1971. I believe it was July. It was evening. Evening in the summer in Medicine Hat means that you can't cook eggs on the sidewalk in the shade. But you can still cook eggs on the asphalt in the shade and the sidewalk in the sun. If you imagine hell and throw in some pink, plastic flamingos, you are probably pretty close.

Robin was my foster brother. He was a Métis. He was a year older than I was. He had been my foster brother since I was one year old. We were as close as any brothers there ever were in the world. Looking back as an adult, I realize two things. Robin was easily led. He was also most likely at least mildly mentally unstable. A kind of manic, destructive, marginally psychopathic bent which made him an excellent childhood companion. I would come up with ideas that were obviously dangerous, sometimes illegal and always ill advised. I would tell Robin. He would convince me that they were perfectly reasonable. I would then convince him to go first. This worked out well for me as I was able to observe the results and decide on the merits of the idea. In all the time I knew Robin he only ever broke his leg once, and never required more than 12 stitches at one time. I admit that he was following my instructions to implement one of my ideas both times but I don't technically consider them my fault.

My parents were in the house. I don't know what they were doing. My mother, as all mothers are, was insane. I never knew if bearing children did this or if having them around was the cause. In the winter she used to keep the house hot enough to bake bread in. In the summer, the air conditioning was cranked so high you could use it as a meat locker. The upside I always felt is old people had severe heart strain from the shock when leaving or entering our house. Which meant you could pretty much be assured that no adults would be getting in the way in the middle of what ever adventure we had planned.

On this particular evening, we had decided to go into the garage and play with power tools. The thing about playing with power tools is you have to actually do something with them or it is no more fun than playing with a light switch. The other thing about being eight years old and playing with power tools unsupervised is not to be caught. This ruled out saws. Saws make a mess. You have to find things to cut, you have to hide the things you cut after you cut them and then there is the attendant sawdust. We settled on drills.

I don't remember the particulars but at some point before this we had seen my father cut the head off a nail, mount the nail in the drill and use it as a drill bit. This produced a very small hole. We, OK probably me but I like to remember it as more of a group effort, came to the conclusion that we could cut the head off a nail, mount it in a drill, drill holes in the work bench and not get caught. The holes would be small. We had access to nails. If we heard the door, we could hide the drill quickly. It was perfect. Again, with adult hindsight I can not for the life of me figure out how this is entertainment. Maybe all children are insane.

At this point, it is worth mentioning that my dad had purchased a new vice about two or so months before this. It was blue; it had an anvil on one end. It was quite large. It was an impressive piece of equipment. It was mounted on the edge of the workbench. The workbench ran the length of the garage beside the car.

To embark on the actual drilling of the holes in my father's work bench we first had to cut the head off a couple of nails. When we had seen my father do it, he used a pair of pliers. I wonder why they are called a pair, but that isn't germane to this story. When my father did it, we obviously had not been paying attention. We didn't seem to realize there is a part at the bottom of the pliers designed to cut wire. At least I think we missed it or I can't see the following events unfolding as they did.

We put the nail in the pliers. We squeezed. First one of us, then both of us. The head did not come off the nail. We decided we needed a mechanical advantage. We put the pliers in the vice. We twisted the vice as hard as two children under the age of 10 can. We hung from the hand of the vice, both of us at the same time. Still the head refused to pop off. We then got a five pound blacksmith hammer and a, I believe, seven pound sledge hammer and took turns whacking the handle of the vice. At one point, there was a snap, ping, wizz and bang noise either all at the same time or in very rapid succession. Even now, thirty five plus years later I can still hear it, it was the sound of trouble. Then next thing that happened I can still see as if it happened yesterday, in slow motion. The front part of the vice fell on the floor. At that point, we noticed that half the pliers were on the floor beside it. We didn't know where the other half was.

It took two of us to lift the front of the vice on to the bench. We slid it in just as if nothing was wrong. We turned the handle and nothing happened. We didn't know why, but we knew it couldn't be good. We then picked up the unscathed nail and put it away. We took the half a pliers and put it in a neighbors garbage can several houses away. Everything looked right. The perfect crime. Off we went as if nothing had happened. We had perfected acting innocent by then. I suspect we weren't as good at it as we thought but our parents probably didn't think we were as evil as we were.

Several days later, my dad is in the garage. He calls us into the garage. We innocently go into the garage. He asked us if we had been playing with his vice. We of course deny it. He says he knows we are lying but what he wants to know is how two kids snap the screw in a vice. We ask him what he means. He then pulls out the front vice, turns it over so we can see inside the channel cover, he is steaming, and shows us the broken screw. Interestingly enough it was at that point that I figured out how a vice works. Then, no longer keeping his cool he asks where the other half of the pliers is. BUSTED. He points to the other side of the car where there is half of a pair of pliers embedded in one of the two by fours of the opposite wall.

He swore at us, and then he swore at us in German. His parents were German and he spoke German but he never swore in German unless he was REALLY mad. He was angry because we broke his vice. He was angry because we broke his pliers. He was angry because the pliers could have hit the new car instead of missing it and hitting the wall. But mostly he was angry because we lied to him and we had unleashed something that could embed a half a pair of pliers in a two by four sixteen feet away and it could have been one of us rather than a two by four.

After he calmed down, it seemed like a long time but it might not have been, he asked us what we were trying to do. We told him the story of trying to cut the head off a nail and how we weren't strong enough to do it with our hands. We told him of hitting the handle of the vice with hammers. He was still surprised we could generate enough force to break the screw. He didn't ask what we were going to do with the nail once we had cut the head off it. We felt there was no need to volunteer that information.

We sold that house and moved to another when I was seventeen. I removed the pliers from the wall of the garage before we moved. It had somehow become the place where my dad hung ropes. He never got rid of that broken vice. He mounted it on the new work bench in the new garage at the new house and used the anvil on it now and then. He had a smaller vice he used and some years later, we got him another big vice for Christmas.

My dad has passed away several years ago, and I miss him a lot. I don't know why this incident has been on my mind the last few days but it has. There are probably many life lessons children should learn from this story, but I don't know what they are. I hope you enjoyed me telling out about it.

I wonder if anybody else reads these things. I have read some peoples but not regularly. If somebody actually comments I might write more, then again I might not. One of the problems about any of the blog stuff is you can only continue to write if you are passionate. Otherwise the things you are passionate about take over. I think that means you can only really write about passive things. If you are obsessed with looking at a painting, or plumbing fixtures or something. Most the things I am passionate about are activities which I would rather be doing than writing about them.