Leif the RC Car Builder Appeared in my Dream

I wonder how often I dream about Leif. Like most people, I rarely remember my dreams. When I do, it's almost always because something awakened me during the dream. That's what happened this morning. The phone rang and woke me from a dream about him.

I was talking to some man, no one I ever knew, about how Leif built his radio controlled cars, starting with the one when he was in sixth or seventh grade. That kit was made in China and had no instructions in English. I think it's quite remarkable that Leif was able to figure out how to put the whole thing together and make it work just fine. Later, he modified it to make it lighter and faster.

Leif had not been a very interested or avid reader, only reading what he absolutely HAD to for school until he discovered that there were magazines about RC cars and cool automobiles. He subscribed to them and devoured them with gusto.

Since he had a subscription to "Car and Driver" and some other adult car magazines, some list somewhere decided he was an adult male and started sending him credit card applications. He got a laugh out of that, and decided to have some fun with it.

One day, he took one of the applications and answered it all truthfully. Occupation: junior high school student. Income: $260 annually (his allowance), etc. He sent it back to them. Apparently, someone got the message, as he stopped getting credit card ads.

But back to the dream. Leif came into the room and I introduced him to this man, who was very impressed with him. In the dream, Leif was in high school, tall, handsome and very slender. He was wearing is trademark spiffy clothes (like he did at that time, not at the end of his life).

I wish I had been able to finish the dream and find out the rest of it, but if I had, I might not have ever known about it.

This photo was taken long before the Leif of the dream. It was in our garden in Sachsen bei Ansbach, Germany, in October 1979. He was four years old, and the hint of those charming dimples is showing here. He needed a haircut. I cut all the hair in our family, and it was usually overdue when it got done, usually because the boys didn't want their hair cut.

I don't know whether I ever saw this photo before. I hauled out some old slides and scanned them a few days ago. This darling picture was among them. I wonder how many more I will discover if I ever get the time to scan all of the slides we took.

Leif and Motor Trend

Leif was fascinated with all kinds of vehicles from the time he was very small. One of his first words was "truck," and he loved anything that went under its own power. Second, but also loved, were things he could MAKE go, whether Matchbox cars or a Big Wheel. By the time he was in junior high, he began a really serious interest in cars, planes and radio-controlled cars, and subscribed to several magazines about them, which he studied carefully with far more interest than he had in his school work. He could give you endless statistics about the models of cars he found most alluring, particularly sports cars and monster trucks.

We found it really strange when this thirteen-year-old kid started getting a lot of mail from credit card companies offering him credit cards. It didn't take us long to realize that most thirteen-year-olds are not subscribing to Motor Trend and Car and Driver, and that those magazines had most likely sold their subscription lists to credit card companies.

In an effort to stop the nonsense, Leif and I devised a plan. We would have him fill out one of the applications being absolutely truthful. Occupation: junior high school student. Income: whatever his small allowance was at the time. And so on. He signed it with his terrible handwriting and sent it in. We had a good laugh thinking about what whoever opened it would think. It worked, though. No more credit card offers . . . at least until he was in college, which was a good thing. Although I don't think he would have been likely to actually get a card before he was eighteen without us signing, even as an adult he could not handle credit responsibly.

He had a lifelong love affair with vehicles and speed, and he managed to indulge them (while being in debt for it) with a Mazda RX-8 and a motorcycle, both of which he drove far too fast.
----------------

The red Ferrari is a photo that Leif took when he was 12 years old and in junior high and the drawing is one he made when he was an adult, in 1998 I think when he was 23 years old.

Leif at Fourteen - The Sudden Change From Boy to Young Man

When Leif was thirteen, he shot up in height to 6' 1", towering over his classmates, and thinned out to a slim figure that was striking. Unlike most boys, he was already shaving by that time, and his sudden puberty also brought with it a terrible case of acne. He was a handsome kid, even with the acne, and he seemed to take everything in stride. He never talked to us about any difficulties of growing up so fast physically, or mentioned worrying about the acne. It wasn't until years after he was a grown man that he told me that some of the kids in his junior high called him "pizza face," and that had hurt him and his self esteem to the point where, even all those years later, he felt women wouldn't be interested in him because of it. He was shy about approaching girls and women, and as an adult he would try to get to know women well by email, phone and texting before meeting them in person, to try to form a relationship before they would see him. And yet, he also professed to have good self-esteem and did have a high opinion of his mental abilities.

I read once that for most of us, our self-image is formed in high school, and that we have a hard time changing it or shaking it off long years after it is no longer appropriate. I don't know whether it is true, but I do think there is certainly a residual undercurrent of that, of what we thought we were at that time as we were coming into young adulthood, and it probably was true for Leif, too.

This photo, taken in the living room of our quarters at Fort Sheridan, Illinois is one of very few that show Leif's acne, and yet look at that glowing, dazzling smile! Leif had the greatest smile, if you could get him to let it go. He contained his emotions very carefully, and of often you'd get a half smile, a bemused look, not the full force smile that was so wonderful. I don't know who took this photo. It might have been me, but I don't recall having seen it until I found it in his photo album after he died. It was taken with his camera. I wish I knew the occasion on which it was taken. I wish I could see that smile again.

Leif the Photographer

When Leif was in junior high school in Highland Park, he started on four new interests that consumed him, learning to play the electric guitar, building and running radio controlled model cars, computers, and photography. The computer wasn't completely new, since we'd had one in Japan and Hawaii, but it was in Illinois that his interest blossomed and he also began using it for school assignments. I've already written about the RC cars and his guitars.

There was a camera shop in Highland Park that also sold used cameras. I was doing a lot of photography for publication in those days, as well as the usual family photos, and Leif was with me at times when I went to the camera shop to request special processing. My entire family seems to have the photography bug, at least in my generation, and Peter W. has it as well. I think it rubbed off on Leif. He spotted a Minolta 7000 SLR camera that he wanted and lobbied hard to get it as a gift. The set was considerably more expensive than what we usually spent for either Christmas or birthday for our sons, and I wasn't sure that expensive a camera was a good idea for a young teen. However, Leif was very technically savvy, and had some obvious artistic talent, and we wondered whether this might prove to be a really good thing for him. In the end, we made one of our many bargains with him. He would get the camera and the superb MD lens that came with it, one which went from wide angle to a short telephoto, and a flash apparatus as well, but they were for both Christmas and birthday, and he had to work off the remainder of the price that was above our gift budget.

The first couple of years he had the camera, he took quite a few rolls of film. His favorite subjects in those days were cool sports cars, whether seen on the street or at a car show, and our cat, Scamp. He also liked photographing ultramodern architecture. When we moved to Puerto Rico after his freshman year of high school, he photographed his first love, K., when they were on a date, and his friends at a party.

After that, he used the camera less and less and although he kept it, it mostly gathered dust. One reason for that was the cost of film and developing. He did take some pictures of Nikko when they were at Fort Drum, and a few with his army buddies, but after that, he acquired an inexpensive digital camera and the combination of that and his computer made it much easier to take pictures. From that time on, his main subjects were himself, his computers, his guns, his cars and motorcycles, and photos of the two women he was involved with and loved after his divorce. He also liked to take photos and video with his cell phones. I've posted quite a few of his photos on this blog already.

Eventually, when we were moving him to Florida, I asked him whether he wanted to keep the Minolta. He just shrugged. It was plain he wasn't going to use it any longer, and over the years the shoe mount for the flash had gotten cracked, so he thought it wasn't worth anything. I sold it with some camera equipment of mine and Peter W.'s and he was happy with the digital camera he had until it quit working. The last birthday gift we gave him was a new Fuji digital pocket camera he had his eye on, January 27, 2008, when he was here for dinner the day before his birthday. Sadly, in the two-and-a-half months he had it, he hardly used it.

The photos above are of Leif in Puerto Rico with his Minolta 7000 camera in 1992 when he was photographing the Tall Ships coming into San Juan during the celebration of the 500 years since Columbus discovered America, his camera, and one of the photos he took of a Ferrari in December 1986.

More of Leif's Childhood Art

Leif was far more interested in drawing weapons and space ships than people or animals as a child, and I can't recall that he ever drew or painted anything that one might have called a landscape or a still like. He didn't photograph them, either.

However, in his Kindergarten Art Portfolio, he did have three "animal" drawings. The top one here is a spotted dog, and it is much more like what other children his age might have drawn, with little idea of anatomy or real shape. However, the second one of the Dachshund is quite sophisticated and impressed the art teacher. His ability to define the dog's shape with the vertical lines and make it look as though it weren't stiff like the first one but active was remarkable for his age. I don't think he ever did anything like it again, though.

The third crayon drawing is an owl with a graduation cap. I believe he got the idea for this drawing from the "Little Professor" math teaching electronic "game" he had. He never drew anything remotely like this again, either.

I don't think I have any drawings or art creations of Leif's between kindergarten and junior high. The top photo is of a soft sculpture he made in one of his junior high art classes. It is Zaphod Beeblebrox from Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," a science fiction book he read on his brother's recommendation. He loved it, did a book report about it, and read the rest of the "trilogy" that had four books (absurd, as the books also were). I think his sculpture of Zaphod was quite good and I still have it.

Leif's "First Car" - the RC-10

When Leif was in junior high school in Highland Park, Illinois, he was too young to have either a car or a driver's license, but too old for the Matchbox cars. That's when he discovered radio-controlled cars. He save his allowance and gift money to spend on them. The first kit he bought was made in China and in those days (about 1986) the "English" instructions were nearly unreadable. With his mechanical skills, he figured out how to put it together and soon had it racing up and down the street.

Of course, typical of Leif, he had to have a better one . . . and a better one. The top of the line in those days was the RC-10. It was expensive and it took him awhile to save up the money, but boy, was it fast and sleek! Not content with the "out of the box" version, he spent what seemed to be an endless amount of money on different gears, wheels, bodies, and then modified the body. You can see in this photo that he drilled numerous holes in the aluminum chassis to make it lighter and therefore faster.

The RC-10 proved to be his ticket to two outstanding science fair projects. First, in seventh grade, he designed and carried out an experiment on how different tire treads affected battery life and the length the car could go on a single charge. In 8th grade, he went all the way to the Illinois State Science Fair with his intricate and excellent experiment on how different gear ratios affected speed and distance. Perhaps in the next couple of days I'll post photos of him with his science fair displays.

The obsession with radio-controlled cars had an added benefit. Leif had always maintained he didn't like to read, and getting him to read school assignments and books for book reports usually was an unpleasant chore. However, he loved reading about model cars, sports cars and radio-controlled cars and subscribed to several magazines about them, which he read avidly.

Actually, it wasn't that Leif didn't like to read, just that he didn't like the kind of reading he was required to do. Hand him the "right" book, like Orson Scott Card's Ender series, beginning with Ender's Game, and he couldn't put it down.

One amusing thing about his subscriptions was the other mail he got because of them. Evidently the profile for someone subscribing to Car and Driver magazine, for instance, must have been for a yuppy, or at least a young man with some cash, and of age. Leif got frequent credit card offers at the age of 13 or 14. We had no success in stopping the flood of them until one night he sat down and filled out one of the applications . . . truthfully, stating his occupation as "junior high school student," and his income as his meager allowance, etc. To bad we couldn't have seen the face of whoever opened it.

I don't know what happened to his RC-10. I think he had it at least until he went into the Army in 1998, maybe even after that.

Among his things when he died was a radio-controlled car. Still having fun. Now his nephew will enjoy playing with it.