The last time I saw Jack, who was 71 when he died Sept. 1, was as I descended from the sounds of music in Mother Stewart’s courtyard into the tap room.
Because he was wearing something other than his work suit, which was a pair of well-worn blue jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt, I almost told him, “I see your wife dressed you tonight.”
I mention that because of the style of attire suggested for his memorial service: “casual or ‘ugly casual’ (old t-shirts, plaid, chicken prints, all denim, Palmer Mfg. logo shirts, etc.)”
Just as I could hear Jack’s voice in those words, I took pleasure in the rest of an obituary so wonderfully full of him.
“He enjoyed reading, scrolling Reddit, rock climbing, being Papa Dude to his granddaughters, spending time with his beloved friends and family, and was an avid Pelotonia rider, in which he was the oldest person to complete the 200-mile ride in 2023, a very proud achievement of his.”
“Enjoyed” – usually a throw-away word – jumped out at me in that sentence because the tensile strength of the joy with which he did what he did was, to me, his most remarkable trait.
Without being threatening, he exuded the blue-collar physical toughness of the Springfield he grew up in.
In 40 years of interviewing people, one of the metrics I’ve thought about developing is one that measures the percentage of the essential person we are that we manage to realize in our lifetimes.
Jack flirted with pushing the percentage of his “Jackness” over 100 in a way you’d expect from, say, a person who might climb rocks and complete the 200-mile Pelatonia at age 70.
A throwback, he was the son of a foundry manager and a guy who embraced the title “foundry rat” in the way an NBA player embraces “gym rat.”
The company – companies – Jack founded and operated for 49 years at corner of Main Street and Bechtle avenue first built machinery for foundries. It did so in a way that reflected the experiences of a grumpy young Jack who, time and again, swore under his breath trying to fix a piece of equipment designed by engineers who had zero consideration for the unfortunate foundry rat who might have do the fixing.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
Garry Beair, who met Palmer in the early 1970s in welding class at the then-Clark County Joint Vocational School, calls that kind of knowledge “tribal knowledge.”
In a radio story I did for WYSO a couple years back, Palmer describes his gold standard for machinery this way: “Simple, you know, really easy to work on and thick – stupid thick. We always say, if you run into one of our machines with the forklift, you go fix the forklift.”
He was a doggedly creative a person in the way he approached problems – focusing on every aspect that made a machine or manufacturing process work.
That same attribute allowed him see potential for improvement or solutions where others saw headaches.
As he told me for the WYSO story: “I see opportunity everywhere – just driving down the road, talking to people, reading magazines. I can’t help but look at machinery and say, you know, ‘I could build that. I could incorporate that in some of my designs. That looks like something that we could use.’”
He reveled in talking about the many customers who came to him saying they’d approached others in search of a solution and were turned down time after time.
“The easy thing to do is say, ‘Well, no, I don’t make that. Thank you very much. Let’s go to lunch,’” he said. “That’s what losers say.”
I’ve wondered how many times he drove himself toward a solution with those same words.
Once he’d realized the machines he made to move sand in a foundry could be easily adapted to move other things – at first, the moving and mixing to recondition the sand used at golf courses – the whole world of materials handling opened up to him.
Palmer’s knowledge of his own machines and others eventually led people who were building factories to come to consult him. He didn’t set up the buildings but parlayed his knowledge of machinery to identify and arrange the pieces of it that, in the proper sequence, would become a production line. He thought of that process as “industrial choreography,” a term that clearly has a place in the lexicon of the industrial arts.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
Palmer also had an ability to relate to everyone who might be involved in production, from the shop rat he once was to the company president he had become. And that led to consulting work involving how a company might take greatest advantage of the potential of the people and machinery at its disposal.
I once told Jack that I wouldn’t be able to run my own business because the worries would constantly be with me, that it would be, for me, an unhappy life.
He called me “a very smart man” and said that the only people who should go into business for themselves were the ones that couldn’t stand not to.
I’ll end with the kind of observation I think Jack might like – one that employs the essential principals of one field work to productive use in another.
The psychologist Erik Erickson defined “generativity” as a trait that involves the “ability to transcend personal interests to provide care and concern for younger and older generations.”
Now the word generativity may seem hoity-toity in a shop. But its root word, “generator,” is not.
Jack was a generator – a generator of products, processes, relationships and advances involving the one thing in his life, outside of his family, a shop rat who came of age in the Springfield of the 1970s loved: American manufacturing.
His was a productive life.
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