Extraordinary People: Gene Allen, Sr.

Since the first writing about an extraordinary person recently I have been flooded with ideas of others who deserve recognition. One I have thought about time and again, and there is so much to write -- and so much I never knew about him -- that it seems folly to try capturing him in a few short paragraphs. Yet he is compelling and I want to try.

Gene Allen, Sr. was my grandfather. He was born three years after the Wright brothers made the first powered flight. At the age of nineteen, less than twenty-five years after that first flight, Grandpa taught himself the principles of aerodynamics, designed an airplane, and built it using a motorcycle engine in his parents' basement. They had to be exceptionally understanding; the wall had to be knocked out to get the plane out of the basement. A good illustration of how genius can be focused on one area and blind to others near, no? The airplane was first flown from a grass field that later became Kansas City's downtown airport. He later designed and built another, this one a low-wing monoplane in an era of biplanes.

Grandpa spent his working life as an engineer. He only had a high school education. Through intense curiosity, observation, experimentation, and motivation he designed the first self-propelled Gleaner combine, bringing the company out of the horse-drawn era. An exact scale replica of that combine, carefully made from tin cans, still survives in a family member's home.

One of Grandpa's nicknames was Genius. I don't know how he would have scored on an IQ test, but there are two qualities that put him into the exceptional category: practicality and creativity. It probably was a factor that he was around during the Great Depression, but he had that quality of not wasting things, not disposing of things when tired of them or they were just a little worn. In fact, if it were possible he would avoid buying something if he could make it himself. Photography was one of his passions, and rather than buy darkroom equipment he made it all himself. That equipment still works and is in my sister's home. He made tools, picture frames, sailboats, house modifications...just about anything he really wanted or needed.

Grandpa was more self-sufficient than many. He taught himself to draw (a color plate of butterfly drawings is framed in my mother's living room). He modified car accessory designs. He taught himself to cut gemstones. He loved camping in the mountains, and set in motion the family habit that is now in its fourth generation. Thinking about it, the word can't must have been a bit foreign to him. This, too, has been passed to successive generations.

Grandpa was kind, moral, and unpretentiously religious. He was Scoutmaster when his sons were in Boy Scouts. He delighted in his family. He was never harsh, and instead was quite patient. He grieved for his wife's sudden death in a car wreck before age 50, and went on with his life.

It's impossible to gauge the ripples of influence Grandpa sent out into the world. There may be only a handful of people alive who know what he did for farmers gathering their crops. The qualities he mastered and lived have been impressed into his family, and doubtless to all the families he was involved with in daily life, and the qualities have been passed on and on without his name attached. Yet but for him things may have been very different for many people. A regular George Bailey.

Grandpa died in 1980. We would probably miss him more, but since we are what he passed on there's a smile involved, too.