Stu

Stu by Bruce McAllister

The first time I met Stu, I was just a kid and there weren't any lights hovering over his house. The last time I saw him, when I was grown and we both knew what life could be if you let it, there were. That's the best way to start, I guess.

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That first time, our dad piled us into our old Chevy wagon—the kind you took to drive-in movies with sheets on the seats and your kids in pajamas—and drove us to the north county, saying only, "Stu is an inventor. He'll never see any royalties from his inventions because the navy owns them, but he's an inventor, the kind that made America great." Our dad was director of a navy laboratory on Point Loma, and he was an inventor too—which made us proud—but he was very humble when it came to his friend Stu. "All I've invented," he would say, "is a car headrest, and I didn't do much with it." It was true. He'd invented a headrest for cars in the 1940s, when there weren't any, even if people needed them then, too. He'd even patented it but hadn't tried to sell the patent or find venture capital for it. After all, he was a career naval officer; the navy was his life, and what a life. He got to work on classified projects with his favorite people: electronics experts, materials engineers, microwave physicists, and the kinds of inventors who, like Stu, had made America great. How had he first met Stu? How does anyone in the navy get to know a wide-eyed, crazy-haired inventor who wasn't at all "by the book," who shouldn't have been anywhere near the military but somehow was? On a Secret Project, of course. My brother and I—who were ten and six at the time—were sure of it. Our dad and Stu had to be working on a Secret Project together. We had evidence. Only a few weeks earlier we'd gotten stuck after school waiting for our dad at the Lab, which is what they called the row of old converted navy barracks. We'd stood there patiently in the parking lot until we couldn't stand it any longer, then started playing with the little pieces of neatly cut brass and other alloy that someone had tossed out a window instead of