'The Lamonster Chronicles'

#9 - Fiddling with Disaster!
When Lamont went out on his own as a mobile welder, he approached it like everything else. He was never satisfied with things as they were. I remember him getting a several thousand dollar, brand new Miller welder. He was very excited about it. He installed it on his truck and started using it. I dropped by his house one day to find it with the panels off and him digging into the guts. He was soldering on circuit boards, messing with the wiring, and who knows what all.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked horrified. ‘You’re going to destroy a brand-new, top of the line welder! At the very least, you’re voiding the warranty.’ Though I knew that was an empty statement as Lamont was never concerned about warranties. He altered everything right out of the box, most of the time. I suppose he just couldn’t help himself.

‘I don’t like the way it works’, he said calmly, without even turning his head away from what he was doing. ‘I want it to do things that it won’t do; I’m fixing it.’

‘You’re fixing a meticulously crafted machine engineered by a team of highly skilled experts with degrees, working for the best welder manufacturing business in the world…’ I asserted. Thinking of Lamont’s dropping out of school in the 10th grade.

‘Yep!’, he said. And that’s exactly what he did. Because, according to him, it did what it couldn’t do when he was finished. Miller found out about it and wanted to know what he had done to it. Then Miller started sending him prototypes to use and alter any way he liked. I guess you could say these things just fell into his lap. But I suspect there was a great deal more to it than luck.

How he knew what to do with that welder is beyond me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. But after all these years, it still amazes me.

#10 - A Christmas (Almost) Story
I had a bunch of vacation built up at work. They said, 'We're going to give you the last 3 weeks of December off, and the 1st week of January. If you don't take the time, you will lose it. So, we decided to do a nationwide round robin to visit friends and relatives from Colorado to Montana to Indiana to Florida, with some sightseeing along the way.

Lamont and his family had left San Diego the year before and relocated in Greeneville, TN. So, we put them on the schedule, between seeing my dad in Indiana and a good friend in Florida.

We spent Christmas with my dad in Fort Wayne. They conveniently arranged for 8 inches of snow on Christmas Eve that year. We left the day after Christmas and headed to Tennessee to see Lamont and crew.

The next morning, Lamont said, ‘I have someone that I’d like you to meet waiting for us in the driveway'. We discovered that it was his realtor, all ready to take us out and show us available houses in the area. I said, ‘I don’t know what Lamont told you. But I’m not looking to move. I’ve got a career in the fire department back in San Diego, and you would be wasting your time.’

The very nice lady replied that, being between Christmas and New Years, she had no clients or prospects. We could load into her van and she would give us a history tour of the area. Mixed in, she would show us a few houses so she could write the trip off on her taxes.

I said, 'OK’, as long as you realize that you’re wasting your time. So, we all piled into her van and off we went.

We did have a good time. There is a lot of history in Greeneville, TN. We were also impressed with what you could get at such low prices. Especially when compared to similar properties in southern California. It was pretty shocking. But we didn’t really see anything we might be interested in, especially considering that we were not looking to move. So, we said thank you and parted ways.

We all stayed up late that night, our boys enjoying their renewed friendship with Lamont’s boys. Lamont and I got up early the next morning, everyone else still in bed. We sat around the kitchen table talking about the day before and the properties we’d looked at. The realtor had left a listing magazine with us, and we leafed through that as we talked.

‘Is there anything else you’d like to look at?’ Lamont asked. ‘I don’t think anyone is getting up anytime soon, so breakfast isn’t going to happen for a while.’

There was one place, a 31-acre farm not far away, that I was curious about. Just curious, mind you, not really interested. We had time to kill so, why not, I said. And we headed out.

We found it easily and we spoke with the wife who was outside mending fence. She told us the property had sold a few days before, but again. I was not disappointed in the least. And we headed back to the house thinking about the home cooked meal that we hoped was awaiting our arrival. We took the same route back.

Along side the road I caught a quick glimpse of a small sign that said, ‘For Sale’. It was pushed into the ground at the end of a long gravel road which disappeared over a rise into the woods. Neither of us had seen it on the way out. That’s how inconspicuous it was. It didn’t say anything about what was for sale. Just a phone number.

I pretended not to have seen it at all, knowing that Lamont would want to make too much of it. But it didn't fly.

Lamont was driving. He said, ‘Did you see that?’

‘You mean the ‘For Sale’ sign?’ I replied innocently.

‘Yes, I didn’t see it on the way out. What did it say?’

‘Nothing really. Just a generic For Sale sign and I think a phone number.’

‘Do you want to go back and take a closer look?’ He asked.

‘No’, I said. 'The ladies will be up by now, let’s just keep going.’ Hoping that he was getting as hungry as I was. But I already knew I was sunk. Lamont never listened to anything I said. It made me wonder why he even bothered to ask. We turned around and went back.

‘Just a phone number’, I pointed out as we approached. ‘Same thing on the other side.’ With nothing but that long gravel driveway to nowhere visible. We took down the phone number and the address off the mailbox and headed to the house.

Lamont called the real estate agent from the day before. All she wanted was the address. Said she’d get everything she needed from that. But shortly, she called back asking for the phone number because she couldn’t find anything listed at the address.

Incredibly, it turned out to be a house and 11 acres for sale. The house sat way back off the road and couldn’t be seen from that end of the driveway. The agent handling the sale had just gotten her license and it was her 1st listing. She didn’t think anyone would be interested over the holidays, so she had not actually listed the property for sale yet. She'd just put the For Sale sign out intending to list it in the New Year.

‘But I’m willing to show it to you if you like.’ She said. ‘When would you be available?’

‘Well, we’re leaving for Florida tomorrow, so it will have to be today.’ I said. Thinking that would end the conversation and we’d be off the hook. I didn’t want to be the bad guy with these 2 realtors going to all this trouble, and then not even offering to look at it. It was already early afternoon.

‘I can be there in an hour’, she said.

I loved the place; my wife absolutely hated it. We made a ridiculous lowball offer and headed out of town the next morning. Honestly, I thought that would be the end of it. My wife was all in a dither over my impulsive action. You can imagine that it was the topic of conversation all the way to Florida.

After a great visit with our friends there, we headed back to San Diego. Still talking about the property back in Tennessee, of course. My wife had reams of reasons why we shouldn’t do it. I told her there’s no way they are going to take that offer. But strangely, the idea of moving to Greeneville, TN was growing on me.

We were headed west on I-10, somewhere in west Texas when our realtor called and said they had countered with a price $5,000.00 more. I couldn’t believe it. We ended up taking the offer and moved into our new home in May.

There is absolutely no doubt that Lamont is the reason we now live in Greeneville, TN. It’s still hard to believe. It came as close to not happening as anything could have.