Paul Myers

Professor Raymond
UWRT 1103-038
28 September 2015
Typesetter, Clockmaker, Warrior
My late paternal grandfather was a man who always has intrigued me. He too was named
Paul Myers and was born in 1929 in the city of Dayton Ohio. He married my late grandmother
Lois, a woman his parents firmly disapproved of. She was a native of the Kentucky foothills who
moved to Dayton immediately after her marriage at some point around 1950. He was then
drafted to fight in the Korean War at some point within 1950 and 51. He was assigned to a
logistics group as a radio operator and never saw combat. He was deeply against the war from
the outset and did not appreciate being drafted, but he was never openly hostile about it. After the
war ended in 53, he returned to Dayton and worked as a typesetter for Craftsman. My aunt
Paula was born in 1956 with my father following soon after in 58. Later on he became the vice
president of an ad company whose primary customer was P & G. He never got rich, but his
family was fed and he got to retire at sixty-two. A good deal all in all. He was diagnosed with a
rare blood disease in his seventies and died at eighty-four.
The man was a jokester, a tinkerer, and also very far away. It has either been prohibitively
expensive, or prohibitively time consuming, to get to Dayton to visit him or my grandmother, but
I did learn a bit about him. He had an intense interest in handiwork and technology that ranged
from clock-making to the 1992 vintage iMac that he kept in his office until his death. He was
constantly tinkering with clocks, tools, and electronics in his basement workshop. When my
parents and I were emptying out the basement after my grandmothers death, my father kept

talking about memories he had of his father working on a clock or building a piece of furniture.
We lugged a solid brick of steel, he claimed it was a table-saw, up a flight of stairs ad across
several states because he so strongly associated it with his father.