.

Dan Fahey

Patrick Fahey

Mrs. Mimna

IDE—9/10

March 17, 2010

Patrick Fahey

Mrs. Mimna

IDE—9/10

17 March 2010

Dan Fahey

            Daniel T. Fahey, my grandfather’s, story begins on March 7^th, 1933, in Aurora Indiana, a small town 35 miles west of Cincinnati nestled on the shore of the Ohio River (Home page). He was the youngest in his family of six, with two older brothers and one sister. His father was the foreman for a foundry making enough money for his family to live comfortable in lower middle class. “I'm the baby of the family. It was great because I could do no wrong,” Dan remembered in a personal interview. He and his family lived in a house across the train tracks from the Aurora Casket Company.

            When he was a child, Dan and his family listened to the radio for entertainment. “Everyone used to sit around the radio and my mother listened to every baseball game that was broadcasted over the radio from the Cincinnati Reds,” Dan recalled in a personal interview. Occasionally, he and his family actually went to a Cincinnati Reds game. “We were always baseball people. We liked the National League baseball as apposed to American League, who we used to call the junior league,” he said in a personal interview. When Dan was young, television was nothing like it is today. There were only a few channels, and Dan said in a personal interview, “What little you could watch on the TV was full of snow.” He thinks today’s entertainment is much more vast and exciting, nothing like listening to Jack Armstrong: the All American Boy, on the radio. Compared to today, the things Dan did for entertainment were much few and laid-back then today, with the Internet and thousands of stations on the television. A kid today could probably not sit around a radio and be satisfied with today’s more intense entertainment.

            Dan attended Aurora’s local public school through high school, graduating from Aurora High School in 1950. School was routine for Dan, but he never missed a day. Upon graduation, a special award was given to him for his perfect attendance. In fifth grade Dan went to the spelling bee and finished fourth. Even sixty-six years later, he still remembers the word he missed and it’s spelling still haunts him: Larynx. During seventh grade, Dan got a job at the Palace Theater, a local movie theater. Consequently, he watched a lot of movies as they came out in theaters. He kept this job through high school, and with the money he made paid his way through college, with some help from his parents.

            The day Dan graduated high school; he was to report to get a physical for the army. Dan had worked hard his whole high school carrier to keep his grades high enough to stay out of the draft. When he went in to get the physical, the doctor told him that he had a heart murmur, which was more serious back then, and that he wasn’t eligible for the draft. Although he learned he had a heart murmur, it was a relief that Dan didn’t have to go to war, and lucky that he keep his grades up because if he hadn’t, he would not have been accepted into Tri-State College and later to Michigan State.

            Dan was the first in his family to continue school after high school. It was normal when he was growing up to just follow your fathers trade. Dan’s father sent him to work as an apprentice and it was then that he decided he wanted to farther his knowledge so he could get a good job. Before this experience, Dan hadn’t planned to go to college, as non of his siblings had, but decided he didn’t want to work on a hot, stinky farm his whole life. Now, after two generations, college is expected in the Fahey family, and I even if I did want to work on a hot farm all day, I would be doing it with a college degree, all thanks to my grandfather raising my father with high standards for education.

            Dan moved out of Aurora when he was nineteen to Angola, Indiana, where he got a degree in engineering at Tri-state College. He received his Masters in Business Administration (MBA) at Michigan State and went on to becoming an engineer.

            Dan moved to Hamilton, Ohio, located in southwest Ohio close to Cincinnati, where he got his first job as an engineer. Dan remembers his first job fondly, saying in a personal interview, “It was so exciting that I could hardly wait till Monday morning to come so I could get back to work.” Dan went onto do many other mechanical engineering jobs, as well as working in residential and commercial construction business. He is proud of the work he has done over his life. “I helped put a man on the moon without an electron calculator,” Dan said in a personal interview.

            Of all the things Dan helped create as an engineer, the hydraulics system for the NASA’s Apollo missions, which would create the space shuttle that carried the first men to the moon’s surface. The hydraulic system helped steer four of the five engines on the spacecraft, which would be crucial to guide the three astronauts on board to the moon (“Saturn V First Stage”).

            NASA’s Apollo missions will be remembered forever in history all around the world. For thousands of years man has looked up at the moon, always looking at it but never getting any closer. On July 16, 1969, the engines of the Saturn V spaceship fired up and carried three men out of Earth’s orbit, two of which were to become the first men to take a step onto the moon. After four days of traveling through space, a lunar module carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin landed on the moon’s surface. The original predetermined landing spot on the moon, called the Sea of Tranquility, was too rocky for Armstrong to land. He was forced to fly to module to a smoother surface, leaving only thirty seconds of fuel (“Apollo Program”). Armstrong contacts NASA’s control center in Huston, Texas, at 4: 18 in the afternoon, saying, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” according to “One Giant Leap for Mankind.”

            While half a billion watch on their televisions on earth, Neil Armstrong climbs down the ladder of the lunar module and set the first ever human foot onto the Moon’s surface, saying, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” a quote that will forever be remembered (“July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind”). After Aldrin joins him, the two spend two and a half hours on the moons surface, taking pictures and collecting samples of lunar rock. Before returning to their spaceship, the two leave an American flag a plague that reads, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” The site where the lunar module landed has become historic, and the three astronauts along with it as they landed back on earth on July 24 (“Apollo Program”).

Apart from working on hydraulics for the Apollo missions, Dan also worked on the hydraulics for ballistic missals and high-speed torpedoes, which played a large role in the Cold War between the US and Russia, as well as a revolutionary prototype of a flying ship. Dan and his coworkers worked on hydraulics for a One hundred fifty ton boat that would use hydroplaning to get up to fifty knots on the hydrofoil and six feet out of water. Hydrofoil is a structure mounted on the hull of a boat that allows the boat to lift from the water while moving forward. The boat Dan worked on would have been ideal to travel in wavy oceans. While normal boats are slowed down by waves, the prototype would have been able to go above them, reducing drag and increasing speed. Unfortunately, the prototype never went anywhere.

  Dan even invented something of his own. “We went from aerospace jobs to garbage trucks. I have an invention—a patent—that helps speed up the collection of garbage and it was a hydraulic device that did that,” he said in a personal interview. Although Dan no longer continues to work today, he came out of retirement to help with the building of his son Brian’s house.

While attending college in Aurora, Dan met a woman named Maxine Spangle, known to her friends as Mickey. She was the niece of his landlord and only in high school, but soon later the two married. When they moved to Hamilton, their first son and my father, was born on September 23, 1959. They named him Brian Patrick Fahey. Between Brian and Engineering, Dan’s hands were full. When the family moved to South Bend, Dan remembers Brian almost burning the house down when he was only three. After a move to Columbus, Ohio, in 1964, Dan and Mickey had their second and last child, Patrick Glen Fahey on March 17, 1967.

Unfortunately, tension arose between Mickey and Dan and the two separated. Dan remarried Betty Vitalie in 1973 and after meeting her through her niece in a bowling league that both Dan and she were part of and remain together today.

The two live in a house in the suburbs of Columbus Ohio in the city of Powell, with his two sons and five grandchildren, including myself, all living nearby. They do not participate in many activities today except for housework and working in the garden, which Dan said in a personal interview, “is quite a change of the activity of being in construction.” He says that he misses doing construction work.

Recently, Dan has begun to try and learn to play the drums. “Emphasize trying,” Dan joked in a personal interview. His son, Brian, who is a drummer as well as a doctor and a father of three, got his father started on the instrument. Dan has a set in his basement, which he messes around on frequently.

Another interest of Dan’s was oil painting. He started the hobby thinking that it would interest him, as engineers do a lot of sketching and drafting. He took a few classes at the YMCA to learn the basics, and has done several painting, including two of both his sons’, which he plans to display. Now, however, Dan no longer oil paints. “The reason I quite was I didn’t think I had the talent to be a good painter. I think its something you got to be born with. You can learn to be mechanical but you cant be taught to be great at painting,” Dan said in a personal interview.

Recently, Dan celebrated his seventy seventh birthday with his family. One thing he has lived by in his life was, “that anything worth doing is worth doing well.” He has proven he lives by his motto in the work he did as an engineer, whether it was helping man reach the moon or helping garbage trucks compact more trash. He worked hard in school, not missing a single day, and went on to farther his education against odds that he would follow in his father’s career. Dan is a wise man, but never fails to see the humor in life.

I went into writing this project knowing that I wasn’t going to like it. My first hint that this wasn’t going to be my favorite project was when I asked my grandpa for an interview about his life and he responded by saying, “Not all of my life.” In retrospect, I probably should have tried to find someone else to interview, but sure enough interview day rolled around and I didn’t get the type of answers I wanted after pressing question after question. His answers were only just answers, not stories about his life like I wanted and like this project was designed for. I got to know what my grandpa’s political view was but heard no story about why or how it got that way. More interviews followed but more of what I was looking for didn’t. I usually have no problems finding words and never have to worry if my copy will be too short, but for this I had work hard just get his whole life out and had to keep adding more to make it long enough. This project was just that, a project, and although I didn’t loath every minute I didn’t love those minutes either.