Oh! It's Nothing....

In 1983 our family lived in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. At the time it was the fastest growing city in Oklahama. (In spite of the fact that their annual festival was the "Rooster Day" ??? .... no roosters around that I saw). We had a big yard that joined in the back with the other neighbors yards and no fences. That year we were into model rockets. We (er the kids!) had a lot of fun shooting them up then chasing them. But not Shane, he was off to the side building his own rocket. Now I'm not sure if you've ever seen a model rocket go off, but they're fast, scary, and they go high, really high. So here's Shane with some gift wrap tubing making a super-duper rocket. He puts one long tube on top of the other in the center and 3 or 4 shorter tubes around the bottom. Then he takes masking tape and wraps it all up. (Have you ever seen the Red-Green show?) The center tube is not quite straight where the extended tube meets, but hey, the masking tape holds it all together. Some of the neighborhood kids are enjoying the fun when they notice Shane building this "rocket". They start laughing and kind of making fun of him. "That homemade thing will never get off the ground!" Smirk, Smirk, Chuckle, Chuckle!

But Shane's not one to care, he's too busy building his rocket. Finally, it's done and it's time to shoot it off. Everyone gets serious as when these things take off they really fly, and this one, well, this one looks like it may go in any direction! Shane puts the rocket on the launch pad hooks up the rocket engine to the wires that lead to a launch button about 20 feet away. We all get behind garbage cans, or garbage can lids and wait for the count down. Now the kids are starting to laugh again, but then it's time. "....5, 4, 3, 2, lift off!" Whoosh! The unlikely rocket shoots up above the trees as we all look in awe.

"Wow!" Smiles break out on everyone's faces. "Did you see that" All of a sudden the heckling turns into admiration. Shane has the biggest smile on his face. It actually worked!

That's the way Shane's childhood was, always thinking, always inventing. Now cut to his adulthood. Shane falls in love with his soon to be wife and decides to make her a present. His brother Jason had gotten some carving knives for a present and Shane asked him if he could use them. The next thing you know he was carving an ornate Victorian style photo album out of wood!. Never having carved anything before it looked like a piece of art when he got done with it. In fact it was so good that it was accepted into a national Woodworking Show held in Detroit where it was displayed with only about a dozen other pieces of woodworking art under glass!

Last year I was over their home (Shane and Holly's) and Holly says to Shane "did you tell your father?" "About what?" he said. "Your patent". "You got a patent?" I said. "Oh, It's Nothing..." "Nothing! You're the only person I actually know that got a patent!" Since then he's applied for several patents and have received 4 so far. Here's the name of one of the patents: "Lean burn engine control nox purging based on positional loading of oxidants in emission control device" That's a mouthful.

Shane is a humble guy. He's a hard-working father, deacon at his church, a loving father, and still an inventor. College came hard for him. He worked his way through college and graduated on his own. Amazingly he graduated from a Christian college (unrecognized in the workaday world) competed against engineers from some of the finest college in the U.S. and today he is rated as one of the top research engineers at Ford Motor Company!

Shane and Holly haven't forgotten their roots and still remain humble.

Once again, I'm blessed by the Lord to have a son like Shane.

Oh, Happy Birthday Shane!