My Father's Stillson Wrench

Original owner: Francis Chelsea Bacon (Bob’s  Dad)

In the Seabees, my father was a motor machinist mate. I was always impressed with his knowledge of knots. He knew them all. Square knots, running bowlines that didn’t slip, and even simple half hitches.

In Port Hueneme, California, at Seabee Electrician Power Pole School, we learned the bowline to rescue a man from the top of a 35 foot power pole. Everyone calls power poles telephone poles but they ain’t. Bowline sounds like a way to tie up a boat so that it doesn’t get away. That knot does not slip.

In his civilian life he was a millwright, welder, and blacksmith. Knowing ropes and come alongs and torches, he could fix The Crusher at New England Lime Company when it broke down. Huge, no tailgate Euclids would dump the broken up limestone into the The Crusher. It was loud, and you could easily hear it all over the Italian section of town, Zylonite, where we lived. When it broke down, everything from Greylock Mountain to the valley floor in Adams stopped. Except the blasting. Every day around 2pm, the quarry crew would blast a huge section that would then topple into the open pit quarry bottom. You never went near the quarry around 2pm. Never.

Rosa Carnazzola, at her grocery store, would have to put the cans that had fallen back on the shelves. Mom would straighten her picture frames in our little house. As I was saying before you interrupted, everything stopped. The ball mills that pulverized the soft ball size limestone, the kilns that heated the powder, the bagging machines that had nothing to bag if nothing was coming from the quarry. The empty tractor trailer trucks and railroad cars that would haul the lime out of state. Some of it even went to Yankee Stadium. There were no Red Sox fans in Adams. We got our TV signal and news from WRGB Albany. It is in New York. 

Dad would drive up the limestone road with five or six men and they would do the repair. Sometimes it would take days.

In Ms. Malley's English class in 1962, each of us had to stand in front of the class and make a presentation. I made mine using Dad’s Stillson wrench pictured above. It is the actual one.

Ms. Malley wore her hair pulled back and she had leather, quite substantial, tie shoes, which she wore with her below-the-knee dresses. She wore granny glasses and took NO prisoners. She was partial to the high school football players. My halfback Adams High captain father was scouted by the New York Giants. But then the war came. In 1939 she was my father's English teacher also.

Just like Samuel Colt of Connecticut did with his pistol, Daniel Stillman of New Hampshire, around 1865, made his prototype from wood. What was new about it was unlike the monkey wrench, the teeth on the Stillson were on an angle. He paid someone to build it of steel, and every plumber or swimming pool builder you know today has a Stillson. 

I carry this one in my pick up truck. The loop loc swimming pool safety covers are secured with brass screws into the concrete. There are around 40 of them. They get full of sand, or they get stripped, and sometimes you cannot unscrew them -- unless of course you own your Dad’s Stillson wrench.