Stu
by Bruce McAllister



The first time I met Stu, I was just a kid and there
weren't any lights hovering over his house. The
last time I saw him, when I was grown and we
both knew what life could be if you let it, there
were. That's the best way to start, I guess.



                       ·····


That first time, our dad piled us into our old Chevy
wagon—the kind you took to drive-in movies with
sheets on the seats and your kids in
pajamas—and drove us to the north county,
saying only, "Stu is an inventor. He'll never see
any royalties from his inventions because the
navy owns them, but he's an inventor, the kind
that made America great."

Our dad was director of a navy laboratory on
Point Loma, and he was an inventor too—which
made us proud—but he was very humble when it
came to his friend Stu. "All I've invented," he
would say, "is a car headrest, and I didn't do
much with it." It was true. He'd invented a
headrest for cars in the 1940s, when there
weren't any, even if people needed them then,
too. He'd even patented it but hadn't tried to sell
the patent or find venture capital for it. After all,
he was a career naval officer; the navy was his
life, and what a life. He got to work on classified
projects with his favorite people: electronics
experts, materials engineers, microwave
physicists, and the kinds of inventors who, like
Stu, had made America great.

How had he first met Stu? How does anyone in
the navy get to know a wide-eyed, crazy-haired
inventor who wasn't at all "by the book," who
shouldn't have been anywhere near the military
but somehow was? On a Secret Project, of
course. My brother and I—who were ten and six
at the time—were sure of it. Our dad and Stu had
to be working on a Secret Project together.

We had evidence. Only a few weeks earlier we'd
gotten stuck after school waiting for our dad at
the Lab, which is what they called the row of old
converted navy barracks. We'd stood there
patiently in the parking lot until we couldn't stand
it any longer, then started playing with the little
pieces of neatly cut brass and other alloy that
someone had tossed out a window instead of