oboy you've prompted a brain dump. sorry.<p>"J. E." was named "James," but by the time I met him he'd given that name to his son and insisted on being JE only. He was "a mule following farmboy too unschooled to serve in the infantry" in WW2, so they had him make runways on various Pacific Islands with a bulldozer. He got <i>really good</i> at it, and bought himself one as soon as he got home.<p>When I knew him in the 80s he was the proprietor of a successful farming business, as well as a fairly large construction company focusing on earthwork. 50 employees and who knows what revenue; they didn't pinch pennies. He "ran" the company by choosing good managers, and spent his actual time working with whichever crew he felt like that day. He was often to be found in the shop with the mechanics, fixing the equipment, creating new hydraulic valves on the lathe for fun / to save buying a rare part for a 30 year old machine, etc.<p>He was truly unschooled, any math more complicated than money confused him and I think he had trouble reading. He was fiercely smart, and just believed "book learning" wasn't for him. But he was always eager to help teach the things he knew to his crews, and even more eager to learn new things, as well as eager to help others learn. He taught me more about road building, dam and waterway engineering, and the surface geology of our area than I can describe. Having him explain (a) what this chunk of metal was going to become (b) why it needed to be that shape to fit into an engine, and (c) watching him make it ... was true magic.<p>When we got the Italian "Maxi-Cultivator" machine that was so complicated only 3 people on the planet could keep one running, it was another entire education to watch this Tennessee Good Ole Boy dive into the machine with the Italian mechanic (and hapless translator who was having severe "Deliverance" phobias) and critique the design choices and implications of differing terrain. There was surprisingly little discussion of the parentage and morals of various parties, considering the issue at hand was a half million dollar planting machine that couldn't penetrate clay.<p>He truly was an artist will a bulldozer. He could use that tool to shape gravel on a hill the way a child smooth sand with a hand. "Feel everything the machine has to say to you" and "take care of your tools and they will take care of you".<p>They ran <i>old</i> equipment and were constantly rebuilding it; the intimate knowledge of the machinery was worth more than the money saved from economizing on capital. He really just liked having a huge junkyard of old, big scrap iron around. When he got to use some of it he was delighted.