My Father’s “Stuff” – Looking Back on Father’s Day

My father, Zack Gibbs, was 44 when I was born in 1951. He died of cancer 16 years later at age 60. Throughout his life he had been a tinkerer.  He liked to build things from scratch, something he got from his father who grew up on a farm.  Both of them made toys for me. Unlike his father, my dad loved designing electronic equipment. I think he got his start in electronics from working in the 1930’s as a technician for Professor Donald Menzel, the director of the Harvard Observatory and a distant cousin.  Later he designed seismographic instruments for oil prospecting and forecasting rock bursts in mines. When I was young, he had a small company that manufactured an electrostatic flocking machine, a totally new concept at the time.  Until then, flocking of garments and greeting cards was done by applying glue through a stencil or silkscreen and then dusting the flock onto the glue.  Not surprisingly, the flock lay down flat.  In my father’s machine, the flock first passed through a high voltage DC field that created a polarizing charge on each particle so that when the flock landed in the glue, it stood on end.  This was the beginning of fuzzy-feeling flock. 

I loved tagging along when he worked in his workshop near Occidental College in Highland Park, California. I’m not sure what the original purpose of the old building was, but it had a large room with a concrete floor that served as the workshop and many rooms that probably had once been offices, but which he used to store his extra “stuff.” He collected anything electronic.  There were hundreds of meters, vacuum tubes, old TV sets, radios, speakers. It was a child’s dream to hunt through these rooms of stuff looking for treasures while my father was working. We would build things together using things literally off the shelf.  He never had to order anything. 

There were also many cameras of all shapes and sizes.  He got me started taking photographs at a very early age, a hobby I have treasured throughout my life. There is no doubt that my life in science and medicine got its start from my father, his workshop and his cameras.

There may have been a darker aspect to my father’s workshop.  In addition to the many rooms full of stuff, there were at least three garages in the back that he had also filled with unwanted equipment including a washing machine. At the time my father was considered to be a bit eccentric, but today he would almost certainly be diagnosed as having hoarding disorder. Our garage at home also had at least two drill presses, a lathe, and many meters.  I suspect the acquisition of his workshop in Highland Park was in part due to my mother’s desire to keep stuff from invading our home more than it already had.

And then there is the possible Alzheimer’s connection. Hoarding disorder is seen fairly commonly in people with moderate to advanced Alzheimer’s dementia, but it generally is felt to be the result of the dementia. My father died early.  Despite having at least one copy of the APOE-4 gene (because I have two copies), he had no evidence of cognitive impairment during his life. Could hoarding be an early symptom of Alzheimer’s like loss of smell? Recall that I began to lose my sense of smell nearly ten years before being diagnosed with MCI due to Alzheimer’s pathology. I could find very little in the neurology literature on this topic, but I know of at least one ongoing study looking at this possible connection.

Hoarding disorder or not, my father’s vast collection of “stuff” was a dream come true for a young boy with a curious mind. I think my mother saw it all as junk, and in fact she called in a junk man to get rid of most of the stuff after he died, but otherwise the “stuff” was a pleasure for my father and a source of adventure for me.