Life, So Different from Expectations

Life, So Different from Expectations
9/21/2010

Life’s expectations from the age of 20 to 30 was full of dynamic optimism and planning for the future. Clear back in the 1970’s I was wanting to change the world by being the great inventor of green technology and single handedly free the world of Arabian oil and call the power company to have them take that ugly meter off of the house. Although the signs indicated that we would be out of oil by the 90’s certainly by the year 2000, by 1980 Reagan became president and we seemed to get energy amnesia. All of the gas lines of the 70’s were suddenly forgotten and we just imported more oil and turned our attention to computers and telecommunication and funding for research in energy waned. In spite of the political environment, I negated the politician’s power, and imagined that single handedly I was going to be the mad scientist and great business mogul who would invent an efficient way of producing energy in the backyard, then sell those devices all over the world. I would be lauded as a hero of mankind and would live happily ever after. I figured if I put my mind to it, and had a positive mental attitude (that phrase was used a lot in the 70’s), I could accomplish anything that I could dream. I figured I should get all of that done by the age of 30, 35 tops. Then I could turn my sights on other worthy accomplishments in saving the world.
The things that I wanted nothing to do with was to ever have to come in contact with an attorney or a politician or see the inside of a courtroom. When I was 20 I was happily Baptist and hated German and considered myself to be language handicapped having failed German in high school. I considered business something anyone could do and I would pick it up in my spare time if I needed it. I never considered myself a leader of many people and hoped I never would have to give a speech in front of anyone. Politics was something I ignored and didn’t understand what all of the fuss was about. I wanted to accomplish all of these technological things but I certainly did not want to live in a city. In essence I had a dysfunctional set of desires, dreams, and understanding of how society functioned.
The beginning of learning of life’s little secrets and having my dysfunctional values challenged started when I was 20. I had met a Mormon and she introduced me to the missionaries. I, being a Bible beatin’ Baaaaaptist, looked forward to teaching these poor, misguided Mormon missionaries about the true way to God. My objective was to save their souls and convert them to Baptist Christianity. I never stood a chance. I was beat before I began. It was a setup. Every question I asked they answered clearly, succinctly, and in ways that I had only dreamed. Many of my opinions about religion I felt were had by no one else but me, certainly not the Baptists, but found that these Mormon missionaries taught the very things that I already believed. So now I’m a Mooooormon.
The next upsetting event occurred less than a year later when, on a lark, I transferred from the University of Houston to Brigham Young University. I went from being one of the few people I knew who didn’t smoke and drink, to being surrounded by 25,000 such non-conformists. They were like a bunch of short haired hippies, swimming in the opposite direction of the “establishment“ current. In another 18 months my apple cart was really upset when I was called on a mission for two years to the place that spoke the language where I was handicapped, Germany. Life couldn’t have taken more of a U turn. I certainly had never planned on a mission, and thought that I had past the age of the Mormon draft. But not so. I was able to dodge Uncle Sam’s Vietnam but not God’s Germany. So I was in the army now, but this was God’s army. Well my life continues to U turn until it begins to look like a spiral. The question was, is this a death spiral into the ground, or a spiral staircase going up?
Returning from my mission, getting married and a new job within two months of returning, I was set for life. I had a good job, good benefits, a retirement package. I merely needed to sit back, relax, and cruise into retirement, 35 years down the road. But I would have to give up on my dreams of energy domination. Never believing I could ever go to graduate school, my new wife suggests that I do just that. Not wanting to disappoint her or look like a coward, I applied, got accepted to and attended Texas A&M and got a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Now I was ready to really plunge into my goal of turning the world upside down. I was even told in a blessing how my work would come to influence many people and that what I was doing was right. I just knew that the blessing must have been referring to the work I was conducting on the Stirling engine. At the time I was struggling with a massive computer program modeling the complex functions of a phase changing working fluid in a theoretical configuration of a Stirling engine. This blessing gave me the faith to press on to solve the problems and get the program working. Many miracles occurred to allow me to academically finish my project and all of the classes associated with getting this degree. Finally, my Ph.D. project was finished and the computer model was functioning. I knew this was the first big step to world energy domination. However, after receiving my Ph.D., starting to work at GMI, and working with the model, I realized that I was attempting to break the 2nd law of thermodynamics. I was so far beyond my professors that they didn’t even realize that was what had happened. The modeled was functioning correctly, but it showed an increase in power, merely because there was an increase in pressure in the engine, which naturally causes in increase in power. That is a subject of another paper that I will not write or publish. Now, breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics is not a bad idea if I could pull it off, but alas, even my model refused to push heat from cold to hot. How could this be? I was given a blessing. This program must work so I can build the most innovative engine the world has ever seen. I was crushed. Was the blessing wrong? What was going on? My positive mental attitude was really taking a beating. This was the beginning of a long class in which I am still enrolled.
Because of the dysfunctional plan I was attempting to follow, one of my self imposed criteria was to live in a small town. As GMI and GM were failing financially in the early 80’s, I left there and came to Fayetteville to teach at the University of Arkansas. Another of the platitudes that I espoused to was to provide a “home town” for my children. I wanted a rather stable town, unlike Houston, and I wanted to remain there so my kids could have roots and a place they could call home. So Fayetteville was it. This was to be the last move come h___ or high water. So continuing to press on in the quest for energy genius and dominance, equipped with a yellow pad and a pencil and the great resources and reputation of the University of Arkansas (please note the sarcasm in my voice) I proceeded to write over 35 proposals to the various departments of defense, navy, army, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and every other funding agency I could think of. Within this time period, Roger Iverson came to me and wanted me to assist him in realizing some of his dreams of a clutch/brake idea which he had. He wrote some of the most gosh awful proposals that I have ever seen, and they got funded. So I went with the money.
I put my ideas on hold to work on his. They were quite innovative and I found that the principles actually worked, miraculously I might add. I equipped a lab at Engineering South (which we referred to as Panty Hose Tech. It had been a hosiery factory before production moved across the border.) I became famous in the engineering school and was a rising star at the university. In addition, Roger had established the Advanced Brake and Clutch company, ABC for short, and I was given stock in the company, and it looked as though I was certainly going to be rich and famous.
While all of this was going on, I was also asked, on occasion, to consult for a lawyer in Ft. Smith named E.C. Gilbreath in Jeep rollover lawsuits. I hated the work but it paid $80 per hour, an obscene amount, I know, but if he was foolish enough to pay it, who am I to stop him? One summer E.C. had even paid $10,000 for me to research certain dynamic characteristics of the Jeep. I had no help. I welded, hoisted, swung, and did everything on that project. With that pay, I didn’t have to teach that summer. After one summer of teaching summer school, I added another item to my dysfunctional list of life’s rules, don’t teach summer school.
So the road of life was drawing me away from my dream of energy domination. But I figured after I had money flowing in from ABC, I could then return to my task of freeing the world of oil. In addition to all of this, I was assisting the students in this silly project of building what amounted to an off-road go-kart for a student competition. It was called the Mini-Baja. I figured that I should be able to assist them in winning this competition with half my brain tied behind my back.
Such was the situation in the 1980s. I was teaching, researching in an area where I had no interest, dealing with students in a design competition, and working on a company where I hoped to become rich so I could fund my real research love. I was lauded as a great teacher and was nominated for several years as the outstanding teacher in the mechanical engineering department and got it one year. My competition was only one other freshman professor, Rick Couvillion. He was and still is a great teacher.
Again life’s road leads in directions that can’t be anticipated. ABC received a grant to develop the technology and sell it to a large manufacturer. We had a guarantee from Budd Wheel that they would buy the technology from us if we could demonstrate its functionality in a class 8 tractor trailer brake. We designed, built, and delivered for testing in Michigan at the Budd Wheel facility two brakes. It cost us $70,000, funded in part by people buying stock in ABC. Budd tested the brake on their brake dynamometer in accordance to a federal test procedure to assure that brakes can pass minimum federal standards for truck brakes. This test normally tests brakes to their physical limit. If they pass the test they are literally toasted. After the test, we broke the brakes down to inspect the internal parts for wear. None could be detected. It was miraculous. The engineer in charge was anxious to move the project ahead. Fame and fortune were just around the corner. I could begin on my engine project in a month or so.
Days, weeks, then months went by. Finally, we heard that the project had been rejected by the president of the company, because it was going to cost them $2 million to retool for the project and various other excuses typifying current American industry to keep the status quo.
Roger was like I was, a man with a positive mental attitude. Not to be denied success, he applied for and received more money from the state of Arkansas to continue this project and attempt to sell it to someone. We built other brakes and clutches and demonstrated them in many spectacular ways. BMW wanted to see if the brakes could slow a car from 120 mph to 80 mph 5 times in 5 minutes. We demonstrated that on our Suburban, equipped with the brakes only on the front, by loading the Suburban with 500 lb of iron, driving 90 mph around the bypass at 3 in the morning and stopping it completely 5 times in 5 minutes. (The bypass was our test track in those days.) They were impressed. They didn’t buy. Volvo wanted a retarder for their trucks to be put in their drive line in place of the Jacobs brakes. We did it. They were impressed. They didn’t buy. Similar results with Saab Scania, Mercedes, and others. Somewhere in there Roger cracked. The company went bankrupt. All of those people who had invested, some with retirement funds, lost their money. This failure literally drove Roger crazy. With ABC’s demise, I lost the fame and fortune that I never had. Then I came under attack by the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority and the Arkansas Energy committee accusing me that I had misrepresented what we had done and many other things. I had to go to Little Rock and defend myself. That was successful, but the project died in the end.
I went to the department head of mechanical engineering, Bill Schmidt, and asked what I should do. He said, “I guess you start over.” Start over! I had spent the last 8 years working for something just to see it crumble before my eyes. I still had a government contract on some research that I needed to finish, which I did. But there was no more enthusiasm. There was no more dream. I looked around at the older professors at the university. They were bitter old men that hated teaching and hated what they did. Most did no research. The one who did was being criticized by a young pup, who couldn’t even get tenure, for the manner in which he didn’t follow proper university procedures. The university procedures for funding were dysfunctional. They actually worked against anyone who was trying to do research. What I saw as a future at the university was not pretty. I saw no one whom I wanted to emulate.
Rather to continue to attempt to get funding from government agencies for research, I decided to have my legal consulting, which was growing, fund research from which I could support a graduate student and publish papers. I then established Renfroe Engineering, Inc. at the Arkansas Boardwalk down on Dickson. It was a humble beginning with Fran, Ron Olson then came Bryan Aldridge. Eventually we moved into Dr. McDonalds office building and we began doing research with Greg Fleniken as my graduate student. This was on vehicle dynamics and behavior and was to be used in litigation against ATV manufacturers. I was still a faculty member on the graduate faculty. When word got around that I was consulting and making money off of my research, then they passed a rule that part time faculty could not be on the graduate faculty. I had cut to part time at that time and now I was being punished for doing what was being done at other universities around the nation by innovative faculty such as Denise Guenther.
That was all the beginning to what has become a large consulting firm with 20+ employees and doing $5 to $7 million per year. What is interesting is that I have become one of the most sought after experts in the country for my knowledge of automobiles and my ability to testify in court. I would have never dreamed that I would be friends with and work for attorneys. I spend more time in a courtroom or deposition than most attorneys. Being deposed and sitting on the witness stand being grilled by a lawyer whose objective is to malign and demean you and destroy your entire career has been the most sickening and difficult things I have ever had to do. I have hated the thought of it for years. In the ninety’s my intestinal tract was always screwed up because of the tension I was under. Before a deposition or a trial I thought I was going to throw up. In trial I have prayed for strength and intelligence to be able to foil these attacks from my avowed enemies. At night I have to wear a bite protector to keep from knocking the caps off of my teeth from grinding. I have become a gladiator, a fighter, a mad dog. I have become strong in ways I never anticipated or really wanted, or maybe I did. In all of this I feel like I have been forged from blows of a hammer into something I hope can be used by the Lord in future battles. I figure that is the purpose, because I feel like He has been wielding the hammer. But as I now approach the back side of a career that I never sought, I realize that I was never driving in all of this. I had an idea of what I wanted to be as a nice little cottage tucked away somewhere, but what the Lord had in mind was to tear out walls of restriction that I had erected and renovate in areas where I feared to tread. The Lord has made me much different than I had dreamed I was capable. My only contribution to this new creation has only been to provide the fuel. I have always pushed forward and hoped someone was driving. That is much more so now as I have come to trust the driver more. I now look forward to the adventure of places not anticipated knowing the journey may be tough but the scenery will be great. I have not done anything I wanted to do but I have become more than I thought I could ever have become. The good news is that it is still becoming.
So as I write this, I hope all of my children can learn from me as they struggle with what is to be the future and actually believe that their future is theirs to determine, that life is often about piloting a path through the boulders as they present themselves. Just as a kayaker or canoeist cannot stop their descent into the cataract, they can only paddle furiously to set up for the next boulder and look for the best path through the rapids. Often we are swept into paths we did not want but we make the best of what presents itself to us. Sometimes we strike the boulders and capsize. Our job is to right ourselves and continue on as the stream directs. The uncertainty and danger of the rapids is what makes it fun. I have a shirt from the Hallet race track that says, “If it can’t kill you, it ain’t a sport.” Life is a great sport because it can kill you. The best thing is to realize the pilot at the back of the raft is the Lord. He is there to make it as fun and rewarding of an experience as it can be. While we may not understand the path we are taking and what is going on, relying on the guide makes it more fun, because you know that He has your best interests at heart and is there to give you the thrill of your life. So grab hold of your paddle and make this a fun ride.