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Bubbles in the Wine |
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The Rolfe Arrow — February 27, 1975 On a recent Sunday morning yours truly was sitting in the Presbyterian Church of Rochester, Minnesota, when the minister said something that prompted the going ahead with this column. The idea of a column for The Rolfe Arrow had been tossed around a lot over the last several years. If you don’t like the idea, you’ll have to blame it on going to church, and that’s a pretty tough argument. What’s the column going to be about? Everything from A to Zeman, some intended to be funny, some dead serious, but, I hope, mostly ideas – thoughts to promote more thoughts or to make poor things better and the good things still better. In between A and Zeman will be politics, Rolfe, ISU, other family interests, bridge, guest columns, and many others. While going to lunch up there in Rochester, I made an agreement with myself that I wouldn’t bother Mr. Swartz with the idea unless a list of 50 topics could be made. By the end of lunch 37 items had been written down. You probably wonder if it will involve school ideas while I am on the board. Sure enough, if an explanation seems to be needed on an item the school is doing or not doing. If it were controversial within the board, well, in that case, I’d rather not. Things would have to be pretty bad to do that. You may be wondering about the title, "Bubbles In The Wine." The background is this: About 30 years ago the John Deere Experimental Men’s meeting was being held in Moline and a good friend of mine from the Waterloo factory, Emil Jirsa, was to give a talk on the development of the John Deere Powr-Trol (Hydraulic) system, then in its infancy. Emil wasn’t much of a talker and he didn’t have the handsome, slippery appearance of John Connally. He was, as a matter of fact, just the opposite, and I suppose the audience was expecting a dull halting speech, hoping to get on to the next topic, or to get into the bar, where each engineer would have the opportunity to brag about what he had dreamed up. Emil started thus: "You know, I have five gallons of wine fermenting in my basement, and the ideas we got at first for this Powr-Trol system came to us about as fast as the bubbles are coming off of that wine – and most of the ideas we got were not worth much more than the bubbles are worth." After that Emil had the audience in his hand. Later the Chief Engineer came to the podium and remarked that as the bubbles were necessary to ferment and refine the wine – so the ideas are necessary to develop and refine the Powr-Trol system, and further, that no one expects every idea to be a winner, far from it. Remember, I said I hoped this column would be mostly ideas, "Bubbles In The Wine," and if I do one-fourth the job that the John Deere Powr-Trol system does for us JD farmers, I’ll be in ecstasy.
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