I Can Do This
Back in 1963 I was 17 when my mom died. So I went down to stay with my grandparents in Florida for a few months.
One day I was sitting at the kitchen table with my grandfather (Victor Kaufman). He was telling me about when he worked around the Blast Furnace in the steel mills in Chicago. It was hard hot dangerous work. One day his boss came up to him and asked him if he could run the overhead crane. My grandfather said he didn’t hesitate and told his boss, “Sure I can.” Then my grandfather leaned over to me smiling and said, “I didn’t have the slightest idea how to operate it but it paid more and I got to sit down away from the hot furnace. I figured how to run the crane on my own. When an opportunity comes along you can’t be afraid to go for it.
Being a dumb teenager at the time, his story didn’t sink in at first. Not until I got into the Navy right after I left my grandparents. When they put me on the flight deck of my aircraft carrier with all the jet aircraft around, I said, “I can do that. I didn’t want to work below decks for the next 3 years. You never get to see daylight down below. I wanted to work out in the open and see the sun and have the sea breeze blowing in my face. But I have to tell you I was scared to death when I saw how dangerous it was. I was so scared the first month that every time I went up there I almost peed in my pants. I even made sure I went to the bathroom before I went up on the flight deck but it didn’t make any difference. The phrase, “It scared the piss out of me,” was so true. But I could hear my grandfather's voice saying “I can do this.”
William Kaufman
