Grandpa Charlie, An Electric Car, and A Lost Opportunity
If only I could live that moment over again
I was eight years old. I sat beside my Grandpa Charlie on a plywood bench, sharing squares of chocolate in the single-car garage that he’d converted into a workshop.
The room smelled of aged wood, old tools, and motor oil. It was Charlie’s sanctuary, a place where he pulled ideas from his speckled composition notebooks and made them reality.
If Grandpa Charlie needed something, anything, he’d create it in his workshop using vintage machines. A metalworking lathe. A bandsaw. A grinding mill. Whatever gadget was necessary, he created.
Grandpa’s workshop was the place he was most himself.
The silver-rimmed industrial clock ticked on the workshop’s wall that winter afternoon as the sun streamed through the open window, soaking the machines in light. We rubbed our hands together for warmth.
Then, Grandpa Charlie asked me a question.
“Would you like to learn how an electric car works?”
“I’m more into baseball, Grandpa,” I answered.
A hint of disappointment flashed across his face. Then he gave a good-natured shrug.
That was it. Our interaction flickered through my 8-year-old awareness in an instant and was gone. I had no idea what was behind Grandpa Charlie’s question, and there was no way to understand the opportunity I had just missed.
But now I do.
Born in 1908, Grandpa Charlie had grown up in Brooklyn during a decade when the world was introduced to the first moving assembly line, crank handles evolved into ignitions, and Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler rose to the top of the auto industry.
As a kid, Charlie would take apart and rebuild motorbike engines, vacuum cleaners, washers, dryers, refrigerators — anything he could get his hands on — scattering a mess of parts across the oak floor in his family’s row house. Through self-study and hours of tinkering, he became a master craftsman and fixer.
Grandpa Charlie’s parents owned a grocery store. He loved rolling up his sleeve to the elbow and reaching deep into the storefront barrel to pluck out a kosher dill. At our family dinners years later, he’d laughingly recall the cold, yellow-green juice dripping from his right arm and how he smelled of pickles the rest of the week.
Though his family struggled to make ends meet, Charlie always had work because he could fix anything: phonographs, radios, camera shutters, anything needing repair. Even at a young age, he was a provider.
Charlie grew up, met my Grandma Mae, and started a family. When my parents started our own family, Grandpa and Grandma moved a couple of towns over, and we saw them often.
Grandpa Charlie would pick up my brother and me from school in his blue Buick Skylark and stop at Radio Shack to buy us the latest remote-controlled cars. We’d race miniature roadsters and buggies around a makeshift track on our driveway until shadows crept onto the asphalt and my mom called us in for dinner.
I still remember the way Grandpa smiled when we begged for five more minutes.
Grandpa Charlie was an expert in electric cars ahead of his time. He worked for the Yardney Electric Corporation as an Electro-Mechanical Development Engineer, innovating new hydraulic and mechanical concepts, battery charging, and electronic control systems. He helped develop silver-and-zinc batteries for rockets, missiles, and submarines.
Through family lore, journals, and a 1967 article from Parade Magazine, I learned that Grandpa Charlie designed and built an electric car known as the “Yardney Experimental Electric,” a gray Renault Dauphine. He removed the engine and replaced it with aircraft batteries and a small electric motor. The “Yardney” used standard horsepower and ran 77 miles on a full charge. It simply needed to be plugged into an ordinary electricity source to refuel.
Grandpa Charlie had demonstrated the vehicle to Congress and the Senate, taught members to drive the electric car, and received a letter of thanks from Washington. He spent a fulfilling career fixing, inventing, and doing what he loved.
My grandpa had 41 patents to his name.
That winter’s day, he wanted to share his love and knowledge of electric cars with me. But unthinkingly, I turned him down. I wish I could travel back in time and sit with my grandpa again on that plywood bench. I wish I could hear his kind voice, share a chocolate bar, and listen more closely to the tug in my heart.
I wish I could relive that moment and say yes, but I’m 50 years old now, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that there are no do-overs in this life. Opportunities whirl into existence like fuel through an engine, then vanish into thin air.
Grandpa may have been disappointed in that moment, but he forgave me, and I’ve grown up to forgive myself.
I like to think I’ve learned from that mistake. I’m paying more attention now, listening more deeply, recognizing the precious nature of relationships with loved ones and the sacred spaces where what’s most essential passes between us.
We’ll always make mistakes, as will the people around us, but there’s a place in the heart that forgives and loves anyway.
