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By Root 247 0

Fred, and he invited me to come to his shop on Goose Island. This is an island on the Chicago River, just west of the Loop. It is an industrial wasteland, eerily quiet and desolate. As I would learn later from Fred’s Snap-on dealer, who had serviced the area for over twenty years, the building next to Fred’s was a rendering plant where animal parts were reduced to glue. The dealer claimed to have firsthand knowledge that the local mob used the place to dispose of human bodies with some regularity. A big car would back up to the loading bay and the workers at the plant would be told to take a long break.

I followed Fred’s directions to an unmarked door on a blank-looking warehouse. He opened the door with a hard and somewhat skeptical look on his face, then instantly softened when he saw the starter motor in my hands. We climbed the stairs to the second floor, which was all his, then entered a space that had been partitioned off from the rest of the warehouse. There were two lifts; each held a Ducati at eye level. Crowded around the shop were Aermacchis, MV Augustas, Benellis, and some other Italian makes I had never even heard of, as well as quite a few Hondas from the 1960s and ’70s. They were bathed in the slanting light of a Chicago winter in late afternoon; one wall of the shop was solid windows from waist level up.

Fred told me to put the motor on a certain bench that was free of clutter. He checked the impedance, as I had done, to confirm there was no short circuit or discontinuity. He spun the shaft in its bearings, as I had. He hooked it up to a battery. It moved ever so slightly, but wouldn’t spin. Then he grabbed the shaft and tried to wiggle it side to side. “Too much free play.” He suggested the problem was the bushing that located the end of the shaft in the motor housing—it was worn. When a current is applied to the windings, it produces not only a torque but also an initial sideways force. Free to move too much (perhaps a few hundredths of an inch), the rotor was binding on the motor housing. Fred scrounged around for a Honda motor. He found one with the same bushing, then used a “blind hole bearing puller” to extract it, as well as the one in my motor. Then he gently tapped the new, or rather newer, one into place. The motor worked. Then Fred gave me a succinct dissertation on the peculiar metallurgy of these Honda starter motor bushings of the mid-seventies. Here was a scholar.

Over the next six months I spent a lot of time at Fred’s shop, learning, and put in only occasional appearances at the Committee. His whole scene seemed too groovy to be real, and provided an example of a life that was enviable to me. It also got me thinking about possible livelihoods. As it happened, in the spring I got a call from a former teacher, now in Washington, D.C., asking if I was interested in a job as director of a certain think tank. The salary was huge. Hell, yes, I was interested. I interviewed, and ended up getting the job. But I would quickly discover it was not to my taste. It was concerned more with the forms of inquiry than with the substance; the trappings of scholarship were used to put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise. These positions served various interests, ideological or material. For example, part of my job consisted of making arguments about global warming that just happened to coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies that funded the think tank. Fred’s life seemed more liberal.

One of the earliest uses of the word “liberal” was to draw a distinction between the “liberal arts” and the “servile arts.” The former were those pursuits befitting a free man, while the latter were identified with the mechanical arts. I landed the job at the think tank because I had a prestigious education in the liberal arts, yet the job itself felt illiberal: coming up with the best arguments money could buy. This wasn’t work befitting a free man, and the tie I wore started to feel like the mark of the slave. As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me