This web page starts here.
WALLACE BROWN SCHERER
January 27, 1913 - to - June 22, 2006
by Wallace T. Scherer
I moved in with Mom and Dad in August of 1999. Dad was still somewhat active, though he had to rest a lot due to several health problems. Nevertheless he continued working on various projects around the house.
Here Dad is with neighbor Vickie Snyder and her daughter Jessica. He is demonstrating a project to teach deaf people to sing.
Working on wiring the lights that go behind the music staff.
After finishing the house, one of the first major projects he started working on was the invention of a human powered helicopter. Actually, there was an international contest with a reward of $10,000. I'm sure he spent that much on it including his time. The reward is now $20,000. See more information on this competition.
Dad worked several years on the project and even had his work written up in the Rolex 1993 "Spirit of Enterprise" book.
The Wallycopter never got airborne, so Dad had not worked on it in a while when I moved in, though it still hung around in the garage. He finally donated it to a person who said he was interested in continuing the project, but we never heard from him again.
Here is Dad with my three children, Judy, Chip, and Tammy, each sporting a "I'M BACKING H.P. WALLYCOPTER" T-shirt. Dad is holding one of the rotor wings. This was taken in about 1988.
Dad never lost his desire to do art. Here he is trying to copy an enlarged projection of a slide of Mom in her younger years. (More of his artwork is depicted in the photos from his Davidson College reunion.)
In this humorous drawing, he depicts himself hanging onto the roof gutter yelling for his wife after his ladder fell. Fortunately this never happened.
One of the neighborhood projects that he headed up for many years was the Christmas lighting project. He would collect donated paper bags from the local Publix grocery store, and with funds from the homeowners association purchase tea candles. He wrote up and drew instructions for each homeowner in Biltmore terrace to put some sand in the bottom of each bag, space them 10 feet apart along the road in front of their house, and place a lighted tea candle in the bag at 6 PM on the evening of Christmas Eve. It made for a pretty sight.
After he finally turned the project over to others in the year 2000, some of the neighbors made a big banner in his honor.
He perfected a way to cut the bottoms off old beer bottles people would sometimes discard beside the road next to our house. With the bottoms cut off he then mounted a small light socket inside and attached a piece of copper tubing which he bent to the right shape. Then he made a base out of routed wood, or used a plastic butter tub that had a nice design. The biggest of these lamps was a chandelier.
Click here to see pictures of the lamps he made.
One of Dad's occasional gripes about things in this life had to do with things not working like they were supposed to. He sometimes said, half seriously, that things had a mind of their own and were intentionally working against us. Here is a humorous paper he wrote called The Innate Perversity of Inanimate Objects.
This web page ends here.
