If you've heard of John Ratzenberger, you're more likely to know him for what he's done in Hollywood than what he's doing for America's factories.
Wasn't he the guy who played Cliff Clavin, the blowhard in the mailman's uniform in "Cheers"? Yeah. And isn't that his voice I hear in all those Pixar movies, from "Toy Story" to "WALL-E" to "Up"? Yeah, that's him, too.
Mr. Ratzenberger's all that and an evangelist for American manufacturing and its skilled workers. I met him a couple of years ago when he led what amounted to a Strip District pep rally to "keep it made in America." Last week, his publicist hooked me up with him on a cell phone in Italy just so he could talk about the reasons for this technology camp for young tinkerers in South Park.
What was he doing in Portofino, Italy?
"I'm helping with the spaghetti harvest," he said.
The week-long camp at South Park Middle School was for 31 fifth- and sixth-graders, 12 of them girls. It was funded in part by Nuts, Bolts and Thingamajigs, a group dedicated to the dignity of working with your hands. Mr. Ratzenberger founded it after touring the country for his TV show, "Made in America," a few years ago.
He rattled off some of the same stats I'd read in the handout: the average age of manufacturing employees is 56, some 25 percent of American kids don't graduate high school, and in three years there will be a vacancy for 500,000 welders nationwide.
Those are good-paying jobs, but I asked if they'd stay that way. It seems every time factory workers make a decent wage, the factory owner look into sending those jobs to Asia or Mexico.
"We're always going to need people building things," Mr. Ratzenberger said.
America's real stimulus package is its skilled workers. Workers are needed to build skyscrapers, high-speed rail and airports "and we're literally running out of these people." As shop classes have disappeared, we're turning out kids who can't operate a ruler a much less a lathe.
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So I drove down to South Park on Friday to meet Josh Cramer in what was definitely not your grandfather's shop class.
Mr. Cramer, 26, is in his fifth year of teaching applied engineering at the middle school, and this was his third and final camp of the summer in the camps' third year.
As we talked, kids kneeled all over the floor, test-driving model cars they'd created to run on eco-friendly power such as compressed air (balloons aren't just for birthdays anymore), gravity and drops of water.
"This does a half-circle," Hanna Rigby, a sixth-grader next fall, told Mr. Cramer as her team's gravity-powered car moved slowly across the floor. "Does that count?"
Not if another team's car can do a full circle, he told her, and so Hanna's team went back to tinkering.
The kids don't pay a dime for this Gateway to Technology Camp. The Society of Manufacturing Engineers Education Foundation, Kennametal, Westinghouse Electric, the Society of Automotive Engineers and Mr. Ratzenberger's NBT foundation provide the grants.
The gravity-powered car featured a weighted-lever, with coins for weights and a string attached to an axle. When the lever dropped, the see-saw motion unspooled the string, turning the wheels and sending the car across the room.
"These kids, they come up with the wildest solutions," Mr. Cramer said. "You actually watch kids learn, watch the light bulb go off."
In a world running out of petroleum, we're going to have to come up with other solutions. Maybe the ideas will begin germinating in these camps.
Two of every 30 kids might go on to become engineers, but every engineer needs 10 technicians, Mr. Cramer said.
Korey Beyer, a rising seventh-grader, made a car that went 124 feet powered on about two drops of water. Rachel Kaminsky, Jessica Solomon, Emily Marcus and Hanna Rigby, all going into sixth grade, rotated the wheels on their car so it would go in circles.
"I think we need to tweak our wheels some more," Jessica said after the car came to a too-quick stop.
Thursday's edition of PG South will feature more about this class. I left them at midday, in the parking lot, trying to determine which eco-powered car could go farthest on blacktop. (The schools' hallways are so slick, the longest was not long enough for some of these cars.)
Mr. Cramer says the camp will be back next summer and those who want information should e-mail him at cramerj@sparksd.org or call 412-831-7200. Those who want to support Mr. Ratzenberger's NBT foundation can find information at www.nutsandboltsfoundation.org, including how to donate through text messaging.
First Published: July 26, 2009, 4:00 a.m.
