Originally published Saturday, July 4, 1998

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

If Ron Juricich and his son, John, are knee-deep into a heavy machine repair this weekend, they might work into and through Father's Day without taking much of a break.

Some folks might think they're working fools.

"Guys sometimes spill out of the restaurant lounge next door and see our lights on at night, and they're amazed that we're still working," said the elder Juricich. "They tell us we're nuts."

"But the way I see it, these guys with a belly full of whiskey will have a hangover in the morning, and we'll have kept busy and made some money."

Son, John, a husky, dark-haired 34-year-old with a pleasant smile, nods his quiet assent as he leans against a heavy metal lathe. He came to work in his father's machine shop right out of Central Kitsap High -- the same school his father attended -- and they've kept the lights on and the machines humming ever since.

It's just a tad after dawn, and a great blue heron is still picking through the flotsam of tidal washings not far from the front door. Bay Shore Machine Works is tucked away and out of sight -- and it's not a pretty sight -- on the tideflats of Dyes Inlet, not far from the fancy hotel and new shopping center. The vintage corrugated-metal building is held up by pilings and a family philosophy that hard work has to be balanced with creative thinking.

"Sometimes, the guy leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk is thinking about a way to do something, and that's as important as working at a machine," Ron said.

You wouldn't think, to look at it, that there's any time or space for feet-on-the-desk thinking around here. This 40-by-80-foot, high-ceiling building is crammed with several dozen monolithic machines in a helter-skelter arrangement that would challenge a mongoose for getting from one end to the other. Hanging from the heavy beams and stacked against the walls are a part-finished sprint car and half of a 5/8-scale "dwarf" racing car.

"That we do when there's time," said the man whose workweek averages 60 to 70 hours.

"It's not like we're working stiffs," Ron said. "John here likes to gamble, and I get out to the Brickyard 500 races and places like that." There's even time for some of that feet-up-on-the-desk idea work . . . if you can find the desk.

Some of it doesn't pay off. Ron put a couple years of work and a lot of money into his invention of an off-road fuel tax calculation device, only -- he alleges -- to see it stolen out from under by a former associate.

"A patent is only as good as the money you have to protect it in court . . . and we'd run out of money at that point," Ron says, tossing a prototype back onto a cluttered workbench.

Most of their work involves heavy-machine repair for local paving, quarry and rock-crushing companies, "some of it in the shop and some of it out on the site," Ron says. There is no downtime. When there are no major repairs, there are projects, such as the custom lumber sawing rig that takes up a considerable chunk of space at the front end of the shop.

"The man came to me and told me what he needed," Ron said. "I went out and looked at his operation, and at what he needed, and I came back and did some figuring and put it all in a drawing and a contract.

"This piece of machinery," he said, nodding to the incomplete framework of steel and gears, "will do it all, with just a limited amount of manpower."

There are no fancy engineering drawings. Much of it is etched in the gray matter beneath the Brickyard 500 ball cap, waiting for more welding and machining. Some operations might have spent a lot of computer design time and a whole lot more effort and money just to get it on paper. But in this busy father-and-son shop, it's taking shape a little bit each day.

"We don't have young guys stopping by looking for work here; everyone wants to sit at a computer and call it work," Ron said. "Computers are good, but someone has to do the work. I've got nothing against computers, but it's gotten to where people let computers do their thinking. And that's not THINKING!"

There is a computer, of sorts, beneath that ball cap. And sometimes it hasn't been able to compute the right stuff, Juricich admits.

"John can do anything that needs doing in this shop," says his dad. "He's learned it all, but we had some problems in the past, some real head-banging, when he'd stop and say: 'You never let me use my brain.'

"Well, it took me a while, because I'd always thought of him as a little guy . . . my son, still learning. Then, about five years ago, I realized I was wrong. I saw that his ideas worked, too!"

John cracks just a bit of a smile now. It's not often that a hard-nosed, hard-working father will admit something like that to a stranger. It's more praise than many sons might expect but a whole lot hope for. And it's probably why they're still working together.

They work hard, and they work well, together, this Juricich father and son in the busy little machine shop on the tideflats.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.