The Talanian Way

I understand buildings. As strange as it sounds, they speak to me. The pitch of the roofline, the red or cream-colored bricks, the radiators, the old coal furnaces, the mesh of wiring, the pine floors, the square footage, the Sheetrock or paneled walls, and the street on which the property stands—all of these tell me what it would be like to live there or to rent to people or businesses and, most important, given the work I’ve done for over a half century, the value of the building, the cost of owning it, and the potential profit if I decide to sell.
I suppose this understanding qualifies as one of those mysterious talents. I’m lucky to have it because I always had trouble reading and retaining information and getting the right answers on tests. Not that I didn’t work hard (and eventually, I did manage to graduate from college.) But I started school in the 1950s, and while it’s now clear that I struggle to read with comprehension, a problem that would plague me on and off into adulthood, back then my teachers considered me intellectually challenged.
During my childhood, I was insatiably curious about mechanical things—how a bicycle worked, for instance, and why a lamp went on when you flicked the switch. In my free time, I enjoyed digging stuff out of the trash and making a variety of things. If I received a toy for my birthday or Christmas, I was far more interested in taking it apart and putting it together again than I was in playing with it. Later on, I began tinkering with hammers, nails, and wood and built forts and tree houses. And as frustrated as I was in school, I learned that there was a place for people like me in the world.
My father’s brother-in-law, James Mukjian, was a physics professor at Northeastern University who also contracted with the government to do work at the Charlestown Navy Yard. He wore bow ties and tweed sport coats, and he was evidently quite intelligent. One day, I stopped by his house, and he was having a problem. He had just bought a stereo with all the latest components. He had plugged the speakers into the receiver along with the AM/FM radio and a turntable on top. He was sitting there reading the directions and scratching his head because when he put down the tone arm, the needle would skid across the record. My first instinct was to pick up the arm, which I did, and I saw that the plastic protector was still on the needle. So I snapped it off, dropped the arm, and the music played. For Jim, if it wasn’t written in the directions, he couldn’t figure it out. That was when I realized the difference between a learned man and a handy man.
My parents never gave me any stern lectures about my performance in school. In part, it was because they knew I was trying, and they were the opposite of today’s helicopter parents. In addition, I believe their acceptance of my situation was because my father shared a dislike of book learning and a love for all things mechanical. My mother, Nevart Semonian, realized it soon after she met Charles Talanian at an Armenian church picnic in the summer of 1940. Nevart had grown up in West Somerville; Charles had been born in Cranston, Rhode Island. I’m told that my father was an excellent dancer. Whether this was the deciding factor for my mother accepting his proposal, I can’t say. They were married in 1941.
At the time, Charles was operating a grocery store in West Roxbury. He closed the store when the Second World War began and joined the Army Air Corps. He applied to become an airplane mechanic and lied about his education. On the application, he used his brother’s credentials from high school and college. He was assigned to Laurence G. Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts. One afternoon, he was reading a book about how to repair airplane wings when a colonel called him aside and informed him that he had been caught: he didn’t have the education he’d claimed, and he had been faking it on the job.
“You’re right,” he told the colonel. “But let me take the mechanic’s test. It can’t be written. Just give me a verbal test and a blackboard. I’ll show you I can do the work.”
His request was granted, and Charles passed the test.
He used to fly in the planes with the test pilots because one of the crucial projects he was assigned was to stabilize the cameras that took the pictures used for bomb-damage assessment. The Army Air Corps was having trouble making the cameras hold still, and Charles, along with the Bendix Spring Company, figured out how to mount the cameras so they wouldn’t vibrate. The planes weren’t heated in those days, and I remember, as a child, seeing the sheep-lined leather gloves he used to wear on those flights. I still have the two toolboxes that he had custom-made with wheels on them. Whenever a mechanic needed a tool, he had to walk all the way back to the hanger and then return to the plane on the tarmac. It was a waste of time. But with wheels on the boxes, the tools would be right at hand. No one suggested the idea to Charles. It just made sense.