The little boy Owen had a mechanical gift. Or maybe it was the gift of seeing the possibilities within things.
When he was a toddler, he always had a tool grasped in his hand.
His parents, Krista and Brad, bought him a toolbox with pretend tools, but almost-real wasn’t real enough for Owen. He wanted the metal and the heft.
It wasn’t long before he started taking things apart.
By the time he was 5 years old, grownups were bringing him broken things.
Sometimes it was a toaster, its tiny pieces scattered everywhere and Owen in the middle of it all — a happy child.
“We adults around him could see that he had an engineering mind,” Krista said.
So, people lavished him with the gift of junk: ancient microwaves that had been gathering dust in storerooms, old computers and dead engines. Someone gave him a broken chainsaw.
Nothing was too far gone for Owen. Studying how the parts fit together, he often found a way to reassemble and bring broken things back to life. And sometimes, he made something entirely new.
When he was 8, he and his cousin made their first forge out of a flowerpot, using insulation Owen had pulled from a broken oven.
He made his first homemade knives out of old pipes and pieces of scrap metal and began doing woodworking.
For Christmas in 2018, when he was 10 years old, he got a small belt sander. He made a bench out of two-by-fours. With these things and a few other tools, he had the modest beginnings of a garage workshop. He had a great childhood, along with his siblings, Andrew and Ava Belle.
But then Owen started feeling sick, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital® entered their lives…
Call 1-800-399-5946 | Text GIVE to 626262* | Online at stjude.org/radio/wdez
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