Uncle Gus and His Walnut Machine

These dramatic neighbor girls are my sister Donna’s friends. Karen Odom Brown Is kneeling and Jeanne Carroll McCloud is on the stump.

The two big trees in the background are black walnut trees. The valley further behind the girls was full of walnut trees. We picked up walnuts in the fall to get our money to buy Christmas gifts. We put the walnuts in the tracks of our dirt driveway so the cars and milk truck would hull them as they drove over them. We then put the hulled walnuts into burlap “gunny” sacks and took them to town to sell at the Farmer’s Exchange. 

Photo by

  
Margaret Walls  

Written by 
LeRoy Walls 
 

Back in the late 1950’s my Great Uncle Gus invented a small machine that would take the walnut meat out of a walnut shell 90% whole. “Gus has got a million dollar invention on his hands” was a frequent comment at that time.

Uncle Gus was a German machinist who worked in the St. Louis area during the week and often returning to the family farm in the Ozarks on weekends. He was a bachelor and therefore had time during the week to work on his plans, time on weekends to build parts for it in his shop and even enough time to become a bit eccentric!

After making a successful small walnut machine he began working on a production size that could be patented. He had meticulous drawings of all the parts needed for it.

Gus never told anyone or shared a master drawing of how the parts to his walnut machine fit together. By being a lone wolf he never succeeded in finishing his production scale machine. In the late years of his life he shared some of his drawings with me since in college I had used machine shop tools, turned screw threads on a lathe and taken mechanical drafting classes. I was amazed with the technical genius of Uncle Gus. Even though he failed -- few could even envision the gears, lobes, screw threads and camshafts for a machine quite so grand as his walnut machine.

There are tremendous lessons on trust and teamwork that I learned from Uncle Gus -- not because he used these but because he didn’t. Gus failed largely because he never shared his exceptional knowledge with those who could have helped turned his dream into reality.

At Woodpro we try to use the many variations of wood to show off its natural beauty. From this I’ve gained even greater respect for Uncle Gus. In his earlier successful model he was able to create a machine that recognized and compensated for almost infinite variation in the size and shape of walnuts created within nature. He succeeded in developing a man-made machine that extracted the meat from this nut 90% whole.

Often when I eat a brownie or fudge made with walnuts, I feel like taking my hat off to Uncle Gus -- for his partial success, his genius and his lifetime of persistently trying to complete his walnut machine.  

12/17/2001