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By Evan Genest (son)
I appreciate getting a chance to speak here today. The Ken Genest I can describe will be just one facet of a man who had other facets too. I was pretty young when I first met him... so forgive me if youth colors my perspective. My earliest memory of my dad is his coffee mug. As a three year old, maybe two year old, I have this strong memory of finding that mug and grabbing it with both hands I would upend them and drink the single swallow that usually remained. The coffee was of course cold, sugary, with just a bit of milk. The other childhood memory I will share is his rolls of masking tape. In our basement there were rolls and rolls of masking tape, hanging on pegboards. Unlike the masking tape at other people's house, none of ours was the right color, that masking tape color, and none of it was the right size. His rolls were usually jet-black, or maybe silver, red, or green. This masking tape was everywhere: on the pegboard, stacked on the table, lost, behind a cabinet, or in drawers, buried in piles of tools for making art. And what I later found out that the tape was a kind of pen for him, a way to draw things. He and the GM Design Center artists, were buying tape by the carton, in widths ranging from normal all the way down to 1/16". With it they were drawing cars on 15 foot long sheets of paper that they had tacked up on the wall. My dad wasn't sure who started drawing with the tape but he felt it was someone there at the Design Center. They had invented, years before computers, a way to lay down the darkest, sharpest line imaginable on these enormous pieces of paper, drawing in 1:1 scale, I think. The drawings all fell apart after a couple years in a drawer of course, so all we have are the archivist drawings -- hopefully. Dad talked a lot about his work at GM. He came home from the Tech Center talking about streamlining and wind tunnels. He started talking about crash-test dummies and about how in the future, cars would add a second seatbelt for your upper body. He said GM had learned to make a bag that could explode from the steering wheel center but that noone could imagine it making it into production. Alot of what he and his friends drew went into a drawer or a file and that was it, but his team at GM brought two major designs to market. The Buick Riviera I actually have no idea what it looks like. But the Chevy Corvair is an icon of the 60s, much more famous. He told me that his team was going for was the excitement of a German rear-engine, rear-drive setup, like a Porsche or a VW Bug. The engineering of the Corvair (not my dad's job) included a rear suspension that was a little ahead of it's time which, unfortunately would sometimes flip the car over and kill the occupants. General Motors fixed this part of the design in later years but dropped the Corvair entirely after ____. I drove a Corvair once. I found it extremely fun. The steering was pretty hard to describe but it was nothing like any car you've ever driven; I highly recommend it. Our family owned a '65 Corvair that was sky blue and later, sky blue with rust highlights. Like many of the designers, Dad also had to have a two-seater. His was a red, ragtop Fiat. My two memories of the Fiat are Dad repairing the rust holes and once or twice riding in it listening to Motown on the AM radio. It was 1968 and I was three. Later, when I rediscovered Motown, it was for quite awhile in my mind 'that music from Dad's sportscar.'' He sketched a bus for General Motors at some point. I remember sitting parked in my dad's station wagon around 1978, and we watched one of the new SEMTA buses go by and he sort of said vaguely "I think that's my design. I did some drawings a long time ago and never knew where they ended up, but that is the basic shape of my bus: front, back, everything." He always said he went to Riverdale High. That was because the town of ____ NH was where ____ went to high school, a few years ahead of Ken. Dad's art teacher there, name unknown, told my dad that you could make a living in art, his teacher told him that you had to go away, to New York or Providence, and learn how to design. It really opened my dad's eyes and sent him on a trajectory that brought him first to Pratt Institute, and then here to Michigan. So we should think about that fellow who said those words in 1949 to the little teenaged Ken Genest. In Dad's life, that little brief push lives on. There was a ten year period then when I stopped seeing him. He started a family with Sharon, Billy, April, Gene, and Jimmy. We became a little estranged. I was pretty occupied, becoming an adult, so I didn't totally notice. I think we had a phone call or some awkward chat in the mid-eighties and, making small talk, it came out that he was doing a lot of biking. Like A TON. Riding to work, buying a bike, inevitably buying another bike, (a third even?). Bikes became like a new sports car for him. He stopped smoking, started talking a lot about 'Rails to Trails.' Conversations would eventually circle around to advocating for making bicycle corridors wherever there were unused train tracks. He said trails were really where it was at for bikes and that I should come try it. We started meeting in parking lots around Rochester. He'd show up with a couple of Treks or Gary Fishers on the roof rack, the first I had ever seen with a large tubing frame or front suspenion. The bikes gave us a very male way to talk to have something to talk about. My family in general, not just him, doesn't do a lot of 'how have you been', "are you eating enough?" We would chatter nonstop about how to weld aluminum, do you think a bike could be made from graphite, but how would you weld graphite, look at these handlebars (they were shaped like a giant paper clip), check out this Bio-Pace sprocket, they call this helmet a skid-lid, it has no top, oh you got a flat-tire, look that is called a 'snakebite' (when the rim pinches the tube, rolling over a big tree root). I don't know if this is touching or a little bit weak but, the #1 piece of advice I ever got from my dad, and that I use more or less daily now, is 'lean just the back wheel agains an object, that way the bike won't fall over. The guys that ride for Sterling Schwinn taught me that.' These conversations were kind of the first time I met my dad. We had never connected before, exactly. I steadily asked questions from that point on. Over the course of thirty years I asked him enough questions to learn about the masking tape, the Bible, all the stories of his new family, why he fought and divorced my mom, what he remembered about his own dad Arthur Genest, about his only sibling (Richard, a year older and 3x more 'energetic'), what did he do in the Army, why did he become an artist. I recorded interviews with him twice. I wish I could do a third interview. If he would agree to it, I would interview him one more time. I'd show him a palette of colors, ask him which were his favorites, and why. I'd like to show him a photo of himself at each age of his life and ask him why he's not smiling in most of them. I would like to ask him whether it made him uncomfortable that we are politically opposite -- he has obviously accomodated it somehow, because it never seemed to be a barrier to our relationship. It is true that he is unsmiling in many of his photos. But not later in life. In his last ten years he has a mellowed, pleased expression. He knew how to give and receive love and he knew that he was well-loved by that point. And when he passed away two weeks ago he knew he was not alone, he knew that he was surrounded by his family. I want to mention one more piece of GM Tech that we should be proud of and that is the names on the sides of the vehicles-- Ken made those. When you see Chevy and GMC trucks like the Silverado, the name on the tailgate is from his group. I sent him a couple photos in March. I asked if the designs were his. He said 'The first one, no, that's newer. The second one, yes, that' basically the same.' To give full credit, a fellow at GM made the GM custom-font and Dad would set the letters up into the name, doing the kerning and sizing with a penknife and rubber cement. As I side note, I would like to say he also generated an enormous number of Jesus logos in the same fashion. As you leave here today, I hope you will notice the back ends of these vehicles when you are at stoplights because it is a reminder of the numerous little piece of him that is still alive. His personality was really unique, kind of mysterious because he was a bit incommunicative. A bit passive, but also, calm, reflective. Towards the end, wise. Very sober. He had a rich inner life and those mysterious inner musings, along with his tenderness and his really super funny sense of humor are what is now lost to us. He had the winking humor of his dad, giving a pinch when you weren't looking. Lying on his hospital bed last week, when ALS had stolen from him almost all of his movement, even the ability to breathe, finally, and deafness had taken his ability to freely communicate, and the mask had taken his ability to speak, he played footsie with me. I could hardly believe it. I would look away and there'd be a tap and I'd look back and he would be looking somewhere else. A total straight-faced joker. So much love in his humor. Open thread. Feel free to leave a memory about Ken Genest in the comments. You can include links. We need images! Send them to my email address (at right and also on the photos page).
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March 2019
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