Remembering a friend
 

During my stint in Germany, I learned that they love to use the folding ruler zollstock/meterstab (I was told wars have been fought over the naming, but I digress). I find it really is handy and preferable to a tape measure most of the time. Anyway, I asked one of my German colleagues to bring one back, as I stupidly snapped mine in half. And so he did, but one made of plastic and not the standard material of choice, birch. This version was not nearly as stiff and wouldn't hold itself up when fully extended. There I was, swinging a 2 meter long floppy ruler around in our area where 6 of us sit. Chris, uncharacteristically, didn't have much to contribute to this matter, other than to say, are you still on about the bloody ruler, after about 30 minutes of me complaining and making different shapes with it. And that was that.

A few days/weeks later, Chris gave me this brass and wooden folding ruler with beautiful patina. He was visiting his folks, remembered my apparent love of folding rulers, and dug this one out of his father's workshop. His father was a design engineer on the Concorde, and he often talked about the noise of a room full of people doing drawings by hand while smoking that he saw as a child. I was genuinely amazed that I now owned a tool that a Concorde engineer used to use. But clearly not a very careful one, Chris joked - you might just be able to see the saw marks on it.

That was Chris - the one who remembered all the little details. Quite a lot in fact. He was well known for having an unnatural capacity to be able to name the podium finishers for any given grand prix in history. Every now and then he was wrong, but we didn't care. He spent over 25 years in F1 including a brief detour making some overpriced car called McLaren F1 in a shed, together with Captain Ahab Jr probably. People who have never worked with him (of which there aren't many), still knew the one called Pointy. I preferred to call him Smudgy, which was his nickname from pencil drawing days. He remembered my old boss, Mark Preston, when Mark first came to the UK from Australia and declared that one day he would have his own F1 team. And he did just that. Mark says he learned much from Chris, and I too am glad that I had the privilege to have known him in the beginning of my F1 career.

We teased him a lot for his grumpy old ways, but he always laughed with us. Deep inside, we knew that he had been there and done all that, and we respected him equally for his experience as well as his ability to never take things too seriously. He was a "work dad" for most of us and that makes it particularly difficult to lose him. It had crossed my mind as we went on our ways to work from home/shutdown, that we could actually lose people during this period. It wasn't Covid-19 that got him, but an accident. The most upsetting part is that he was only a year or two away from retiring. His wife is from Brazil and they were planning to move there and buy a house on the beach. He was even planning on opening a British pub complete with a big fireplace - in the tropical heat. Typical Chris.

As long as I work, I will have his father's ruler on my desk. And I will think of him every time I see it. Rest easy, Chris Bowen. We will miss you.

Thanks all for reading, this is therapeutic for me. Of course I'm sad, but whenever I think of him and his memory, I remember something funny and that makes me smile. I think we should all be so fortunate to be remembered like that.

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Thank you for that beautiful trubute...he meant a lot to you and it shows.

RIP Chris...

Very nice tribute. I feel the same way about a friend of mine who we lost to Pancreatic cancer a few years back. He was in the same line of work as me and we collaborated on quite a few projects.

I still miss and think of him often.

Wrt to those folding rulers.....I have a few that were in my late step-father's tool chest and will keep them as a remembrance - but now that you mentioned you prefer them to a tape measure - you have me wondering if I'm missing something. :p

RIP to your friend, Chris.....

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My condolences. Thankfully, it sounds like you've got many great memories which is the most important thing.

To this day I use a metric folding measure doing projects. I can't deal with all those inches/feet and fractions if I can have just mm. You need to get a wooden one indeed. The plastic jobs are crap.

RIP to your friend. Little things you can cherish from a person you love make a big difference in coping and remembering them.

G

Touching memory.

Nice write up on Chris Won .... you were presumably working with Chris when we caught up in Frankfurt ?

Rest in Peace, Amigo de Won.

Thanks for the comments.

Hey Kevin, actually no, I was in WRC back then. I only started working with Chris in 2018. We were in the same sub-section within our engineering group, so we did spend an awful lot of time together in that relatively short period.

Another one of Chris' talents was storytelling. He penned "Friday Chaps" series of obscure motorsport stories that got sent around up and down the paddock. We'd ask when he would write a book or two, but he thought it wasn't worth the trouble trying to deal with all the copyright issues for photos he needed. I was hoping that he might change his mind in his retirement... We now hope that we can at least track down all the issues of Chaps and put them in one collection.

I don't know the history of this blog but it has a couple of Chris' articles. I understand Chaps the email series spans well over a decade. historicracing.com

I'm sorry for the loss of a great friend, Won.

Thank-you for sharing your sweet tribute.

My condolences....

Heard today that it was a heart attack. Doesn't make it any better or worse. He's the kind of person who would have had a huge number of people turn up at the funeral, but of course that's not really possible in the current climate. This makes me appreciate just a little bit better what the people directly affected by Covid-19 must go through right now.

Condolences.

I have some of the folding rulers, and even one much like yours with the brass ends. I never use them I just grab my roll up tape measure. I keep the old fold up rulers because I got them from my grandfather's tool box and I still have the old tool box as well.

I have several tools I use a lot, that were dad's or grandpa's or tools that were given to me as a gifts and I think of the person that gave them to me every time.

I am sorry for your loss.

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I did find this one in my tool box. It is in Imperial not that silly metric stuff. ;)

It has little pins on the left side that align with the holes in face on the right, and one pin near the middle near the 7 inch mark. Somewhere I have a fold up ruler that has a brass extension on the end in a 16th of an inch.

This ruler was made in USA, and says Warranted Boxwood on the face.

Sorry for the thread hijack. I never knew that were sought after or desirable, I kept it because it was old and kinda cool.

Sorry for your loss..