A tremendous patriot and a great friend of this magazine, James Paul Buchwald concluded his 94 fully lived years this week. This Depression-era kid from Cleveland — whose small frame held big passions and talents and ideas, and whose long tenure on this planet proved of great consequence — tried mightily to defy death’s sting. Alas, the inveterate cyclist — of both pedal and motor — has throttled off, bound for eternity, and with it, we pray, relief, salvation, and reunion with loved ones gone before him. He does so having left this world a better place.
About this friend, personal and institutional: A tinkerer at heart, a man of insight, vision, mechanical skill, and tenacity — and precision — Jim proved that a better mousetrap could be built. His was a natural-gas compressor (“separable reciprocating natural gas compressor,” to be accurate). Not too long into his career as a design engineer, and of the mind that there just had to be a more efficient way to move natural gas from oil-drilling sites to pipelines, Jim and two fellow engineers scraped together $10,000 and took on the task of building a smaller, cost-effective, and high-quality device. “Smaller” being a relative term: Good luck to any who would create a compressor prototype in the garage. But Jim did, albeit in the basement of his family’s central-Ohio home with additional manufacturing accomplished in a former turkey-processing plant, said to have retained the odors of its prior purposes. From such humble origins . . .
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