Creative Spark:

BILL POTTER

In the same trunk where I store my mother’s letters, there is another stack rubber-banded together: those I received in the mid-seventies from the older brother I adored who was backpacking his way through the country. While I looked up to all my older siblings, Bill was the brother I perceived as the epitome of coolness during the bell-bottomed, long-haired ‘70s. The beautiful hand lettering on those letters attests to his artistic bent in high school, where he enjoyed sculpting in clay and designing black light posters.

Self-described as “rather rebellious and free-spirited” during that era, Bill left home after his 1973 high school graduation, two months before his eighteenth birthday, intent on reaching the Rocky Mountains with a friend who owned a car. When it looked as though their money was running out, the two then headed to Denver, Colorado, with their backpacks and tent, picking up odd jobs.

“Coming from small-town Iowa to the big city was an education on life,” Bill says. “What I remember the most are the people I met there. I turned a bit ‘hippie’ as a result.”

Bill soon returned to Iowa, where he worked at a factory for a couple of years before deciding to see more of the country. He hitchhiked his way to Portland, Oregon, where he picked fruit and did other odd jobs for two years, living without any more possessions than what he could carry on his back. Through his travels and occasional meals eaten at various churches and missions he visited in Denver and Portland, he was exposed to a different type of religion than the one he’d grown up with, hearing messages his troubled soul yearned for. He gave his heart to Jesus during one of the church’s meetings. By the time he met his future wife, Brenda, in 1984, he’d returned to Iowa and was working as a truck driver. The two were baptized together.

“When we were first married, I was driving a truck over the road and normally home just on weekends,” Bill says about that time. “Then when our daughter turned five, I took her with me for a week in the truck and realized just how awesome she was. It was then I decided I needed to find a different job that would allow me to be home with my new family.”

Bill worked for a local hazardous chemical delivery company for a couple of years, then got another local delivery job, later moving into a mechanic position for that company. In 1994, by then a father of two, he began work as a mechanic with PMX Industries, the leading supplier of copper and copper alloys in North America. He was promoted to supervisor in 1998, then maintenance planner in 2000. He worked that position through the duration of his employment, retiring at age sixty-two.

“I owe my success at PMX to creativity. I’ve always liked creating or improving things, even as a mechanic,” Bill says. “I know creativity helped me very much as a planner. I was responsible for designing machine downturn schedules, technical writing, and event planning. Although it wasn’t part of my job description, I was still designing equipment improvements and sketching ideas for those improvements to become realities through the engineering and production departments.”

While Bill had continued doing some drawing and writing through adulthood and enjoyed whittling during family campouts, it wasn’t until he inherited our grandfather’s tool chest that his creativity really took off.

“The chest was full of some of my mom’s carving tools as well as a few of my grandpa’s woodworking tools. Holding those tools in my hands, I thought about Mom and her father and the things they’d made. Using their tools made me feel like I was spending time with them. Once I started creating things (whittling, carving, and woodburning), it was like someone, maybe God himself, flipped on a switch, and now I can’t stop creating,” Bill says. “I feel so very blessed that I have an opportunity to do what I want to do and enjoy what I already have, not pursue ‘more.’ I get so much satisfaction from creating something. I can’t see stopping as long as my fingers and mind function. I’m creating because I enjoy it, moved to do so by my Creator.”

 

“Parenting is creating.

Teaching is creating.

Working is creating.

It all is.”

—PATTI DIGH