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Longtime Portlanders might recall Marvin Mafron, an inventor who for a number of years had a late-night infomercial in which he tried to peddle his sets of steak knives with detachable blades. To the audience beyond the camera, he would demonstrate with the press of a button just how easily the blades detached, though he never explained why this novel feature was an improvement over a conventional set of knives.
My family lived next door to the Mafron family for several years when I was a child. They had a frail boy named Mickey who was my age. We got on tepidly, though due to proximity his unrequited friendship was thrust upon me. We did share an interest in professional sports, and sometimes Marvin would drive us to the sports-card shop in their wood-paneled, wood-burning Chrysler station wagon.
That car, Marvin's own invention, is the topic of this week's column.
Marvin envisioned a world free from the tyranny of petroleum, in which cars and airplanes and houses and factories were all powered by the Northwest's most abundant and renewable resource: good old clean-burning timber. We were fresh out of the oil crises of the late-1970s, so research into alternative fuel sources was all the rage.
Marvin reserved a table at the Alternative Energy Pavilion at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tenn., with money won during a wild, three-day no-whammies streak on Press Your Luck. At the World's Fair, he met with a representative from the Blue Bird Corporation—manufacturer of school buses—who signed a contract to license Marvin's high-efficiency, wood-burning engine technology for a test fleet of buses.
The wood-burning buses were soon distributed to school districts throughout Oregon and Washington. One of the buses was assigned to service the school Mickey and I attended. I remember the momentous excitement of seeing the new yellow bus with its puffing brick chimney pulling up to the stop. Though the bus did not have the same giddy-up, the cabin was filled with the pleasant smell of wood smoke and, on cold, dreary mornings, the fiery furnace warmed us and brightened our spirits.
The trial run seemed to be going successfully, and plans were made to manufacture more buses. There were some isolated incidents of pranksters opening the furnace grate while the bus was in motion and throwing things like notebooks or Styrofoam into the fire. However, this problem seemed easily solvable with locking furnace grates.
The wood-burning bus project was shelved after a gruesome episode for which, I admit, I am partially to blame. One afternoon that annoying twerp Mickey sat down next to me on the bus, and I asked him to find another spot. When he did not, I unzipped his backpack and stole the first textbook I could find. I took it to the back of the bus, opened the grate and threw the book into the fire with the logs. Mickey fatefully reached into the flames. Underestimating the amount of heat generated within his father's high-efficiency wood furnace, he burned his hand badly enough that it had to be amputated.
It is unfortunate that I put his book in the furnace, but more unfortunate that he reached into the furnace, so I cannot take full responsibility for depriving the world of Marvin Mafron's vision of a utopian, petroleum-free, wood-burning society. But it does pain me to imagine an unrealized Portland that could have become a great hub of innovation and manufacturing like Indianapolis, Detroit or Dearborn before it.
Willamette Week