This Friday (as well as Sunday)is the 124th birthday of the person I envisioned myself to be – and he was the ultimate inspiration of why I decided to get an engineering degree.
By the time this man was 20, he was alone in the world, having lost his family in World War I. He got a job driving trucks from one factory to another and did this for a time before getting hired by a large Italian manufacturer.
Here he became friends with the engineers and ‘chief players’ at the firm. These friendships he leveraged for the remainder of his life. And, by the end of his life, he was considered one of the most revered engineers in the world, having never achieved an engineering degree himself.
Throughout his life, his peers challenged him, revered him, hated him, wanted to destroy his work and eulogized him with praise when he passed at age 90.
How did he have two birthdays – Friday as well as Sunday. He was born on the 18th of February but there was such a snow storm that day his family did not record his birth until the 20th – and in his country, your ‘birthday’ was the day it was recorded.
He himself considered his passion in life to be a terrible joy as he ‘sent’ dozens of men to their deaths over the years. Although he did not pass judgement on these men or cause their death, the media stirred the public’s emotions to a frenzy – to the point he was tried for some of these deaths, and found innocent.
His name – Enzo Ferrari.
His Terrible Joy was automobile racing.
He was much more in tune with building the next successful racing car than in building a street car. However, he found he could make enough money to finance his racing by selling ‘streetable’ copies of his racing cars.
To give you a small taste of the sound, sensation, smell, I have been allowed to relish dozens of times, go to 7 Minutes Of Pure Ferrari 250 GTO Hillclimb Bliss – YouTube
Buon Compleanno Enzo
