My father certainly had nothing to do with my eventual tool addiction. He wasn't much interested in making or fixing things. He liked reading, dancing, playing cards, and listening to the radio (and watching TV, once we finally got one). His big hobbies were hunting and fishing. He was a spiffy dresser, too. As a Chief Clerk, he wore a coat and tie to work. He never even owned a pair of jeans. His rough trousers for the great outdoors were khakis.
My mother was a talented and inventive seamstress, and she was also talented at oil painting, but wasn't into any other crafts. My older brother never showed the slightest sign of wanting to handle a saw or drill. I rather doubt that he ever even owned a pocket knife. My older sister did eventually end up owning a craft store for a while, during which time she got into decoupage and gold leafing, but I never saw any sign of interest in such things before she got married.
In my case, my love of building things must have been at least partly due to the kids I hung out with. I grew up in a series of small towns and oil camps in the 40s and 50s, and we often made our own toys. Old roller skates were disassembled and attached to boards to make scooters. Wooden cigar box tops became rubber-band-powered paddlewheel boats. Weapons were a big thing--Bowie knives carved from apple crate; submachine guns sawed out of pine boards; blowguns made by using a straightened coat hanger, heated over the kitchen stove, to burn through the sections of a length of bamboo, with darts made from the spines of date palm leaves; double-pronged spears from bamboo fishing poles; and bows and arrows from a variety of materials.
All that has stayed with me. While in my mid-50s, I startled our office manager by making a blowgun from a couple of FAX paper rollers, with darts made from paper clips and mailing labels, and shooting at targets all the way across our rather large office. As an "adult" I've made a variety of daggers from files and saw blades, a crossbow from an automobile leaf spring that I picked up during police call at Ft. Bragg, and a naginata (Japanese halberd) from an oak staff and a machete blade. I failed at making a gun to shoot needles using CO2 cartridges. I did make a .22 zip gun when I was in high school, but never had enough confidence in the barrel to actually shoot it. I also made my own gunpowder, leading to a variety of small bombs.
My earliest musical instrument was a cow-horn bugle that I made at about the age of 12 or 13. I was out hunting (meaning shooting anything that moved--except for cows, which were strictly off limits) and ran across a long-dead cow. It's horns slid right off when I pulled at them, so I took them home, carved a mouthpiece on one, drilled through into the cavity, and used broken glass to scrape it smooth.
I've built a couple of Appalachian dulcimers--one from a kit and one from scratch, and I made a banjolin by sawing the neck off of an old mandolin and attaching it to the shell of a cheap banjo with a severly warped neck. What I reall want to do is to make a guitar-banjo by attaching an electric guitar neck that I have lying around to a snare drum. A friend did that, and it was quite impressive. I also did a lot of mother-of-pearl inlay work on my $22.22 Suzuki fiddle. (My second dulcimer taught me the wisdom of keeping one's fingers away from table saw blades, as it's impossible to get bloodstains out of porous woods--and they can make your finger shorter and interfere with guitar playing.)
I no longer have a workshop, but I still have tons of tools--somewhere in boxes in the garage. When I lived in Japan, I went crazy for all those unique Japanese woodworking tools.
I did take shop in the 9th grade. We did several wood projects, a tooled leather billfold, bookbinding, and tin-can craft. I won a pocket knife for a butterfly kite that I made in that class. However, I'd already been building my own toys since at least the third grade. The same school also had auto shop, but I didn't have a car, so I didn't take it.
The Texas Boy Scout troops that I was in from the 6th through the 11th grade were all big on crafts. We did leather work (belts and moccasins), and learned to make rope from packing twine and arrowheads from flint. We plaited lanyards and made plaster-of-paris castings. On my own, I tanned snake skins and failed at tanning a raccoon skin (using tannic acid from my chemistry set), so that my coonskin cap eventually became too smelly to wear. I used my plaiting skills to make bullwhips--inspired by seeing Lash Larue live--and got good enough to pop cigarettes out of the mouths of my friends.
As for enterprise, that wasn't always addressed in the formal curriculum, but when I was a senior in high school. I took part in Junior Achievement. We made a business plan, came up with a product, manufactured it, and marketed it. That experience pretty much convinced me that I never wanted to own my own business.
Back in those days, quite a few of the boys belonged to the Future Farmers of America. Girls were relegated to the Future Homemakers of America.
I'm sure I'd be trying my hand at building whistles if I still had a place to work...so I'm glad that I don't. There already isn't enough time in the day for all the stuff I'm doing now (including writing such long posts here).
The comparison does not work, as there is no such thing than "protestant" Germany, there is slightly more Catholics and also Orthodox which are more like the Catholic Church I believe than like the Protestant....
