Ex social studies teacher, now Autos teacher at West Leyden Frank Diebold, enjoys his time in the shop. Diebold remembers back to when his interest in cars was sparked. He recalls back to high school and his first fun car that he purchased he says ”It started when I was in high school myself and took the autos classes and then owned my first car, and I just became, like, enthralled with, like, how do I fix this? How do I fix that? And just working on the car and doing things myself, which led into when I had a little bit of money, when I was in my early 20s, buying what I would call a toy car, right, like my extra, like an older car that I could work on but not rely on every day. The first one I got was a 1975 Buick 225 they called it. It’s about a 225 inch car. It’s about 17 feet long. So think of like an old 1970s Buick or Cadillac”
Caring about the safety of his students a freak incident in the shop occurs he says” Craziest thing I saw is actually, I was using a tool. It’s called an air hammer, and we’re trying to break a wheel axle loose from the hub. And it’s an air powered tool. It’s basically, you pull the trigger, and this thing pulses like 1000s of times per second. It’s loaded with a spring. I was using it. The spring broke. I didn’t notice that the spring broke, and this thing shot from the air gun like a missile across the lab and stuck into one of the wooden tables. Luckily, nobody was in the way.”
Diebold’s loyalty to Leyden shows as he explains moving up through the years here“I worked here for 20 years, and for the first 15 years, I actually taught social studies, but I’ve always had an interest since I was a teenager in cars. Always worked on my own cars, specifically more classic cars, own cars from the 70s and early 80s, and I don’t know, about five years ago, a spot opened up here in the Industrial Technology Department, and I applied for it, and here I am now the auto teacher doing for work what I love doing as a hobby”
A person’s childhood is a thing that most people miss throughout their life Diebold dives back into his childhood memories and says “my father and mother were big influences on my life, right? My mother instilled hard work and like, doing what’s right, and almost there’s a lot of pressure there to always do the right thing always. And work, work, work, work, work. And what I got from my father was, like a more relaxed, like, things are going to be okay. It is that you can’t control the rain. And so I got a good mix of both those outlooks on life. Being a father myself has influenced a lot of my teaching, because my own kids now, my oldest son is almost a freshman in high school, so I think it’s given me a lot more patience with students here, realizing, no offense to the students, but you are only a couple years older than my own children, whereas I’m like 25 years older, so they’re more like children than They are adults. That students here look like adults, but they’re still children, and not in a negative way. That’s in a we need to be more patient with them”.
Some consider snowboarding as an extreme sport Diebold sees it as a family hobby saying” They’re just hills. Colorado, it’s a lot steeper. But, I mean, in some of the runs, it’s not really steeper. It’s just a longer run. Like you go up to Wisconsin on the hills, you go down the hill, you’re at the bottom in like 30 or 45 seconds, whereas in Colorado can be a couple minutes, depending on the run, like stop along the way. It’s tiring.”.
