From Strawberries to Submarines to Swimming Pools

I kept a log of every aircraft that flew over our farm from the time I was eight years old until I was fifteen. I like airplanes. I wrote down the make and model, which direction it was flying, the time of day. It turned out to be hundreds of pages. I lost it in a house fire on February 1st, 2010, when I was 41 years old. Everything I had recorded from that farm, from a restless childhood, from the Navy, from the years after. All of it was gone in one night. But here's the thing about a habit built that deep. You can't burn it out of a person.

The habit of observation didn't live in that log, it lived in me. It still does. It's the reason I read a pool differently than almost everyone else in the field. It started on a farm in Missouri with a man I've been telling you about in pieces for three weeks now. It's time that you met him properly.

I was eight years old when we moved there and fifteen when we left. Seven years. For a kid who attended nine different school systems by the time he graduated high school, seven years in one place wasn't just a chapter of my life. It was the whole book. My father built that farm with his hands. We had three acres of strawberries in a UPIC operation where people came to get a couple quarts for a pie. There was an orchard of about thirty fruit trees, peaches, plums, pears, apples, a persimmon, and a pawpaw. And a two acre garden that didn't exist for recreation. It existed because sometimes it was the only thing standing between us and not eating.

I want you to understand that clearly. That garden fed us, not occasionally, regularly. We put up vegetables and fruit all season so we'd have food for the winter. It wasn't a hobby, it was how we survived. I was ten years old when I started working in the strawberry patch. While every other kid in my school had summer vacation, sleeping in, riding bikes, watching TV, I was picking strawberries. Dad paid two cents a quart, and I'd pick about a thousand quarts a day. Twenty dollars a day for a ten year old in rural Missouri in the late 1970s was serious money. And I learned something that summer that I have not forgotten not once in my entire life.

If you're willing to do the work other people won't do, you'll always find a way to get paid for it. The sky was the other thing you had out there. No neighbors very close at all, no distractions worth mentioning, just land and sky and work and time. So I watched the sky. I started writing things down. Cessna's seven hundred thirty sevens, Piper Cubs, the occasional war bird if we were lucky. Two P fifty one Mustangs flying formation with a B twenty five Mitchell one day. Hundreds of pages over seven years. My father managed the farm and the garden the way he managed everything, without explanation and without asking permission from anyone, including the calendar, the hardware store, or conventional wisdom.

He was an organic gardener before the word existed, no pesticides ever, not one application in seven years on that farm. He read what the system needed and he gave it that. He didn't experience it as a philosophy, he experienced it as attention. Every September, when the Missouri State Fair came to Sedalia, my father would load me into the truck and we would drive to the fairgrounds. Not for the rides, not for the food. We went to the livestock barns. The horse stalls at the end of the fair are not a place most people want to hang out in. They smell like what they are, but my father had a wagon hitched to the back of the truck, and we spent the better part of a day loading every bit of manure and straw out of those stalls we could haul.

Truckload after truckload after truckload. We took it home and added it to the pile. He had three piles, each one a year older than the last. And he never touched anything but the three year old pile to fertilize the garden. I asked him why once. He gave me the kind of answer he always gave me, which was mostly not an answer. Something like that's the one that's ready. I found out years later what he already knew without knowing he knew it. Decomposing manure produces nitrogen. Nitrogen is what plants need. Too fresh and the ammonia burns through the roots, too raw and the microbial activity competes with the plant instead of feeding it.

Three years of controlled decomposition produces stable, bioavailable nitrogen that the garden can actually use. He timed it perfectly, without a chemistry degree, without even a soil analysis kit, without asking anyone. He read the system and he gave it what it needed. He also had a way of dealing with pests that I did not fully understand until I was considerably older. Every two months, year round, including the dead of winter, he'd mix two dozen eggs into five gallons of water and spray the perimeter of the garden and the base of every fruit tree in the orchard. I asked him why he did it in the winter. He looked at me and shrugged.

The sulfur content of eggs is a documented natural repellent. Insects and small animals have a hard stop response to sulfur compounds. My father knew this the way he knew everything, which was not through study but through attention. He had watched what worked and what didn't, and the egg spray worked, so he kept doing it. All year long. Because whatever he was keeping away didn't take winters off, and neither did he.

And then there were the ladybugs. One afternoon my father came home from the farmer's co op with a box, just a plain cardboard box, about twelve inches on a side, taped shut. It smelled kind of strange. He didn't say anything about it, but he took a pocket knife, cut out a hole in the bottom of the box, about the size of a quarter, and walked every row of the strawberry patch and every row of the garden, holding that box upside down, shaking it as he walked. twenty five thousand ladybugs. I watched the whole thing from the fence. Ladybugs are one of the most effective biological pest control agents in existence.

A single ladybug will consume several hundred aphids in a day, and aphids were the primary pest threat to strawberries in the garden. My father had done the math, or something that functioned like the math, entirely in his head, with no textbook and no extension agent and no internet to consult, and arrived at the correct answer. twenty five thousand of them, distributed evenly, walking every row himself to make sure the distribution was right. He didn't explain it then, he didn't explain it later. He just did it. And the strawberries were amazing.

My father built that farm because he was trying to put down roots, trying to be a father and a man in the way he understood those things. It was the most valiant attempt of his life. He didn't fully succeed. And I want to tell you why, because nothing about that farm or me or this podcast makes any sense without understanding what my dad was carrying when he came home from Korea.

My father's name was James. He went by Jim. He joined the United States Navy at seventeen years old. Not out of patriotism and not out of duty. He joined because his father was abusive and his mother was indifferent, and the military was the only institution that would take a boy who had dropped out of school before eighth grade and ship him somewhere far enough away that home couldn't reach him anymore. He told me once, towards the end of his life, that he joined the military hoping a war would kill him. That combat death would have been preferable to the life he was living at home. He was seventeen years old when he thought that.

The Navy sent him to Korea, and what he came back with was two silver stars, one with an oak leaf cluster for bravery, a bronze star also with an oak leaf cluster, six purple hearts, and something that nobody had a proper name for yet in 1953. I asked him once why he had so many purple hearts. He looked at me in that dry and deadly serious way of his and said they kept trying to kill me, but I just wouldn't let 'em.

I'm gonna tell you about one of those purple hearts, the one that earned him his first silver star. He told me this story on june first, nineteen ninety five. It was a Thursday afternoon. We were sitting on the tailgate of his truck, a green nineteen sixty seven Chevy C ten long bed. He called it the beater. Parked it in my driveway. He cried the entire time he was telling it.

A few days before the Inchon landing, Korea's D Day, my father's squad of eighteen men swam five miles from a submarine to the Korean shoreline in the dark. Their mission was reconnaissance. They were tasked to survey the landing beach. That meant mapping the troop strengths, finding the gun emplacements, identifying the terrain obstacles, and setting underwater charges with delay fuses on the barriers and barricades that would obstruct the amphibious landing craft. Frogman work, the kind that doesn't get announced, the kind that doesn't get remembered.

On the way out, on the beach, in the tail end of the mission, they were ambushed by a North Korean patrol. They fought back. Hand to hand combat. In the firefight, Dad took a bayonet through the right side of his chest through out his back.

It gave him a sucking chest wound and a collapsed lung. They eliminated the patrol completely. My father and his commander, a Navy lieutenant, were the only two who survived. Sixteen of the eighteen in Dad's squad never made it off that beach.

The submarine wasn't due back for eighteen hours. The two of them had to tread water in the Yellow Sea for eighteen hours. His lieutenant kept him alive. Eventually the submarine found them. They still had all the information the squad had gone in for. The mission had succeeded. The sacrifice of sixteen men who never came home was credited, quietly and without ceremony, with a significant part of the success of the Inchon landing. His commander won the Navy Cross. My father won his first silver star when he was just eighteen years old.

He never talked about it, not once, not to anyone. For forty-four years he carried every one of those sixteen men inside him and never said a word about any of it. He cried for the first time when he told me the story on that Thursday afternoon, sitting on the tailgate of the beater in my driveway. He was sixty two years old.

His coping mechanism was three packs a day, a six pack of beer, and a nineteen forty six Martin D twenty eight guitar. For the nightmares that never stopped and the sleep that never came. Thirty minutes a night if he was lucky, maybe an hour. Never more than that. Nobody called it PTSD in nineteen fifty three. Nobody called it anything, you just came home. You were supposed to be fine, even if you weren't. And the pride of a man who had done what my father did, who had survived what my father survived, would never have allowed him to ask for help, even if help had existed. So he carried it alone, every night for the rest of his life.

Here's what that looks like from inside a house when you're a child and nobody has a name for it yet. A father who is there but not really there, whose demons take up most of the space in every room he walks into, who loves you, and you know he loves you, but who can't quite reach you through whatever is always between him and the present moment. A hair triggered temper born of a man who hasn't slept properly in years, who fought authority every time he encountered it because authority had sent him into the Yellow Sea at eighteen years old and given him no way to come back from it whole.

Nine towns, nine school systems. We moved around a lot because he couldn't hold a job long enough to stay. Because the fights, the outbursts, the nights that my family spent bailing him out of jail, the general impossibility of being Jim Cooper in a world that had no framework for what Jim Cooper was carrying kept moving us along. He had a childhood friend who was the Pettus County Sheriff, a man named Emmett. Emmett knew my father's history, and while my father was never convicted of anything, he spent a lot of days sobering up as a guest of the county. The farm was his attempt to stop all of that, to build something permanent, to put roots down and be the man he wanted to be and couldn't quite reach.

Three acres of strawberries, an orchard, a two acre garden that kept us fed. A sky full of aircraft that his kid logged obsessively because that was what was out there, and a boy needs to watch something. He almost made it work. And here's what I absorbed from all of that without anyone teaching it to me directly. To love was to sacrifice. To sacrifice was to struggle. Struggle was how you survived, and survival was all there was. I didn't know I had learned that. It was just the water I swam in. It was just how life worked. I carried it into adulthood the way you carry the things you absorb before you're old enough to examine them.

I spent most of my life until my mid forties on what I can only describe as the struggle bus, heading reliably to Struggle Town because struggle was the only home I knew how to find. I self-sabotaged, subconsciously, reliably, found ways to stay in difficulty because difficulty was familiar, and familiar was comfortable even when it was terrible. Even when I knew better. Even when every credential I had earned said that I should have known better. My father didn't teach me that intentionally. He taught me by example, the way parents always teach the things they were never meant to. And he was doing the absolute best he could with what the United States Navy and the Korean War and a childhood that wanted him dead had left him with.

I understand that now. It took a really long time to get there. When I graduated high school, there was no money for college. Period. End of conversation. I joined the Navy, partly because my father had served, and I respected that more than I could articulate at eighteen. Partly because I needed a way out of a life that had no clear next step. I'm not going to romanticize it. I needed a door and the military was the one that was open. What I didn't know was that I was going to discover the other side of it. I scored a perfect score on the ASVAB, the military's standard entrance exam.

Perfect score. And somebody noticed. That score qualified me for nuclear training. Nuclear school is six months of graduate level physics, chemistry, reactor theory, and thermodynamics pressed into a schedule that does not let up. The Navy selects for it carefully because most people wash out. I didn't. I want to tell you what the final exam looked like, because I think it explains something about how I approach every pool in the field. It was one question. That was it. The entire final exam of nuclear power school was one question. It was an energy balance equation. Fourteen variables on one side of the equal sign, fourteen variables on the other side.

Twenty-eight variables in total. You had to solve all of them correctly. If you got the right answer, you passed. If you got the wrong answer, you washed out. There was no partial credit. There was no close enough. There was no, well, you got twenty six of the twenty-eight, so we'll give you something. The only way to get the correct answer was to get every single variable correct. One wrong and the answer was wrong. One wrong and you were done. That's not an exam, that's a philosophy. Every system is connected to every other system. Every variable affects every other variable. You don't get to decide which ones matter and which ones you can approximate.

They all matter. All of them. All the time. I'm not telling you that to impress you. I'm telling you because that philosophy is still running in the background on every field visit I make. It's why I don't round numbers. It's why I don't accept close enough as an answer. It's why six variables in the LSI all get measured and all get managed. Not five, not the important ones. All six.

Nuclear operations doesn't tolerate approximation. You understand the system completely or you don't operate it. There is no in between. On a submarine, it's life or death. You trace every problem back to its root cause or you haven't fixed anything and people die. You've just postponed something worse. A nuclear meltdown on a submarine, eight hundred feet below the surface of the ocean, qualifies as something worse. I carried that framework onto the submarine I served on, the USS Dallas Blue Crew. I carry it to every pool in the field. I chose submarines because my father chose the sea and I wanted to understand what he had gone into.

I also chose submarines because everybody said the food was better. I do like to eat. Out of the Navy, I went to work at the Hanford Nuclear Power Plant in Washington State. On paper it made perfect sense. Nuclear operator, nuclear plant. Ten months. I lasted ten months. I was reading gauges and carrying a clipboard, watching other people make decisions about systems I understood better than they did. I'm gonna be diplomatic about the engineering culture there and say that it and I were not a natural fit.

I moved back to Missouri and went to work for a friend who ran a framing company. I didn't know anything about framing when I started, but I could learn and I could work, and those two things have always been enough. Within six months, I bought the company from him. He was a talented framer and a terrible businessman, and I could see what the business could become if someone just ran it correctly. I partnered with a woman named Joanne and together we built custom homes for twenty five years. Over that career we built about thirty pools to go with those homes, and somewhere in those years, friends and family started calling me when their pool had a problem.

They knew I was an engineer, they figured I could figure it out. I could. But more importantly, I started asking why. Why does pH drift? Why does CYA matter? Why does the same chlorine reading behave completely differently in two pools with different water chemistry? The industry had answers to all of these questions, but most of the answers were rules of thumb passed down from a pool store to a service tech to a pool owner without anyone ever tracing them back to the actual science. I went back to the source, the actual chemistry, the physics. What I found was the industry had some things right, some things approximately right, and some things just plain wrong.

And almost nobody knew the difference because almost nobody had gone deeper. I need to stop here before I tell you about the pool company. Because the pool company and this platform and this podcast wouldn't exist in the form they exist without something that happened first. Something more important than the credentials and the work and the twenty five years of home building. I spent most of my adult life until my mid forties thinking the struggle was just what life was. The difficulty was the baseline. That surviving was the goal, and peace was something that other people had access to. I didn't know any other way because my father hadn't known any other way, and I had learned everything from him, including the things he never even meant to teach.

Then I met Debbie. She didn't put up with any of that. She showed me something I didn't have a word for yet, a thing called highest best self. The idea that you could build something not from a survival instinct, but from clarity, not from the bottom looking up, but from a place of peace and purpose and genuine ease. Everything I have built since then has been built from that place.

Her business acumen and my technical skill. Her peace and my discipline. The combination of those two things built something beyond what either of us could have imagined separately. She is the CFO. She handles the business. I handle the chemistry. Together we built something that works in a way that neither of us could have done alone, and it has been, beyond any measure I had for such things, a resounding success. No more struggle bus on the way to Struggle Town. Just the work done right from a place of peace.

My father never got there. The war took that possibility from him before he was old enough to know it existed. He managed with what he had a nineteen forty six Martin D twenty eight, a six pack of beer, thirty minutes of sleep on a good night, and the strawberry farm that held him together for seven years while his kid watched the sky and wrote things down.

He did the best he could with what he had been given. I understand that completely now. I retired from home building in 2017. Twenty-five years, ready to step back. I got bored immediately. I'm not built for sitting still. Anyone who knows me will confirm this without hesitation and probably with some amusement. Then something happened that I told the full story of in episode one. If you haven't heard it, go back and listen. The short version is this I encountered a failure in the pool industry so basic, so completely preventable, that it could only exist in an industry that had normalized low standards or no standards as a way of doing business.

And I looked at it and I thought, there is a massive gap here between what pool chemistry could be and what most of the industry is actually doing. And someone needs to fill that gap. I've always been capable. I've always been willing to do the work other people won't do. I've always been the kind of person who, when he sees a problem that needs solving, wants to solve it correctly, not approximately, not conveniently, correctly. So I started a pool company, a premium service operation built entirely on scientific credibility and the protection of my clients' backyard investment. No shortcuts, no rules of thumb that I couldn't trace back to actual chemistry.

No tolerance for that's just how we've always done it. By referral only. My team manages hundreds of pools now. Every one of them gets chemistry managed from first principles, documented precisely, adjusted with discipline. The same mindset I brought to a nuclear reactor applied to water chemistry in a backyard in Kansas City. But hundreds of pools are not nearly enough. There are millions of pools in this country, something like a hundred million pools worldwide. Most of them are being managed by people doing their best with incomplete information. Pool owners guessing based on what the pool store told them, service technicians following procedures handed to them without anybody explaining why.

The industry for the most part isn't in a hurry to change any of that. There's money in confusion. There's money in unnecessary chemical sales and equipment that fails sooner than it should, and service calls that solve symptoms without finding causes.

I built this platform because I believe that if you give people the real science, not dumbed down, not stripped of its accuracy, but actually explained in language a human being can actually work with, they can make better decisions. Better decisions mean healthier water and longer lasting equipment and a lot less money spent on problems that shouldn't have happened in the first place. That's what this podcast is the science, explained by someone who spent a career going deep on hard problems, and who finally learned later than he should have, probably, that going deep doesn't have to mean going alone.

From strawberries to submarines to swimming pools, every stop on that road produced something that ended up here. The farm gave me the work ethic and the habit of observation. Beechcraft bonanza flying northwest four oh four PM An eight year old with a notebook watching the sky because that was what was out there twelve miles northeast of Sedalia. I still watch, I still write things down. I just call it documentation now and I do it with a test kit instead of a pencil and the subjects have gotten considerably wetter. The Navy gave me the framework. Every system connected to every other system. No approximations, no good enough.

Twenty eight variables, all of them, all the time. The standard is the standard, and it doesn't care how you feel about it. The engineering degrees gave me the chemistry and the physics, both earned by correspondence on a submarine before the internet existed, by snail mail, and on active duty the entire time in two and a half years between the University of Florida in Gainesville and the FPO in Groton, Connecticut. Some people find that remarkable. To me, it was just the next problem to solve.

The home building gave me twenty-five years of precision work at scale. Thirty pools, the first questions, the beginning of asking why. Debbie gave me peace. The discipline, the stubbornness, the work ethic, the willingness to do the work other people won't do. The ability to tread water when everything else is against you, and hold on until the submarine comes. He literally taught me that last one. He just didn't know he was teaching it. But there's something else he gave me, something I have spent a long time trying to name correctly. He managed forty two acres of Missouri farmland without a chemistry degree, without a soil analysis lab, without a pest control service, without asking anyone for advice I can recall him following.

He composted horse manure for three years before he touched it because he knew when it was ready. He sprayed egg water around the perimeter of his garden in the middle of January because he understood, without a textbook, that whatever he was keeping away didn't take winters off. He walked twenty five thousand ladybugs through his strawberry patch because he had read what the system needed and he gave it that. He didn't experience any of that as science. He experienced it as attention.

A pool is a living system. It tells you what it needs if you stop and read it. You test more locations, you watch where the surface moves, you check the pressures before you assume the chemistry. You ask what the system is telling you before you decide what it needs. My father never touched a pool in his life. But everything I do in one came from watching him.

He also gave me something he had no idea he was giving me a sound. A nineteen forty six Martin D twenty eight playing every night in a farmhouse twelve miles northeast of Sedalia. A man going somewhere inside himself that nothing else in his life could reach. I watched him from across the room. I didn't understand what I was watching then. I understand it now. He was managing the only way he knew how. He was doing the only thing that worked. My brother still has that guitar.

Jim Cooper died on june fourth, nineteen ninety five. It was a Sunday morning and he was sixty two years old. Lung cancer. He never got the recognition he deserved for the music or for what he did in Korea, or for the valiant and imperfect attempt he made at being a father on a strawberry farm in Missouri. He got two silver stars and a bronze star, and six purple hearts, and forty two years of nightmares and nine towns and two acre garden and an orchard with thirty fruit trees and a kid who watched the sky and wrote everything down and couldn't stop asking why.

They kept trying to kill him. He just wouldn't let them. Not in Korea, not in the years after, not until the cigarettes finally finished the job that the war had started. The observation didn't live in the log, it lived in me. It still does. I built this platform from that habit, from that framework, from the peace that Debbie showed me was possible, and from the memory of a man who carried sixteen dead men home from the Yellow Sea in his chest, and played guitar every night in a Missouri farmhouse because it was the only thing that helped. I built it for pool owners who deserve to understand their water, for pool professionals who deserve to be treated like the scientists they're working to become, for an industry that deserves better than it has settled for.

And I built it for my dad. He would have been embarrassed by that. He would have told me to stop making a fuss. He would also have loved every single episode, but he wouldn't have admitted that either. One thing before I go.

I think he would have appreciated it, but he never would have said so. This one's for him. Take care of your water.