90 may just be time to ease up | Wairarapa News | Local News in Wairarapa

After a lifetime of making and fixing things Greytown engineer Jack Hayes has finally hung up his welding gear.

The 90 year old whose exploits with a welding torch and a spanner are legend in South Wairarapa has flagged away taking on jobs for customers but he won't be sitting idle.

"I'll keep buggering about but I won't be taking on any engineering work."

For all his successes- that include transforming the fishing industry at Ngawi by vastly improving the mechanics of launching and retrieving vessels from the bay - Jack reckons his proudest achievement was not making anything of steel.

"It was making my eight kids, they are my proudest achievement."

Jack was born in Eketahuna but moved to Carterton when he was three where his father George took on dairy farming.

He went to Carterton School leaving at 14 to work on the farm for a year before being employed by another dairy farmer.

Jack may have missed out on a formal college education but he went through the " college of hard knocks" and came out a better person for it.

He married Norma in 1940 and served in the army during World War 2 but couldn't go overseas due to a childhood accident.

"I fell off a pony when I was six and put my arm down to cushion the fall.

"The arm was broken and it set crooked."

His " crooked arm" didn't put any hurdles in the way of Jack's working life though.

"You can't worry about something like that, otherwise how would a man with one leg get on?"

The Hayes family came to Greytown - from Martinborough- in 1960, the year Kuranui College opened and Jack had a home built on the corner of Massey Street and McMaster Street, where he still lives.

The timber was logged from the Haurangi Ranges and milled but Jack did make one concession - he choose not to actually build the house himself.

Over the years Jack has put his shoulder to the wheel to build things of all shapes and sizes, including boats.

As a self taught engineer he soon built up a reliable clientele, one that kept him more than busy right up until he decided to shut the doors on his shed adjacent to his house, and put his feet up- at least in theory.

He has outlived Norma who died in 1983 but has family galore to keep an eye on him including grandchildren, great grandchildren and great, great grandchildren.

Jack has several closely affiliated philosophies in life that include if you are going to do something, do it properly and above all have a sense of humour.

"If you have no sense of humour you may as well be dead.

"There's plenty of people who moan and grizzle about everything, but what's the point?"

That sort of thinking has served Jack Hayes well for 90 years, so far.