I’VE ALWAYS HAD AN APTITUDE FOR COMPREHENDING MECHANICAL SYSTEMS. I remember the moment, years ago, when I realized I had this ability. I was sitting in the living room of my then-girlfriend, and as we talked late into the night I grabbed a broken alarm clock that had sat gathering dust on her desk for years. It was the old mechanical kind with a winder on the back and a bell on top, and as we talked I took it completely apart, cleaned the parts and reassembled it. I wound it up and, hearing it begin to tick, put it on the desk. My girlfriend suddenly stopped talking and said with a bit of amazement, “How did you fix that? My dad tried to for years, and was never able to.”

I replied, “I just …” then looked down at the clock in a mix of surprise and confusion. “I don’t actually know.”

That said, when it came to mechanical smarts I could never hold a candle to my high school friend Mike.

When I was around 16 years old, Mike bought an old ’65 Mustang with a beat-up body and a wheezing 289-cubic-inch V-8 engine, and he and I spent an entire summer rebuilding the engine and fixing the body.

I learned an immense amount that summer about how to fix cars. Mike showed me how to line up the pushrods to make sure they were mated with the valve lifters they had worn into; how to tell when lack of compression in a combustion chamber pointed to bad piston rings; and on and on.

There was a tense moment late that summer when we’d finished reassembling the motor and transmission. As Mike prepared to start the car, I said, “Wait a sec, Mike. What’s that?” and pointed to a small, ring-shaped bearing sitting on the front fender.

He began, “Well, that’s for the transmiss —”

We looked at each other and said together, “Oh, heck,” or words to that effect, and after laughing until our sides ached, we set about correcting our mistake.

We eventually got the car running like a top. A few months later Mike moved away with his family to a small town out in the San Joaquin Valley and I gradually lost touch with him. I called his mother a couple decades ago and learned that he’d become a professional auto mechanic, married a nice young woman and was raising a couple kids. I’m sure he’s been a great mechanic and a great dad.

I mentioned in a column a few weeks ago that “it is necessary to make sure that our economy can provide a middle-class wage to more than just the college-educated portion of our workforce, who, for a variety of reasons, will never be more than half of all workers.” Re-reading that recently, it occurred to me that it could apply to my friend Mike and millions of other Americans like him.

Mike’s gifts were not academic or intellectual in nature — I can’t imagine him thriving as, say, a graduate student in the classics — but people like Mike keep our cars safe to drive, our 747s in the air and our trains on the track (this week’s terrible disaster in Pennsylvania being the rare exception). The world runs because of their skills.

The American economy used to have plenty of jobs available for people like Mike. The pattern before 1980 or so was that there would be periodic recessions in which millions of blue-collar manufacturing workers were laid off, then those workers would go back to work as the economy recovered.

It is a commonplace of economics that free trade agreements both cost and create jobs. They destroy lower-skilled jobs and create higher-skilled, and higher-paying, ones. Recent history has borne this out: In the last 30 years, every recession has resulted in layoffs of manufacturing workers, but rather than being rehired when the economy recovered they have instead been pushed into lower-paying jobs, with far fewer benefits and no job security.

This is a problem.

For the Mikes of the world, there is a crying need for jobs that are: 1. Good paying, 2. Do not require a college degree, and 3. Are plentiful.

The time in our history when those three conditions were met was the 30 years after the Second World War. It was a time of strong unions, high marginal tax rates and a government that was committed to protecting the country’s manufacturing base.

I’ll explore that history in more detail, and discuss some lessons we can draw from it, in next week’s column.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.