Michael Schulman: Walt Whitman Odets Remembers His Father: The New Yorker Walt Whitman Odets sat in the upstairs lounge of the American Airlines Theatre, waiting to meet the cast of "The Big Knife," a play by his father, Clifford Odets. Odets fils, who lives in Berkeley, has graying hair and the soft-spoken precision of a clinical psychologist, one of his many vocations. He is also a photographer, a pilot (he gave up flying two years ago and now uses an F.A.A.-approved simulator), an inventor (in the seventies, he created a self-cleaning garlic press but abandoned it after a patent dispute with an Austrian), and an amateur horologist. "Some of the parts of a wristwatch are so small that you can barely see them with the naked eye," he said, puffing on an electronic cigarette. My father was a mechanical idiot, and I think I developed a competence in mechanical areas because it was something I knew he couldn't do. . . .