Not all that long ago, pretty much anything you owned had been handmade by a skilled artisan. Now, after a couple of centuries of industrialization, are handcrafted goods on the road to extinction, or are they making a comeback? And what’s the true value of buying our goods from our neighbors?
This week, JPR’s Michael Joyce brings us four stories from the nexus of craftsmanship and the four classical elements. Today’s story? FIRE.
Joe Koches cranks the bellows that makes his forge blaze brilliant orange.
"Basically what I’m doing now is controlling the fire," he says. "The fire is my very first tool."
For nearly half his 78 years, Joe has been a blacksmith in Ferndale, California.
"The nice thing about blacksmithing is that I don’t have to give this piece up to any kind of technology. Everything that happens to that piece of steel I do it. Not something else."
Joe points around his shop.
"The building that we’re in was built in 1884," he says. "All solid redwood. Unbelievable building. And in 1899 there were 29 blacksmiths in Ferndale. You had to go to the blacksmith for everything. Can you imagine that in a little town like this?"
What’s not hard to imagine is that he’s the only one left. And that Walmart and Costco are 20 miles away. That’s where you can get a plastic towel rack for under 10 bucks. A hand crafted one by Joe could run you five to ten times that.
Regular customer Cheryl Seidner is willing to pay that price.
"I have these wrought iron acorn towel racks, and towel ring, and ‘tissue dispenser’ … to put it politely … I bought these from him not even asking the price."
Seidner isn’t rich, but she’s been a regular customer for 20 years and saves up money to buy functional pieces from Joe.
"You don’t mind doing that with people you know," she says. "Because it gives that person money to pay their rent, pay their electricity, to clothe their family, and then you have a camaraderie with somebody. And," she adds, "I know I’m putting money into our local economy."
Helping neighbors and boosting the local economy are two of the more common reasons given for shopping locally. So are building civic pride and creating jobs. Dan Sumner, an economics professor with UC Davis, says research supports the notion that money spent locally does multiply locally.
“Typical multipliers are two to one," Sumner says. "Meaning one dollar spent locally has a two dollar impact on the local economy. It depends on what the business you buy from and where they buy their things. “
Joe Koches believes that as a local business owner, it's up to him to make that multiplier - or ripple effect - bigger than two to one.
“When somebody comes to Ferndale and they buy something from me, I take that money and go pay my bill at Rings; I go buy groceries; I may get a tank of gas. And maybe he’ll take that money out of town and spend it in Fortuna. But in the meantime it’s gone around my town three times. So if it’s $100, it’s $300 worth of commerce.”
You’ll also frequently hear people say it’s good for the environment to do your shopping as close to home as possible. Again, economist Dan Sumner:
“The issue that it’s better environmentally to buy things locally is really questionable because most of the environmental footprint depends on how something is produced, not where."
And then there is this notion: that when it comes to craftsmanship, that which we are least able to measure, may actually have the most value.
Before he was a blacksmith Joe was one of the very first physician assistants in the United States. He worked with Doctor Clarence Crane in Ferndale. Joe loved bedside medicine so much that there are still old timers around town that affectionately call him “Doc Joe”.
“Part of the reason also that I got out of medicine is that it got so modern that they took the emotion out of it," he says.
It seems strange now, even to Joe, that he rediscovered that emotion by trading in his stethoscope for a hammer.
“When you bring a piece of white-orange metal out of the fire and put it on to an anvil and start to reshape it, it grabs all of your attention and your emotion. For me there is no way I can make a piece and not be very emotional about it."
I ask Joe to show me a piece that embodies that kind of emotion for him. He shows me a lovely tabletop sculpture.
“What you have here is a swan in flight, with wings up. This particular one is a service chime and if you pick the clapper up, and strike the wing ... {ting} ... that’s what you get”
Joe says that over the years, he's made a friend of fire.
“My thoughts on fire are all positive. In fact, I’m planning on going to hell because they’ve got a lot of really cool fires down there and somebody has to make those tridents that they carry around! And most of the women that I’ve been with are probably going to be down there. So I’m going to hell!”
When I ask him what he'd like to see on his gravestone, he chuckles and replies,“He Had A Good Time…”
