[TheForge] Re: historcial blacksmith status in the community

[Mike Spencer]

Just a couple of anecdotal items:

Elihu Burritt (b. 1910, New Britain, Conn.) received a "very meager"
schooling, apprenticed and then worked as a blacksmith. But
eventually, while continuing as a smith, not merely taught himself to
read fluently but mastered several European and Asian languages and
was offered admission to Harvard.  Eventually he became the subject of
_The Learned Blacksmith -- The Letters and Journals of Elihu Burritt_,
published in 1937.

An interesting read, considering that many of today's blacksmiths are
dropouts from engineering, science and other academic pursuits.

Another man of interest was Cecil Parnell.  Cecil dropped out of
school after the 3rd grade to work in the "lumber woods" greasing
the wheels of horse-drawn wagons sometime in the 1920s.  He later
worked in his elder brother's machine shop, then set up on his own.

In the 1960s he somehow wangled the contract to build the
infrastructure for Canada's first satellite earth station [1] which he
completed more or less single-handedly.  One of his yarns was about a
huge steel rod (maybe 8" diameter and 20 or 30 feet long? Memory
fails. Might have been even bigger.) that was delivered to the remote
site at great expense. It should have been threaded on one end where
fabricated but hadn't been.  Rather than incur the expense of shipping
it back to (Montreal?  I forget.) Cecil found a suitable die and
4-spoked holder.  But despite being of traditional blacksmith stature
-- maybe 5'5" and barrel-shaped -- he couldn't turn the die.  So he
borrowed a draught horse and harness and turned the die, 1/4 turn at a
time, backing and hitching for each 1/4 turn.  Possibly the only item
in the space-based telecom world to have been machined by a horse.

He could do numbers and simple arithmetic but he never did learn to
read well enough to cope easily with unfamiliar highway signage.

He especially liked to recount how, when, once upon a time, they had a
breakdown, they called the the head office in Halifax.  Stymied and in
a panic, the head office called the engineering firm in Texas that had
designed and built the whole thing . After some deliberation, the
Texas guys said, "Well, we could put a team on a plane and be there in
a day or two but look, there's this guy, Cecil Parnell, just twenty
miles away. He actually built the thing that isn't working." So Cecil
got the 3:00 AM call, turned out in his pickup and, of course, just
fixed them right up before the sun rose.

Cecil could do roughly twice as much physical work for twice a many
hours at a stretch as a normal person and was cheerfully scornful of
mere mortals.  The only time I ever won his unconditional admiration
was when I was doing some anchors in his shop.  The head of my
favorite 5# hammer broke off and, not wanting to lose the heat,
grabbed another and went on hammering. Work so hard that you wear out
and break tools in all directions and just don't stop?  Well, that was
exactly Cecil's idea of real work.  By the time I had finished the
heat, he had busted the stub out of my hammer head and had rehelved it
with a new handle from his stock, handed it back to me for the next
heat along with loud and enthusiastic approbations about "likin' to see
a man who can wuk".

- Mike


[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/borderfilms/sets/72157625085760647/

    Now abandoned and salvaged.  Cecil also said that, during
    construction, they needed a braided copper ground cable the
    diameter of your arm.  The suppliers sent an entire industrial
    spool -- a couple of tons as I understood it -- rather than the
    needed length.  When Cecil asked how they wanted it handled, they
    had him just roll the whole spool into the swamp with maybe 3/4 of
    the cable still on the spool.  I never heard if the people who
    finally salvaged the abandoned site recovered that or not.

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^