Meet the People

The menu of Dino’s Italian Restaurant devotes a full panel to pizzas—predesigned pies or create your own. I’m waffling over toppings and the promise of leftovers based on what size I order when my server, a plump wild-haired blonde, drops by to check on me.

She props pen to pad. “Decided what you want, hon?”

“Um, yeah. But, first, what’s the difference in size between the small and medium pizzas?”

“Well, sweetheart, the small has six pieces and the medium has eight.”

I choke back a laugh. Okaaaaaay. Maybe they measure things differently in Kentucky. I try to get her to divulge the dimensions, but pizza-diameter estimation was a weak subject in school, so she falls back on the idea that a small serves one to two people, a medium three to four. I order the medium and polish off a third of it. It’s good pizza. My favorite combo of pepperoni, garlic, olives, mushrooms. Fresh-made dough. Thin crust. Great leftovers.

From my first night here, my time in London, Kentucky, has me talking to people. In restaurants. At the state park. Especially at Berea, a college-artisan town 45 minutes north in the foothills of the Appalachians.

The main college building in Berea; many nearby dorms and outbuildings are also brick.

Loved this tree and school entrance.

Berea College doesn’t charge tuition. Instead, students work 10 to 20 hours per week for the school—making rugs or pottery or wooden utensils to sell at the school’s shops, serving in administration or budget offices, working at the college-owned Boone Tavern Hotel and Restaurant, and so on. Under the guidance of their advisor, students must find the work, contract for it, and keep up good standing with both their job and their studies or be dismissed from the school.

Sounds like a pretty good system to me, especially because it helps folks who might not otherwise afford college to get there and graduate. Like the Negroes of the 1800s, who were the college’s primary clientele when it started in 1855. To this day, the school has great renown for its “longstanding tradition of diversity, social justice, environmental responsibility, and community service” (so says the brochure). What I saw was eco-tourism, decent weather, public art, small-town college energy, a sustainable-living mentality, clean neighborhoods, a statewide artisan guild, and an emphasis on hand-craft instead of mass production. Berea is a place I could live.

One of the many craft-selling shops run by the college or its alumni.

A modern sweat shop? This is one of the student work buildings for weaving.

Public art abounds.

Frontyard food and flower gardens are common in the heart of town.

Buttons and bumper stickers of this were everywhere. I think I just missed some sort of summer celebration.

Picture me here...

I go twice to Berea, and both times I spend hours ambling through the studio/stores and talking with people. I meet whittlers (oops, they’re called “carvers” nowadays) on the front porch of a house near the train-depot visitor’s center. John Adams, a wiry man with twinkling eyes and white stubble along his jaw line, puts pocketknife to raw square pegs to make long ornaments called “Santa-cicles.” Next to him, Ray is “chipping”—digging quilt patterns and complex geometries out of the surface of coaster-size squares. Over there, a fellow is carving chained links from a single length of wood, and another is chipping out an intricate floral pattern on the faces of a folding bible stand, its hinged-together top and bottom cleverly carved from a single plank.

Women are armed with knives, too, sculpt-carving birds and squirrels and cutting open-design flatwork they back with stained glass. A duck decoy takes shape on another table, and a completed collection of whimsical mountain men stands for sale. The carvers amuse themselves over visitors who try to figure out how an inch tall wooden heart-and-arrow got into a Coke bottle through a 1/4-inch hole, or how a round wooden ball got to rattling around inside a pair of interlocking cubes—the whole thing also made from one block of wood. All the artisans are in their fifties or older, and they banter as if they carve together all the time—which they do, several days a week.

Jimmie Lou, owner and creator of Hot Flash Beads nearby, politely calls me “ma’am” even though she’s easily fifteen years my senior. She wears safety goggles and a big white smock with a pink Breast Cancer ribbon as she works at a Bunsen burner and turns fragile glass rods into delicate and colorful beads, no two quite alike. She’s a cancer survivor and used to work as a lab technician examining pap smears—a highly stressful job because of all the cancer patients she was around. She started making lampwork beads when the hot flashes of menopause began (hence her shop’s name). Now she can’t stop. “It’s my therapy,” she says through a booming laugh. “Cheaper than a psychiatrist!”

Jimmie Lou at work.

Making beads two at a time means earrings usually match well.

Beads go into an oven for several hours of tempering and cool-down.

A final step in bead preparation for her jewelry: drilling out the “bead poop” that can crust up the holes.

Down the street, a bell tinkles as I open the on-the-corner door of Weaver’s Bottom Studio, and I hesitate to walk across the beautifully sparkling rag rug that greets me from the floor. It shimmers with light from fabrics that are usually relegated to princess costumes, ice skating outfits, and cheerleading squads.

I am about to take a larger-than-life step to avoid the rug when a man laughs from somewhere behind an enormous loom and a rack of woven placemats and towels.

“It’s OK to walk on it. Come on in. That’s what rugs are for.”

A stocky fellow with a long graying braid, deep dimples, and a hang-loose disposition comes down the narrow aisle of the store.

“I’ve never seen one of these with glitter in it,” I marvel, still entranced by the rug.

“My wife does that. She says everyone should have some sparkle in their lives.”

I spend a good half hour here, talking to Neil Colmer about his product. Wool skeins line the walls. Six feet of glass case and a cash register are nearly hidden by racks and stacks of woven dish cloths; bins of rag rugs and piles of placemats cover the floor and tables and a tall bookshelf.

Neil was almost always smiling.

He has four or five looms in the shop, each for different kinds of work, including a double-backed weave that uses over 200 thread shots before the pattern repeats. This kind of loom is so complex that it requires a narrow strip with little brads to activate the 16 frames that move up and down in the required sequence; it reminds me of a player piano’s pegs getting activated by hole-punched paper, but the strip runs vertically, looking like 9 yards of peaceful ordnance for a decommissioned machine gun. It can take days to set up this loom for a pattern.

A double-weave loom makes a pattern on both sides of the fabric, for reversible use. It takes 16 frames...

...all lifted and dropped in the proper sequence and combination by an advancing strip of carefully placed brads.

The gorgeous weave of this particular brad pattern.

Neil demonstrates on both this loom and another that has a pulley-based shuttle thrower, and happily answers gobs of questions from me and a couple of other visitors. Like many other craftspeople I end up meeting, he’s a Berea graduate, and has worked in numerous artistic fields, including music. He prefers traditional equipment over the modern industrial looms he’s worked with.

“Modern looms go so fast they have to keep cameras on them,” he says. “When a machine goes down, the factory guys can slow down the videotape and see what happened. Otherwise they’d never know what went wrong. And rather than send a shuttle back and forth, air shoots the thread across, and the machine mechanically ties and tucks and snips the ends all in one motion.”

It’s a long way from the swish of hand-shot shuttles, the dance of tennis shoes on foot pedals, and the clack of warp frames rising and falling in the looms of Neil’s shop. He even carves his own shuttles when he needs them.

Neil can quickly churn out yards of multicolor towels on this pulley-based loom.

Across the street in a pewter studio, I’m invited by the cashier to talk to the craftsman, John Gastineau. “I think he’s still in there, but maybe he’s already gone for the day. Go check.”

She points to the door of a narrow workshop that’s half the depth of the studio’s building and fronted with a counter that keeps visitors from some serious-looking metal-working machinery. A large-screen computer dominates a tool-littered table, and the dust and detritus of pewter design, casting, and shaping is everywhere.

At my timid “Hello?” a white-bearded, cotton-smocked man turns to greet me like a just-rousing bear, and I sense he really doesn’t want another visitor. Nonetheless, he speaks cordially enough, and I ask a question or two about the 3D hummingbird image that’s on the computer, and what kind of drawing software he uses. My computer knowledge and interest seem to warm him up.

“You’d be surprised how many people think ‘true’ craftsman shouldn’t use computers,” he grumps as he puts hand to mouse, “but it’s a tool that saves me a lot of time and lets me control exactly how something looks.”

John at his drawing software.

He zooms in on the hummingbird and scrubs the pointer across the screen, pulling up new windows and dragging points and selecting complex-looking options to demonstrate how easily he can reshape the picture and its 3D profile, then he points to the various machines that convert the drawing into working pewter molds. I’m soon fingering blanks and templates and castings and trying to keep up—he’s explaining the process a little too quickly for me to fully absorb all the tasks, but he’s definitely happy to be talking.

Molds and test casts and other intermediate steps on their way to pewter medallions.

Before I know it, John has grabbed a shiny 4-inch disc of pewter and is clamping it at the base of a solid, flared cylinder on a lathe. He turns on the machine, and as he and I avidly discuss Berea, politics, and the world’s changing (as in declining) values, he presses a wooden stick to the spinning disc and deftly folds the disc over the conical form to create a pewter cup. He gives the cup a rolled edge, removes it from the lathe, and hands it over for my inspection—I hold a warm, slightly oily, perfectly formed pewter jigger, made in less than ten minutes while we talked. I decide to buy this one, and he etches its bottom with a computer-controlled engraver. The jigger is perfect for margaritas.

Disc centered in lathe.

Coaxing it onto the form.

Guiding the progress and keeping it round.

Nearly all the way down the form.

A lucky candid shot; he had no idea I was taking it because I was holding the camera so casually.

Rolling the top edge.

My handcrafted cup, hot off the lathe.

“Berea is an island of liberalism in a sea of Kentucky Republicans,” says Theresa, a potter who now co-runs a shop with a silversmith. She’s been here nearly twenty years, a Berea graduate. “Not all of them make it,” she says. “It’s a tough school.” She and two other women started an artists’ co-op years ago that’s still thriving. “Everyone today is worried about money. How to make it, how to make more of it. We started that business with almost nothing.

“Our accounts were all on paper then, and Joan was always worried about the money. Linda would wave her hand and say, ‘Oh, money is only jots on paper,’ and not worry about it at all. But now it’s all electronic isn’t it? E-mail, bank statements, online transactions. Joan still worries about money, but now Linda says, ‘Stop worrying! Money is just bits of light on glass!’”

Adopting her blithe approach to cash flow, I decide to skip a sandwich dinner and treat myself to a white tablecloth meal at Boone Tavern. This place is celebrating its centennial thanks to a recommendation by a certain Duncan Hines. Yes, he’s a real person, and he created the first ever restaurant guide as he traveled the US during the 1930s. His Adventures in Good Eating also recommended the Sanders Café—of later Kentucky Fried Chicken fame—in nearby Corbin. Both restaurants, among many others in the pre-interstate days, went on to success because of his good opinion.

Boone Tavern is an outgrowth of the home-cooked meals and lodging that the college president and his wife used to provide to college visitors.

As much as possible, the food here is supplied by Berea student farms, including the vegetables, fruit, lamb, beef, and pork (but not the chicken—odd). I have the crab cakes and salmon, which are of course imported (Atlantic). The orange marmalade vinaigrette dressing for the salad is tart and sweet.

Mmmm, salmon. My first fish since leaving the west coast for the heartland.

Steven, a spiffily-dressed assistant server who watches over water and coffee levels and distributes fresh helpings of hot spoonbread, tells me there’s a Spoonbread Festival every September at Boone Tavern.

“It’s what we’re famous for here. We’ve been serving it for 100 years, ever since we’ve been open.”

Basically it’s a squat cornmeal soufflé—scooped up from a casserole dish and served as a substitute for bread. It’s smooth and creamy and begs for a fork instead of fingers. Steven brings me a recipe card to keep. It’s time-consuming to cook (think risotto), but would be yummy made with the freshly ground cornmeal I bought at McHargue’s Mill.

Steven with hot, fresh spoonbread.

I’m in a dry part of the state—from here to the southern KY border—so there’s no wine with dinner, although it is allowed for the restaurant’s cooking (e.g., filet mignon with burgundy). As during Prohibition, that which is outlawed becomes more desirable, so many Kentuckians head north to Richmond (local billboards announce: “We Sell Liquor! Exit 90”), drive south to Tennessee, or make moonshine on the side.

“It’s the real stuff I wish they’d sell,” laments a big-bellied man who stops next to me later in the specialty foods section of the Kentucky Artisan Center just north of Berea. He grimaces toward the bottles of bourbon-spiked sorghum I’m looking at. “That stuff’s the only way liquor is available here.”

The man calls his young son back from a rack of handmade wooden toys and turns again to me. “If you ever see a sort of mist coming out of the woods and it’s not a foggy day, don’t go near them places. They’ll shoot on sight!”

I picture a circle of shaggy, wild-eyed men bunkered under pines at a belching still, rifles at the ready. “Uh, right,” I say. “Thanks for the tip.”

I edge away from the fellow and head for the cashier with a bottle of bourbon sorghum, sure that, at the very least, that’s one encounter with Kentucky locals I won’t be having.