BlO—Lancaster Fanning, Saturday, August 18,1984
DE PERE, Wis. - David A.
Ponsler, 23, of Jacksonville, Fla.,
watched carefully as Francis
Whitaker, 77, a master blacksmith
from Aspen, Colo., bent a piece of
steel around a bar into a gentle
curve.
“Work from the bottom up, not
from the top down,” Whitaker told
Ponsler. “You do it easier that
way.”
All day, day after day, Whitaker
had little bits of guidance for
Ponsler and about a dozen fellow
smiths chosen to participate in
Whitaker’s master class. The
common thread to all the advice
was a basic message he offered
Pansier: “Don’t rush it. Take your
time.”
Aa Unhurried Art
There is no way a blacksmith
can hurry. There are few ways to
speed up the process. That is one of
the charms of blacksmithing as
practiced here at the conference of
the Artist Blacksmith Association
of North America.
Whether a smith is making an
item as simple as a coathook, or as
complex as the huge gates under
construction by Whitaker’s class
and destined for the National
Ornamental Metals Museum in
Memphis, it is slow, painstaking
work, done primarily by hand.
The common wisdom is that
blacksmithing is dying out, that
there is no more need for hand
forged work in these days of
automated farms and the post
industrial economy, where robots
and machines can mass-produce
items in no time. The evidence of
the conference suggests that the
common wisdom is wrong.
Blacksmithing is surging back.
Some 700 persons attended the
conference, most of them working
smiths. They came from at least 36
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states, from seven Canadian
provinces, from England, France,
Germany, Israel, and
Czechoslovakia.
They were varied in experience,
from the youthful crowd that
packed demonstrations on basic
forging techniques to masters like
Whitaker, who has been a smith for
62 years, and England’s Antony
Robinson, who recently designed
and crafted a mammoth set of
stainless steel gates for the Great
Hall of Winchester.
They ranged from old-time
country smiths like Jud Nelson, 73,
of Sugar Valley, Ga., showing how
to make wagon wheels and
fireplace pokers, to Dorothy
Stiller of Rochester, Wash., one
of a handful of women smiths, who
attended the films, lectures,
demonstrations, and discussions
with her 10-month-old daughter.
They included Joseph Polocz, 63,
of Philadelphia, whose Hungarian
father had been a blacksmith, but
who turned away from the family
trade as a youth “because it was
bloody hard work.” About 10 years
ago, he saw a young smith at work,
thought, “My God, I can do this
with my eyes closed,” and has
been smithing as a hobby ever
since.
Youthful Artisans
And they included young ar
tisans like Tom Joyce, 27, of Santa
Fe, N.M., who has been smithing
for a living since he was 20 and is
now recognized as one of the most
articulate and creative of the new
generation of smiths, a slightly
built young man who seems to
shape a piece of red-hot solid steel
into a floral shape with only a few
blows.
Young David Ponsler is in this
category. He grew up in his
father’s metal shop, and began
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working over a forge when
12 or 13. He creates metal sculp
ture as well as doing more
traditional ornamental work, and
is interested in expanding his
techniques.
“In Jacksonville, I’m alone in
my work,” Ponsler said. “To be
around others like Whitaker is to
learn a great deal.”
Not long ago, the idea that
anyone Ponsler’s age would want
to learn from someone of
Whitaker’s generation would have
seemed laughable. Jack Brubaker
of Nashville, Ind., president of the
blacksmith’s association, said that
blacksmithing as a profitable
business died in the 1920 s and by
the 1950 s and early 1960 s it was
practiced by only a small,
dedicated group of aging craft
smen whose number was dwin
dling.
“Those few who remained in it
had a very steady, reliable local
business,” Brubaker said. “As
long as a man’s there, a depen
dable man that neighbors know,
they’ll come to him. But once a
farmer can’t go to a blacksmith to
sharpen his plow blades, he’ll go to
town and buy a plow with
throwaway blades.”
Book Is
the Key
The turning point was a book by
Alex W. Bealer of suburban
Atlanta. In “The Art of
Blacksmithing," published in 1968,
he paid homage to the dying craft
and passed on some of its
techniques.
To Sealer’s amazement, he
began to get calls and letters from
aspiring young smiths, telling him
that his book was just what they
had been seeking for
blacksmithing tips, or that it had
(Turn to Page B 12)
t jC 8
Wearing headphones to drown out the din, Antony
Robinson of Great Britain shapes a super-hot piece of
stainless steel into part of a sculptural work. Robinson
demonstrated his techniques at a conference of the Artist
Blacksmith Association of North America in De Pere, Wis.
5