Throwback Thursday story of the shop

Throwback Thursday story for you. I had done a bit of math wrong.... Sometime in the next 3 weeks it will be 32 years (not 30) since I have been a blacksmith. 30 years ago I found the place that would later become my home; the oldest continually operating blacksmith shop in the state of Michigan. In my youth, I discovered, as many geekie kids of the early 80s/late 70s did, Dungeons and Dragons. My buddy Scott had one of the basic books in our science class room, and I was fascinated; it was lord of the rings that you could be part of. Hours were spent in the library at lunch, rolling dice with friends. If you ever get a chance to sit down with him, Jerry throws a mean D4 (which is also how we learned first hand about caltrops). That lead to reading even more, only now it was no longer fiction. I poured into the Encyclopedia Britannica my mom got me as a present. Yes, I am that much of a geek I read the entire 30 volume set cover to cover (well, 29, one whole book was an index) to learn more. All to have better gaming sessions. I read roughly a quarter of the books in the school library; anything on the ancient world, armor, castles and the like. We stood in line at Fort Daul Bookstore in Ludington waiting for them to open the box from their early shipments to get the DMG when it came out. Fiction damn near stopped existing for me, save that which we created around tables littered with book, soda and snacks. We took concepts of the game outside with us, constantly in the woods, imagining being rangers watching over the quiet village, ever vigilant to hordes of goblins and orcs and had a few actual random encounters (protip; wild dogs and possums tend not to be friendly). This lead to wanting to build some kit; wooden swords and shields at first. Then eventually finding how to make maille armor; I rounded up every metal coat hanger in the house, baked them in the oven at the highest temperature it would go to for hours and cut and wound them around a section of broom stick to make links, then painstakingly, tediously joined them into a shirt of very loose, large open links. I had my first armor. Scott later upped the game by hammering cans flat and linking those, and an arms race of sorts was on (we eventually evolved the process so far we washed out the left over dog food from the cans before flattening them!). Somewhere in that span, the Ludington Daily News ran an article on a blacksmith living in a town 40 miles south where I had lived as a child. In that article, there were photos of his armor. *REAL* armor... I saved that article, with the cleverly titled photo "medieval mists" showing the smoke in the air as light beamed through the south windows, and vowed to seek out that shop to see and touch that armor in person. That was about 1981 or 82, and I could not yet drive to go looking. In may of 1982, having read about blacksmithing and having a few (bad) ideas, I set out to attempt to build a forge. Curt Stewart's dad had shown us you could get nails hot in a camp fire, and hammer them into crude daggers, and I had done the same in shop class, so it couldn't be all that hard, right? I had one key, critical component wrong. You see, a forge is really nothing more than a fireproof table or container, with air driven *under* the fire to make it hotter. I had a metal electric fan and our families webber charcoal grill. Good enough right? Mom didn't notice I had burned the bottom out of it for a solid three days. Turns out you really need to line them with river clay. I learned by trial and error. A lot of error. Another interesting idea was to build a low scoop shape from cement blocks, facing into the prevailing winds and using sticks from the yard as fuel, which worked ... sort of. Until that stiff breeze brought rain and the blocks shattered later in the day. My experiments continued haphazardly until 1984, in the spring. I had been asking after the blacksmith shop, and was driving around town trying to find it on several occasions, when one day I had thought I was being inconvenienced by the National Asparagus Festival (here after referred to as "ditchweed fest". If you are from here, you know the stuff grows everywhere). Streets were blocked for the parade, and in my efforts to get out of town around said parade, I drove past the shop, rolling to a stop out front. I had found my mecca, sometime in may of 1984. (Could be early June, I'd have to look and see when Ditchweed Fest 2014 happens). I started pestering the owner, Harold. A bright, cantankerous fellow with a steady, deep voice, a strange sense of humor and failing eyesight. Little did I know I would one day become him, as each generation before had here. Finally, I got to work in a real forge, using coal instead of a pile of sticks as fuel... There is more to this story, a lot more. But for now, I will leave it there. The morale, and TL;DR lesson here is sometimes those silly games your kid plays actually will drive them to teach themselves, even if they do obsess over them a bit too much. They might even go on to make cool stuff one day! Also crossposted to facebook.