Bill Moore, the welder

The news on the farm this time is more consequential than most. Bill Moore, the 3rd generation welder just up the road from me, passed away last week. His family kept Lovettsville area farms running for 100 years until his death, and his work tracked the development of farm machinery and farm land in this region. His repairs, or his ideas, touched nearly every piece of machinery on my farm, and without him my farm would not be as it is now. He was 63 years old.

Twelve years ago I was a young twenty-four-year-old trying out vegetable farming, and I had an idea for a mechanical seeding contraption to run behind an old 1950s Farmall Cub tractor. I needed somebody to build it before the season began. I was sent—of course—to Bill Moore, the welder. Unusually, I called him on the phone, since he was at home recovering from his heart attack, and he told me it's exactly the sort of thing he would love to do, but he'd need to stay out of the shop for another month or so. But he was happy to talk—of course—about the Cub tractor, and old-school machinery, and surely would have told me several of the stories of his own well-cared for Cub that I later heard him recount in his shop. He sent me to another local welder, with whom he'd gone to high school, who normally did an entirely different sort of metalwork but was helping people keep up and running while Bill was recovering. Later that season, with Bill back in the shop, he made me some clamps for a new cultivator setup, a design I later modeled my own work after, once I had learned to weld and began to build more of my own farming equipment.

No matter what I brought to him for repair or advice, Bill was always game to stop what he was doing to help the walk-up customer, whether it be a quick fix (“Five dollars”) or a discussion of design considerations told in stories of past machinery built, tried, broken. At that time there was almost always a line, a steady trickle of people stopping in to drop off, or pick up, according to the day of the week, or the weather. Bill never rushed through one person's work to wait on the next; mostly one person's appointment seemed to conclude when the next person walked up. I was never sure whether the work or the talk was the main purpose, and learned to block out at least 45 minutes for a visit to Bill Moore, most of that taken up with listening to Bill tell about mechanical history, local history, and his own family history, a deep repository—a catalog, really—of the activities, characters, relations, and deaths of the farm-based Lovettsville world. He remembered unnecessarily specific stories that even the people they were about had forgotten had ever happened. But of course, he had his old favorites: the one about the man who planted his corn in a spiral, cultivated his way around and around to the middle, then came back a couple weeks later with a can of gas and cultivated his way back out again (that was the first story I heard him tell to somebody else, that I had already heard), or others concerning the success or failure of an unusual idea (going bankrupt borrowing for a steam-powered thresher; industrial potato planting not earning more than to pay the freight, etc). And the humorous one about the new folks coming in from the city, the man who showed him a picture he took of something very exciting in his yard: “He had a photo of a deer. A deer!”

Bill Moore no doubt carried with him three generations of mechanical craftsmanship, but he wanted it understood that he hadn't just picked it all up from his father. “I learned from LOTS of people,” he impressed upon me, “I have a lot of books.” Bill developed the shop towards his own interest of practicing greater levels of craftsmanship, bringing in the mill, the lathe—even the press, a machine used every day—as new tools to access work his father didn't do, or to do the same work better. And he learned to use them—in fact the first thing made on the new lathe was a part to repair the new press. Other people, stopping in for a quick fix, might think that the machine does the work, but Bill he knew it was the craftsman. I made that mistake once, watching him cleanly melt a nut off of a bolt with a torch to fix my tillage disc, remarking in awe that the metal of the nut would just melt away from the bolt, leaving the threads intact. “You're not going to give me anything for skill?” I got his point. Like most people with high-level skill and knowledge, the layman can't appreciate even 10% of what's interesting to the craftsman. When I passed the standard welding test, I brought my bent pieces of metal to show him. Recognizing them immediately, Bill said I ought to be proud of my work and began describing his own time practicing at the Hobart welding school, perhaps glad to tell the story to someone who might understand something of what he was talking about, and would appreciate the skill he'd developed. “I still have all my own bend tests,” he said, “They're on a shelf in my basement.”

It was clear that Bill lived and breathed mechanical work, and I felt him to be so fortunate to have happened to grow up in his father's shop and to now be able to live his life walking down from his house every morning to do work he so clearly enjoyed—and then going back home to yet more mechanical projects. But like most people who work it was simply his profession, work which paid the bills and that he happened to be good at, and liked enough. And he understood that, at the most basic, he ran a customer-service business that played a vital role to the community of working people in the Lovettsville area—as had his father, and grandfather. People needed him to get back up and running, during haying, or harvest, or the snowplow season, and he prioritized his work according to how critical it would be to whomever needed his repair to get going again. He would tell me, as I stopped in to get his advice on some mechanical retrofit I was building, “I'm happy to help you, but I need to get a certain amount of work done,” gesturing to the repairs in progress around the shop, “And I don't know what might come in.” At first I thought he meant financially, that he needed to work a certain amount to make enough money, and of course offered to pay him for his time. But in fact he meant that he simply needed to get the work done, because other people were relying on him to do it.

Years ago, well before my time, in an era when the Lovettsville area was thoroughly a farming economy, and when now-outdated machinery was new technology, there was such call for the shop's services that they had a jig to set up a common repair on one particular part on the front wheel of one particular make of tricycle tractor. More recently, when I would stop in with a farm repair, there was no longer even a line at the shop. Bill would be able to talk for an hour or more without anyone arriving to interrupt. And the work had changed, too. “People bring me things that just aren't worth repairing, or aren't worth the time...and there's very little about it that's at all challenging, that tests my ability.” I remarked to him that his business these days seemed mostly to serve old people with old stuff—and, newly, landscapers and their trailers—which he confirmed was the case. The era of his work was coming to a close, as Lovettsville changed and his customer base aged. “Tractors and machinery just don't break down much anymore,” he explained, “And there just aren't many people around here anymore who are really farming.”

If he was becoming bored by his work, he was becoming more excited about the projects he maintained in his home shop, projects that to most people would appear indistinguishable from his “work” activities, but which as far as I can tell he spent nearly all his time on after closing up for the day. That is, when he wasn't sharpening chainsaw chains, or helping out at the church—or at an auction. He often talked about the precision lathe he was working on setting up at home, and the clocks he was repairing, and their mechanisms; he told me about having such a delightful Christmas morning last year, sitting at home on a Saturday finally getting a difficult clockwork back together, and how he'd got it running so cleanly that it had only lost so many seconds over a long period of time. He had a lifetime of projects to work on up at the house, and Bill was so looking forward to having time to sit down with them. To work on things that really interested him, to have time to execute the craftsmanship that he liked, to whatever level of precision he desired. His dream was to someday use that precision lathe to build a complete copy of an old but innovative Canadian-made clock. Bill Moore, not designing something new, but enjoying the use of his skill and knowledge in reworking something old.

Most weekends, Bill could be found at an auction. He loved attending auctions, and especially enjoyed showing off what he had bought for a song at the last sale. “Guess what this went for! … Five dollars!” A motor, welding leads, buckets of pipe fittings (“Oh, I'll use them all eventually, to make bushings.”) Once I learned to attend auctions as well I brought him my own stories to share, and useful things to show him, some of which he was happy to buy for a few dollars, or to trade for some minor work. One time I'd ended up with a box lot of about half a dozen old brace hand drills, not very serviceable, and he went right to the one with the rounded-out chuck, the worn shaft, the handle re-wound with soldered wire—an unusual repair for such a drill. “Oh my,” he said, taking in the record of the tool's life. “This one's seen a lot of love. I would be glad to have it.” I'm sure it's still somewhere up at his house, with all the other things he cared about.

One more piece on Bill Moore — fiction writing on the topic of his upcoming auction, at which I ended up buying, among many, many other things, an old worn hand drill and some bent pieces of metal.

A Visit to Bill Moore

November 30, 2022

“I went to an auction last Saturday.” He pointed to something just over there, asking, “How much do you think I bought that for?” He waited for my guess, which was too high, as usual. “A dollar!” I acknowledged the good buy. “It was a great sale. You know, I go to a sale every weekend, somewhere or another. Even if I don't come away with anything, I just love going to an auction.” I nodded; that much was clear. “There used to be so many more auctions around here, back when there were more farms—somebody was always retiring, or dying, and having a sale.” I noted the bluntness of his description of the way of the world. “Well, that's how it works. People collect what they need over their life, and then when they no longer need it, it's dispersed to whoever can make use of it for their own lives.”

“There's a sale coming up in December—I'm not going to be able to go to it though. I wish I could, but I can't make it. It's going to be a really good one. Cochran's doing it. This man's family had a welding shop for at least 100 years—well, it was a blacksmith shop first—the two of them, with him on the truck and his father in the shop, they did work for just about everyone around here, kept everyone going. I mean, the machinery people needed in those days, to get their work done. Of course, that was back when this was truly an agricultural area, everywhere around here. There's hardly anybody who's really farming anymore, and things just don't break down the way they used to. He could repair anything, or make it from scratch—few people appreciated his skill, but me, I knew what he was capable of. It's been a while, though, since anything came through the shop that really tested his ability, not for a long time.”

“Well, I guess he'd finished up his work for the day, closed up the shop like usual, and walked on home—he lived just up the street, between his shop and the church—apparently he got as far as taking his shoes off and sitting down to rest by the television. Had a heart attack. Robert Jackson, actually, went to check on him since he didn't come down to open the shop the next morning—it's sort of a funny story—Robert called 911 when nobody answered the door, and the dispatcher said all the officers were busy, and someone would be there in a few hours. A few hours! So he called our friend who lives just north of town, he's an officer, and he had two police cars over to his house before Robert even hung up the phone. The TV was still on when they found him. No two ways about it, he had a heart attack and that was that. I mean, that was the end of him. He just—died.

He stood silent and shook his head for a moment, considering.

“He was 63 years old.” I didn't know whether to be surprised, or whether that was just a statement of fact. “Well, he was. His father lived to be 90, and his mother, she lived to be 92!” I raised my eyebrows. “Well, nobody knows how long he's got left. That's just how old I am now, 63.” I already knew his age, always surprised to hear he's so young. “One time Robert Jackson and I—you know him?” I nodded. “Well he and I'll often go to a sale together, and one time I was off looking at something or another and Robert was talking with someone, who must have seen me off in the distance, and he says to Robert, 'Look at that man work, over there, why, he must be 80!' And Robert shouts to me, 'Bill!' I was some distance away, you know. 'Bill! This man here thinks you're 80!' Well I stopped what I was doing and shouted back to him, 'I've never seen an 80-year-old work like this!'” I smiled. “Well, that's what I said to him.”

“I'm not as young as I used to be, everything's gotten heavier, and in the winter, the cold just comes up from the floor, but I can still get done everything I need to. Well, I can. I'm only 63, you know.” I nodded. “My father, he lived to be pretty old, older than a lot of people. But he lost his mind. To know how much my father knew, what he could accomplish—to look at him, you'd never guess what he was capable of. But like I say, he just got to where he was completely demented, lost his entire mind. Now that's a sorry way to go. That's a sorry way to go.”

“Anyway this sale, like I said I can't go to it, but it'll be a good one, a two-day sale, the first two Thursdays in December—you can look it up. Sort of unusual timing. But anyway one day will be in the shop, you know, what everybody saw driving past on the road, and the other day up at the house—had a whole other shop up at home, to work on his own projects...nevermind the amount of safes, guns, clocks. He just loved anything mechanical.”

“Cochran's listing says of him, by way of talking up the sale, you know—'He could do just about anything for anyone.' Now, they'll say that sort of thing about any number of people, but this man—now, I knew him—and that's an accurate description.” I nodded. “Well, it is.”

“There's going to be a couple welders—I mean, real welders—a precision lathe, like that you could use to make a clock, a great press, all manner of tools...everything, and I mean, everything. Really, there's probably everything there I'd ever need for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, it'll be a good sale. I'm real sorry I won't be able to go.”