Bill Moore, the welder

Today is the anniversary of Bill Moore’s death last year at 63, of a heart attack. His family had kept Lovettsville area farms running for 100 years and his repairs, or his ideas, touched nearly every piece of machinery on my farm. Other writing about his life is further down on this same page.

I always do see Bill Moore with a hammer, when I drive by his shop in Lovettsville and remember what it was like for his roll-up door to be open, to turn and record the momentary image as the car passes of him bent over, arm raised, working on something with a blacksmith's hammer just inside the shadow of the building. Well—the memory is just that, that single frame compiled from the hundreds of times I drove past him there on the main road—the story my mind extracted from that shape of him, bent over, arm raised, is of hammering. It wasn't a hammer, though. That would have been his grandfather, swinging a hammer at a forge, or perhaps his father. Bill, he would have been reaching for the vice grips, or returning with the cutting torch, or flaking out welding cable for slack and more precision, or standing up to lift his visor to take a closer look before bending back for the next weld.

When I needed his skill for a repair for my own farm, or his take on a mechanical problem, I stopped and parked and walked down the short gravel driveway between the weeds and up to that shape of him, bent with work, until he stood, half surprised to see someone, curious what I brought. He always had an answer to my problem, but it often came sprinkled through a longer exposition, almost stream of consciousness, of interconnected recollections stuck end to end, relating in some way to the problem at hand. One time I came to seek his advice on a thermostat I was trying to repair, and came away with an accounting of mercury switches, how mercury was used in critical applications because being a liquid it wouldn't corrode. Surely that story came because mercury switches are often found in old thermostats, although I don't think he included that detail. Later on I noticed the thermostat in my old house had just such a switch, and I watched it in action.

His stories might have been of recent events only ten or twenty years ago, or from his time on the mobile welding truck in the peak of his career, or might comprise a profile of somebody recently died, though told through old anecdotes; and other subjects from time to time appearing (like the highway being built over in Maryland and all the work and machines that went into it or the Black school built with community funds against opposition from the local government) that seemed to be reported of his own experience but in fact turned out to be a recollection of events that occurred when he was a child, or long before his birth. All the same, he kept the record.

Any story, really, is about something that occurred in the past, but many of the people and all of the places his stories were about, they still exist—and in that way those stories to me were just stories of the current world, as all stories are a telling of what happened in the past to inform an understanding of a place, of a time, of an event. In this case, Bill Moore's stories were telling of the world he lived in—the town of Lovettsville and its surrounding activity. The field was right around here where the man had a heart attack by his tractor, where the pilots who worked for the airlines out of Dulles lived and flew their private planes and where one of them once took Bill up in a glider, where the man once planted his corn in a spiral for simpler cultivation, Bill's church up the road and the mechanical problems of an old building, the stories of his neighbors in the community: the honest, crooked, hard-working, or the self-important—who all happened (just by chance) to now be old and some already dead. I never saw a young man with work for Bill at his shop.

When I came to him I inevitably and without even trying, or noticing, brought something of this same world: to weld a new ball onto the tie rod of my little International Cub, designed in 1947, (I learned how International Harvester tested new equipment in the southern hemisphere's summer, to be ready for summer sales up here, before losing its global dominance to the 3-point hitch), or a broken sprocket from a McCormick grain drill from the 50s that needed a new tooth brazed on, or a disc tongue that had cracked from some farmer's poor repair long before I got it. Cleaning out the grease channels on a used disc I bought, with uncommon 7/16ths carriage bolts, Bill remarked that such bolts were often used on equipment built by Ford, in the 70s, and wasn't surprised when I told him it was, in fact, a Ford 201 disc.

These days as I drive south on the main road, through Lovettsville down towards my farm, I no longer look over and see Bill working in his shop. His bay door is closed, as if he's just away for the day, or it's after hours, and he'll be open later. He won't be open later. The grass is grown tall, now that he's not here to keep it mown on his tiny old riding mower. Instead I drive down the same road as ever but I don't see Bill and the world he described through his stories—though I still know which person built his own house and everything else before in his old age becoming obsessed with growing potatoes (never successfully) and from whose son I happened to buy a wagon frame after Bill sent me there looking for potato equipment; and how the traveling salesman (from whose catalog Bill's father bought a welder) helped a man start the business down the road, now run by his son; and how Lovettsville is all farms and Brunswick across the river is all railroad; and how the humble scrap man is more respected than the cabinetmaker who is industrious and highly skilled but thinks he's better than you. Instead of the world these stories are a part of I see the houses, and the new strip mall, all built over the last 20 years since developers discovered the flat, perfect farmland of Lovettsville was also perfect for houses, offering an amount of money no retiring farmer could refuse as fast roads came west and the suburbs grew from DC to connect isolated towns in the country into a continuous exurban expanse. The thousands of people who moved into those houses on every cornfield don't know of the hundreds who comprise a parallel world of activity—or who used to, anyway—and now it becomes difficult to reconstruct the connections, to feel the presence of that world anymore.

Thing is, that world was on its way out when Bill Moore was in his forties. Long before I knew him. Bill just never saw a need to change—he kept things mostly as they were in his father's day; even the rack of wooden tool handles still hung from the ceiling, from when the shop served as the local hardware store, ages ago. His stories too were probably just the same as ever, new ones added to the canon as they came up. He had something to share from the moment I walked up until long after the work was completed. Sometimes I looked for a pause where I might add a topical anecdote of my own, but I rarely found one; he needed to tell me what he needed to say.

On the final page of the classic memoir The Things They Carried, the author Tim O'Brien keeps people and place alive by making up stories, and writes of being dead as “like being inside a book that nobody's reading...the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hoping somebody'll pick it up and start reading.” Bill Moore seemed to live through stories, some recent, some from long ago, some incidental, some personal, but mostly just an accounting. Maybe he wasn't just keeping the record, or sharing it with me, but in the telling of it, he was keeping his world alive. For himself. Like a memory, whose neural connections have to be refreshed, if not gone over in recollection now and again, it fades. Without his stories keeping the threads knit together, his world would soon unravel. As it begins to for me, without him. He kept it alive as long as he lived, alive enough for me to feel it was real.