SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the Good Old Blades Podcast. I am your host, Aaron LeBeer. And join me as we talk to other knife makers and craft about anything and everything knife. In a long list of people I thought would never give me the time of day sits Bruce Foyles. Oddly enough, talking with him a short time resulted in this episode. I don't know why I was so apprehensive, because you can't find a much nicer guy. But this introduction is not about me. Just it's comforting to know your heroes are not always assholes. Thanks, Bruce. If you know knives today, you probably have seen Bruce's handiwork at play. I think it's important to understand his vast contribution towards the commercialization of knives in America and how he's used publication as his love language for knives. But I just can't. I can't summarize such a complex ingenious individual and give him the justice he deserves. I can't quite convey the monumental and rippling contribution he's played in buying and turning Blade magazine into what it is, or Blade Show, or his involvement in the promotion of cutting competitions, or the vast historical and collector markets he's promoted, or the knife makers guild he's supported through times of growth and upheaval, or his auctioning priceless works of art. But thankfully, he can. We have the pleasure of listening to Bruce in this humbling episode of the show, and I feel that way with a great deal of my interviews, that they give me pause, and this is no different. Bruce, it's an honor and a privilege to get to talk to you on the Good Old Blades podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

That's good to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Yeah. Ugh man, I you are a larger than life uh character uh to me. Um I pretty much every every road that I've ever followed down inside of knives has always in some way led back to you. And and uh I'm not I'm not trying to blow smoke or anything. This is the reality. And uh before uh we started, we were talking about the wrecking crew in music. And uh the I think the most influential um uh the people um oftentimes go unrecognized. And not to say that you're unrecognized in in a lot of ways, but under-recognized. Uh if if anybody doesn't know how influential you've been in the knife industry by the end of this uh you know, this first episode, I think that they they will. Uh, but that's a that that'll be a testament to uh your articulation and things. Uh so I mean, first, I I come I come very humbly as a as a fan of yours, and um, I think that uh the the very least that I can do is to pay absolute homage to your influence and knife. So I appreciate everything that you've done.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Well, those are very kind words, and uh as my dad used to say when he was introduced, and somebody said, I've heard a lot about you. The next words I was well it's not all true. So he's trying to cover trying to cover himself. So uh I I don't think I deserve that much. The the I th I think the one thing the the one thing that I guess that I brought to the table is that I like knives. And I've always liked them. And I've always been fascinated with the history and and how they're made and how they're constructed, and it's just always been a captivating subject for me. Uh there's an old gun digest where Ken Warner uh was interviewing Bill Ruger, and Bill Ruger said the difference between Ruger and the other gun companies is that they were gun people and they loved guns. They weren't corporate influences, just trying to make money. They really liked guns, and he said he thought it showed. And that's what I said for years when we were doing Blade Magazine and or anything we were doing is we like knives. And I think that that shows to a knife collector. Uh knife collectors have a sense of, you know, you're one of us or you're not one of us. And so uh for me, it's uh I just always try to show that because I'm enthused about it, still am. And after you know 50-something years doing this, there this it's still exciting to find a really good knife.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Yeah, I think that's great. Um I uh I I uh you know, speaking uh candidly, I want to go back to like the beginning. I've read a lot like a lot of articles um on you and especially trying to you know research uh to become more um uh competent in some of your you know back history with knives uh in kind of the the darker reaches of the web and what's what's available online. Uh not not just what I have in you know publication in paper form, but there was a there was an article from 2004 in the Chattanoogan about uh your life, which is a great read. If anybody uh hasn't yet, uh you need to go read it. But um it mentions that uh your uncle had originally talked to you about your your uh golf hobby and everything, and then introduced the uh concept of knives to you. Is that true? Yes. Um Yeah, can you talk a little bit about like that progression and like how you actually got started in this thing?

SPEAKER_01 5:38

Well sure. Well, uh my uncle's the one that really introduced me to knife collecting per se. But my dad carried a 5391 case whittler that I distinctly remember. Now, you know, that's a thousand multi-thousand dollar knife in mint condition. He carried it as a pocket knife and it had one blade broken in it. He carried it. That was the one knife I remember him carrying. Uh one time he they ran a small motel and he was talking to the guys he was working with because he worked construction full-time, and one of the guys had a small case of knives that he was collecting. My dad bought a stag-handled uh case, USA 5375, and put it up in in the little storage thing above the kitchen table, and he said, keep that because it's collectible. And I think he paid $25 for it at the time. This was like 1968, 69. Knife collecting was just barely getting started. And my great-uncle at a reunion once told me that my great-grandfather always carried a pocket full of knives and was always trading on knives. And that was on a different side of the family from my uncle. My granddad, uh, when I first learned there was knife collecting, my uncle said, look what your granddad's carrying. And he pulled out a 6488 greenbone four-blade Congress knife. I later sold one of those knives in condition for $14,300. And my granddad was carrying something very similar. So evidently there's something in the blood as part of it. But uh I went to my uncle, I just just just married, and I went to my uncle to visit with my grandparents and all that, and um with him, my first cousin and I, we went out to the range and we were hitting golf, golf balls, and I was interested in golf at the time. And I came back in and we I was short on money. And he came in and he said, uh, said, You and you and Steve are crazy. I said, What do you mean? He said, Your hobby is to go out there and spend money and you don't have anything to show for. Come here. And he had a thread cabinet, and he opened up this thread cabinet, and there in neat, equally spaced rows were kissing crane knives and case knives, and they gleamed and they glittered, and they just drew me in. And he said, Now all of these were free because I went over to Mitchell Powers Hardware in Bristol, Tennessee, and I bought a half dozen knives at wholesale. And I sold five of those knives, and the profit from those cleared the one here, so I don't have a penny in these knives. And so the next day he took me to the flea market in Kingsport, Tennessee, and there was uh a guy set up named Lynn Watkins, who called him red then. He had red hair. I later asked him when his hair turned gray. Well, we're gonna change his name to gray, but he didn't think that was too funny. And he was there, Joe Wood was there, and several of the old guys, and they had these tables just full of case knives. And I priced some of them, and he was selling them at 40 off retail. And so I spent what money I had with me, and I borrowed money from my uncle to buy a case stag handled canoe for $35. They bring $400,500 today. And I was hooked. My wife, my newlywed wife, cried because she thought I had gone insane because I had spent the butter and egg money on nine. And I was working at uh a chemical, Tennessee Chemical Company in Copper Hill, Tennessee, and the for the summer job between college. And I walked in over the next week, I sold all of the knives I had taken except for two, which I put back in a collection. Those were free. And I had extra money plus all the money back that I'd taken for the butter and egg month. And she was never really that excited about knives until we went to a show in Sacramento, California, and Jim Parker was there, and Jim always had a small box of diamond rings and cocktail rings and things like that. And she came over and said, Oh, that's a beautiful ring he had. So I handed her three knives, dog's head K-Bars, because Jim was collecting dog's head k bars, so I knew this was his weakness. And I said, Go over there and see if he'll take uh two of these for that ring. And she came back smiling and said, uh, she said, I just gave him all three of them and said, take that ring. So she suddenly discovered that knives could be translated into dynamics. And this, I had a knife collector enthusiast from that point on. So we were uh so basically that's that was my introduction. Is from then on I was always buying and selling. You know, the the interesting thing about Lynn Watkins is he was the first person that sold me knives. He's also the first person that that uh the he sold the first knives to uh Stuart Taylor, who would later buy Schrade and Smith and Wesley and sell them. Uh and did Taylor Cutlery. And so he was responsible for introducing, you know, Stuart became a major player in the game, you know, particularly after he purchased Schrade. And uh and Lynn ran Hickory Hills Cutlery and only passed away in the last year or so. Was a super fellow. And he was still coming to our knife shows as late as three years ago.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

Well, that's amazing. Uh do you think that your eye for collecting has has been like the larger influence for how you have um m moved and shook the the knife industry?

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Uh well, one way I say it, it allows me to put off that career decision a little bit longer. The um I like the knives. The fact I can make money on them and make a living out of it has always been something of a surprise. You know, I I trained as a journalist and um and I've always enjoyed writing. And knives were a subject I enjoyed, so I always wrote about knives. And, you know, I've been I've I've been writing about sporting equipment and things since the sixth grade. The first article I have ever had published in the school paper was how to shoot a 4570 trapdoor Springfield Rifle. And the knife just kind of fell into that too. I'd always wanted to be an outdoor writers association. And I wanted to be an outdoor writer, and I always enjoyed guns. And my plan originally was I was going to uh get enough gun, get enough knives accumulated where I could start swinging off into buying and selling guns, but I never never quite got to it.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

Yeah. Um it w well, I mean, that's something that even in the early days of the the guild shows and everything like that, it seems like there's been a parallel between uh guns and knives, like uh people will pinch it in in either either form. Um but the the amount of um background you have in knives, I mean, you really dug in like a tick into the knife industry.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Well, it it's uh part of it's primeval. Part of it is the absolute instinct of uh, you know, the first the first tool ever was was a knife. And I'm sure there were some cavemen that thought that one was chipped obsidian a little bit better than the other one was a little bit more prized. And uh I think there's an age-old relationship between a man and his tools and a man and his weapons, and that includes firearms, swords, knives, guns, and the whole thing, shooting match. The uh the interesting thing that I discovered early on is say you have a roll of 60 pocket knives and you take them to a local cattle sale and you roll them out on the hood of a car, you will attract a crowd of men. And they're looking, and it's not as if I approve of a knife or not, or knives are such strange things, it's which one of these knives would I like to own. And I think I think it's that it's you know, it's just part of part of being in your psyche is with knives. For me, it was always uh I don't know, it just seemed it just seemed to evolve from buying and selling, making money at it. Uh in 19, you know, I was working at my my my local paper, the my hometown paper, Country Weekly, and uh I'm buying and trading, collecting knives. The biggest dealer in the business was Jim Parker in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And about 1974, 75. I was 74, I was going over to Ben Kelly. We lived in Atlanta, I was going to school at Georgia State. Ben Kelly was the case authorized knife repairman. And he would go to knife shows and set up and polish knives there at the show, take them for repair. If you had a case with broken blade and you send it to you didn't send it to case, you sent it to one of their authorized repairmen. And he had a collection of his own, very knowledgeable and very talkative. And so I've I sent a I've sent a knife to case who forwarded it to him with a broken blade. And I wrote Ben and I said, When it's ready, I will come pick it up. Simply because I wanted to meet him and I wanted to have an entree into his shop, and I figured this was the best way to do it. It took him about a year. Ben was never fast. In about a year, he calls me up and says, Your knife's ready. Uh, do you want me to mail it to you? I said, No, I want to come by and pick it up because I lived maybe 20 miles away. So I went to meet him, and from that we developed a friendship. We started talking and hanging out together, and I would just go camp out at his shop when I wasn't in school, just trying to learn. Occasionally he would, I would help him, you know, do things like a wrap up wrap knives up. You know, they wouldn't let me get near a grinder with a knife. And so I would watch him and learn, you know, learning about knives, and we'd talk about knife history and all of that together because he was as enthused about it as I was. One day I walk in and he says, uh, Jim Parker called me. And I dealt with Jim too, but you know, we never worked close. And he said, Jim Parker called me, and there's a book publisher out of Alabama that's wanting to get into collectible books. And they have contacted Jim because he's the president of the National Life Collectors Association and the biggest dealer in the business. They want him to write a book. And Jim doesn't know how to write, but he knows the prices. So he said, asked me if I knew anybody that was a writer that would work on a knife book, and I told him that you were just the guy. So I load up and go to, and so I I I go to all my professors. Now I'm still in college now, and I go to all of my professors, said, I've got this deal to do a book. How much should I charge? And I think I heard everything from a flat rate of $3,000. That's what my that's what the dean of the uh communications department said. Some of them said we charge so much a page, you saw us charge so much a word, 15, five cents a word. Went through that whole thing. So I had all this pumped up in my body, you know, I'm gonna demand this. And so we met at a knife show in Louisville, Kentucky, and went to Jim's room and we're sitting there talking. I said, Well, how do you want to do this book? I was going to, you know, push really hard and demand that my name be listed on this book because I was already a collector dealing in knives, and I knew this was a way to get bigger in it by getting my name out there. Jim says, Well, I think my name is worth worth something on the book. He said, I figure we'll both say by James F. Parker and Bruce Voil's, and uh I'm gonna do the prices, you're gonna do the writing, I'm gonna make my money selling the book, I'll take 25% of the royalties, and you can have 75% of the royalties. A few days later, he said, I've been dealing with the call me back, so I've been dealing with them, and the publishers are gonna give us an advance, and they were guaranteed for 30,000 copies. I was making $6,500 a year at a newspaper. I was driving my own car at my own expense to sell ads when I was doing that, and and the interviews and writing and all that. And I had a boss who, once I showed him the first copy of my book, he became incensed and jealous because he had never written the book, but he had written training manuals in the in the military. And it just ate him alive. And it was real obvious and clear, and then he came in. Uh the the way the the way the job was set up is I worked Monday in Copper Hill, Tennessee, doing recording and editing and trying to sell ads. Tuesday is I was in Blue Ridge, Georgia, selling ads. Wednesday, I worked in the back shop at the Cherokee Scout in Murphy, North Carolina. Thursday, I also worked in the back shop and whatever, and then on Fridays, I would be back in Blue Ridge trying to sell ads. Well, you can't sell ads in a small country town on Fridays because that's when everybody gets their check and everybody's shopping, and nobody at the stores are willing to talk to you. So what I would do is any overtime I obtained on Wednesdays and Thursdays, I would take off on Friday and go to knife shows. The thing was, I was making as much at knife shows on weekends doing what I enjoyed than I was working in this dead-end newspaper job. And but but it was working because I could do the shows. I had the income, I had the steady income and insurance from the newspaper job. And out of the blue one day, this uh my boss comes up and says, uh, you know, your overtime is being taken, is is earned in Murphy, but it's being taken against your job here in Blue Ridge, Georgia. So you can't take off Fridays anymore. And you know, you don't tell somebody's making more money doing that that that they need to quit and stay there. So I kind of pitched a fit and went over his head to the general boss of all of the new one company owned all of those different newspapers. And I went to the boss and said, I can't work for him anymore. And here's why, and laid it out for him. And uh I went back To work the next day, and the boss calls me and said, I want your, I want your key. I said, Why? He said, I'm firing you for insubordination. Now, I didn't know you could fire civilians for insubordination. But he did me, and it stuck. So I went back the next day to the to the boss where I'd basically give him an ultimatum and I wouldn't work for that guy anymore, but I could work in the other two papers. And he said, Well, I said, we're thinking about calling, about having somebody come back in the fall to write high school sports, and we'll call you then. And I've waited 50-something years for that call, and it never has come. But the fascinating thing is once we moved back to my hometown, they hired me, and I do a column every other week on local history, which is another one of my things. I always live George history. So the thing was the book, though, here I was making $6,500 a year, making about the same selling knives on weekends. My end of the royalties on the book that first year was $13,500. More than double my current salary. And all of a sudden, this whole knife thing looked totally different. And at where I was working at the newspaper, they were letting me use their equipment at night, and I was typesetting and producing the newsletter for the National Knife Collectors Association. When Jim found out I could write, we started on the book, he switched me over into that too, which was making a little bit more money. And just on a film, I made a 16-page newsletter and made it look a little like a magazine. And Jim said, well, you know, I think we could uh I think we could do a magazine. Do you want to start a magazine? So I started, created National Knife Collector Magazine, and we published it, and it was the official magazine for umpteen years there. I edited it until 1981. And uh so when I started editing it as a full-blown magazine, I actually got a decent salary. And plus making selling knives on the weekends in book royalties. I was I was rolling in high cotton for a while, I guess the best way to say it. And I was hooked. You know, what else am I gonna do? Uh I've been editing knife magazines and writing about knives for over well right at 50 years. That's incredible.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Um it doesn't, I guess it does probably doesn't surprise me. You know, in this uh the uh uh military-industrial complex, this idea of insubordination and uh skip leveling and everything like that is uh like highly frowned upon. But it's this I I heard once that uh uh generals don't dig trenches. And I I guess probably like I'm I'm vehemently against that mentality um with you within leadership because the the the reality is is that I will follow somebody who is willing to to get in there and do the dirty work um in order to make sure that things are done and uh done appropriately. I have a really hard time where people sit in ivory towers and try to make decisions and everything like that, and it's it's generally less trustworthy. Um so I mean, he made the decision for you, right? Like he he he pushed you in a direction where I guess you know God's pressing you in this in this in this uh vein of knives and everything, and you just like went to the to the races with it. That's incredible to me.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

Well, Bob Loveless once told me that he had never had a door shut behind him if there wasn't one better opened up in front of him. And Bob, you know, Bob was absolutely one of the most articulate uh people that I've ever met. He could sum something up in in five sentences that that was complex and hard to understand, and he just and he did that. That's why he was so ultimately quotable. And that's how he ended up in things like Sports Illustrated and became such a leader in the business that he was. He he was a very savvy businessman. Uh you know, diverting on to Bob Lovers for just a minute, one of the things that that Bob did that collectors, I'm not sure if they understand how important it was, but his first knives were Delaware made. And a lot of not a lot of people know, you know, you it's possible to find a Delaware-made knife and not know what you have because it just says Delaware made on it. But if you pick up a Bob Loveless knife, it's gonna say R.W. Loveless Maker and the town that he was in. All of them. It's gonna, it could be Lawndale, it's gonna be Riverside, every town. So he put his full name on it and he put the location of where he was. So if you see a Loveless knife and you wanted one, you said, Where can I get one? Well, that wasn't a mystery. You look in the phone book under Bob Loveless in Riverside, California, and you're gonna reach Bob. There's a plethora of knife makers who are Blue Tick Forge or JMZ or some of these or a bell or something like that stamped on the knife, and nobody has a clue who the heck they are. And as an auctioneer, I go absolutely insane with some of these subtle marks of some guy that's not necessarily well known trying to figure out who the heck he really is. And there's no re no person that has a reliable database of this kind of information. Uh, Mark Zalisky at uh Knife Magazine is trying his best to assemble it. And uh, but it's it's never really been accomplished yet. And there are a lot of knife makers whose business is failing because they are not proud enough of their work to put their full name on it or where they're located. And it's so absolutely basic to business, it's mind-boggling. I've I've written about this in Knife magazine, but uh the the other thing that is it's a quote from Bill Adams who used to run Atlanta Cutlery, is it's hard to tell someone that knows everything anything because they already know everything. That's a very common phrase to be used in a lot of the knife business. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

And and I come humbly very humbly for like I don't know what I don't know until I know it. So I mean, I don't I I always assume the fool. Like, I mean, I really if I look at the entire um uh entire I guess stream of data uh from the beginning of recorded history to now, I I know such a small amount, but like I think that there's a deep desire, maybe it's just from uh imposter syndrome or feeling stupid when I was a kid and everything, that I just search out everything I possibly can just to gain a context into the next thing that I'm supposed to learn. And uh, I mean, that is where your work has been very influential to me because your your body of work has been so referenceable to me in learning the industry and appreciating those who've come before me and being able to evaluate the you know not only the history, but the context in which these things exist in time. And it there are very few people that can uh be so referenceable. You you are like um a currently living Wikipedia for the knife industry.

SPEAKER_01 29:44

Well, I'm not sure about that because I learned something about knives every day. Still. I mean, it's uh there's no there's no stopping it. It's just like every time I've uh every time we get a new consignment in, uh, there's something new there. So man, I didn't know they made this. Isn't this kind of interesting? Uh I don't necessarily go to the history of the companies themselves the way I used to. Uh what I would do when I was doing doing the books is like I didn't know a history of PAL. So I started calling people where the factories was. What I would do is I would call the librarian in the town and I would ask them, who is the best local historian? Because if they're a local historian, that librarian's gonna know who they are because they're camping out there. And they would always give me a name, and I would call that name, and then they would say, Oh, you need to, uh, oh yes, I remember the Cutler Company, you need to talk to so-and-so. He used to work there, and they would in turn give me a call. So I would end up talking to uh original factory people that had worked there that knew the history minutely. So, and then I just turn on the recording and listen. And it was just that's and that would lead to other people. You know, I remember one guy uh I was trying to figure out what had happened to the PAL Cutlery, to the old Remington original factory stuff. Remington built their cutlery pieces from scratch at the end of World War I in 1920. They went out of the business in 1940 when they started tooling up to make munitions for World War II. They sold all their equipment to Powell Cutler through going through the library. I talked to a guy named uh Raymond Petro, and he was in charge at Pal Cutler of being the man who broke the machinery into pieces and sold it as salvage. But he was able to give me a concrete date that that was 1953. And so, boom, I've got a fact nobody else knew. And uh unfortunately, at the time he told me this, he had throat cancer and didn't live more than a few months later. Uh, and so I did this for a lot of the cutlery companies, basically just putting the time in. And uh now, even now, you find you find a an old hardware catalog and or you you find an obituary of somebody like E. C. Simmons. Uh, E.C. Simmons in his obituary said he had a mania for knives, and few of his friends and acquaintances owned a knife that he had not examined minutely. Now, this is a man who started E.C. Simmons Hardware, Keen Cutter Knives. Uh, the brand was later bought by one of his former employees, Norvale Shape, that started Shapeley Diamond Edge. Uh he would go, then uh Simmons would also buy Walden Cutlery to produce knives for his company. Walden Cutlery would later be bought by Winchester. And so, you know, it's it's it's like a very tangled family tree in the knife thing, and for the people too, same way. Into friendships and all that, it just kind of networks out. Uh I think the one thing that may be different about me is as far as research material, is I am a guy that was trained to write, and and I'm a knife guy. There are not a lot of people that are have that combination. Uh there's a lot of guys that like knives. There aren't a lot of guys that are trained writers that love knives. You know, even and without saying this inappropriately, there are a lot of editors of past and future of past and past editors of knife magazines that didn't give a hoot about knives. They're writing because they're writers. They weren't, you know, the the definition I I always had was when a knife guy goes to the restroom, he'll take a knife magazine with him to read. And if if you're a writer about knives and editing a knife magazine and you're taking the sports page with you, the difference between those are going to show over time. And if if I bring anything to it, it's it's just an enthusiasm for knives.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

Yeah, that's pretty incredible. Um there's a lot to unpack about what you just said. Um, one, I do agree um when it comes to marking blades and showing pride in your in your work that as a knife maker, um there is it's probably the modern culture of creating businesses and you know uh kitsch kitschy names and stuff that probably contributes towards uh you know creating a brand instead of uh you know, your brand is you as a person, right? Uh we've gone me people are more familiar with the Nike swoosh than they are um, you know, so somebody's actual name being associated with their with their product or output. And so it it becomes very difficult because you know, in the context of the knife makers guild and getting um um inquiries for people's work there or the Texas Knife Makers Guild or any of these uh places that I've kind of involved with their C questions and identification come through, it becomes very, very difficult to ascertain time, place, origin, maker, all of those things. And people, you know, as collectors, they want to know where these things are coming from and and what context or um provenance their things have. And a maker that doesn't mark their blades really doesn't do the collector's market service. And I actually look at that in my own collecting as uh as a sign that if if I buy something and invest in it and I don't have the ability to show provenance, it becomes a slight turnoff to me.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

Well, it's it it it's not just just that. We're dealing with what I call a knife maker mentality. Now, first of all, as a knife maker, and I'm talking in very general terms here, you're not gonna be a good employee for somebody else because you're so darn independent. Because you don't want to work for somebody else, you want to be independent. Now, as a knife maker, that means that you spend a lot of time out in a garage or a shop by yourself making these knives. Because when you've got a buffer going at 3,500 RPM or 1750, and you've got a sharp blade up against that, it's not the time to be having a conversation with somebody. You know, it's like Gil Hibbon was buffing a knife one day. It caught in the buffer and he lost it. He couldn't see it, didn't know where it was. He looked down, it was sticking through his thigh. And he said, he said he just had a uh about a tenth of a second word like old crap flashed through his mind before the paint hit. And it had cut an artery. He nearly, you know, it was it was nearly fatal. But but you know, he got over it, he corrected it. But when you're dealing around that kind of machinery, it's not a group activity. And so there's something about being by yourself that much time in a day that does something to your head a little bit. And I don't I don't mean that in a negative way, it just you you look at things different. I I'm I remember once uh Loveless, one of my favorite Loveless's parables, you might say. He said we were to we were at a show together and he were talking, and he pointed in the room and said, Now let's find the guy in there. He has he's gonna come in and he's gonna sell 20 knives, and he's selling them for $200 a piece, and he's got $100 in equipment and I mean in materials and time, and figuring his time at about $20, $15, $20 an hour. Uh he's got $2,000. He paid $500 for the table. Uh he doesn't do any advertising. He's paying $750 for the room. And he's gonna, first thing he's gonna say with that cash in his pocket is where's the best restaurant in town for me and Mala? Because he's been in that shop for months and he doesn't have a chance to go out and party. And he's gonna go to a real good restaurant that he's gonna spend over the next three days, he's gonna spend $500 going to restaurants. He said the SOB's bankrupt, and you don't even know it.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

And that that is even true today. Uh, that that culture of uh seclusion and then um uh you know socializing is is apparent inside of like Blade Show's pit. Like, I mean, everybody kind of goes there and wows out because they haven't seen anybody for the last you know year, uh, maybe if they do a few shows a year, and it it's it definitely is a place where you can move and shake things and network, but it definitely is also a place where you could spend a lot of money on drink and food and all that stuff, too.

SPEAKER_01 39:41

Well, the the and the reason that it was called the pit, do you know the history of that?

SPEAKER_00 39:47

No, sir. Uh, I'd like you to tell me though.

SPEAKER_01 39:49

At the old, at the old uh guild site at the Crown Center in Kansas City, which was for years where the guild show was held, in the bar downstairs, they had a step-down bar like they have at the Blade Show. And it was called the Pit there, and that's where all the shakers and movers would go to. And that was where, you know, I could go down there and I would be talking to Linton McKenzie on engraving. And uh at the same time on the other side of me is Nate Posner, who runs San Francisco Gun Exchange, who's one of the primary buyers for years. Matter of fact, the knife makers guild gives the Nate Posner Award, which is the highest award they give to someone that's not a knife maker. And uh, you know, not a lot of people even know who he is anymore. Uh and, you know, they also give an award for the best uh to one knife maker a year called the Red Watson Friendship Award on who's the most helpful and nice, nicest person. And uh uh Paul Bash used to give, he would try to buy a red uh a Red Watson knife, and every for years at the Guild, whoever won that award, he would give them a Red Watson knife. And he quit after about six or seven years because he said of all the people he had given that Red Watson knife to, not a one had told him thank you.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

That is uh that's unfortunate. Uh but that that that is very customary, though. I don't I you you know, like going back to uh the the knife maker is like the I know the driving force of the artist in in this industry, right? But they are also, I mean, speaking as a knife maker, like the the worst enemy of of the knife industry in some ways because of how um obtusely they think. Like you you'd think that as a as a sole producer of something that you would be very business-minded, that everything would be taken seriously, you'd be pragmatic, you'd you know, you'd have an appropriate attention towards your uh customer base and the market at large. But it seems like for the most part, it's not that way. And I I can't imagine, like you get a w an award and you get like for me, if I get an award and somebody is uh giving me a knife as a result of that, I'm looking at that guy and wondering what in what context is that is he able to uh give away a knife. And not only am I appreciative because I don't, you know, middle child syndrome, I don't get given a lot of things. I have to take it um if I want it. But um, you know, there I don't I don't understand why appreciation isn't given or attribution given appropriately. Those are all, to me, core tenets of being a good business person, too, as well as just being a good person.

SPEAKER_01 42:55

Well I think you said it early on, is these are artists we're talking about. And with this comes an artist's mentality. Uh I think you'll find few artists, true artists, that are good businessmen or business people. Uh there's no reason they should be. They're not trained to do that. They're trained to make beautiful knives. Uh they don't know anything. There's you know you might find a few that were a businessman that got into knives and can read a balance sheet and make a great knife at the same time. There's very few, if any, of those. You know, that's not to say we don't have educated knife makers. I mean, uh, you know, Fred Carter had a doctorate in biology and made great knives, but that doesn't necessarily make anybody a great businessman either. So uh there's only a few, very few people who have had the savvy to make that combination of being a good businessman. Person and a good knife maker to make it work. Bob Loveless was the first by far. And he tried to tell everybody, and all he did was get people mad at him. Jimmy Lyle was one of those who did that. The best living example I can give you is Daniel Winkler. He is a super person. And because of his, he and his wife Karen Shook Winkler, because of their combined savvy, they are absolutely produce probably the most success of a custom knife maker in this business right now because they transitioned from making traditional knives with Native American themes, primitive stuff, because he originally was a buck skinner and went to rendezvous and things. And he transitioned from that into making axes and tactical knives, ended up making the knives that SEAL Team 6 carried on the bin Laden raid. And from that, he had a special operator come in and showed him an axe he wanted to talk about designing. And he said, I need them for my troops. And he said, But the problem is you're getting a lot of money for this axe, and we're talking about guys on enlisted man's pay. Daniel comes up and he says, Well, I tell you what, uh, let me think on this. And then he said, Well, I'll tell you what, I'm going to do. I'm going to call my regular customers, and if they will pay me for one axe, then I will make one axe free and donate it to somebody on some of the teams. That's exactly what he did. And that's why he got mentioned in the book about uh the bin Laden rig and became, you know, and after that, everybody had to have one of those. And then those two axes on the wall behind the guy in the terminal list, those are winkler-made axes. And from that, he went into full-time production and going with Winkler knives, too. And like I say, most knife makers they make their knives, they sell them, they spend the money, and they sit back and say, I'm happy. Doesn't necessarily make it very successful at it. And you know, it's it's best to be a full-time knife maker if you've got a full-time job to back it up.

SPEAKER_02 46:38

That's the truth.

SPEAKER_01 46:41

And there aren't a lot of that's a real tough thing. And in the knife business, also, uh, we've got a lot of guys selling knives on Facebook now. And what they're doing is they're doing collectible knives, aftermarket knives, you know, knives. They're not buying knives from a factory or a distributor, so they're buying these old collectible knives, going to knife shows, scarfing them up, looking for collections, things like that, then singling them out to this small this audience that they've created on Facebook. What they don't understand is the only person that has really ever made a living buying and selling knives that have already been produced was Rhett Stenham. And he did that and created the Randall Club and some things like that. Jim Parker started out doing that, but he quickly realized that, and he became wealthy when he started importing knives out of Japan. Now he would later buy case, later start a factory in Jacksonville, Alabama that is now Baron's son. He also would buy at the same time cutlery world stores, which was the largest chain of cutlery stores in America. He had them all three at one time. Uh he had some health issues, and he did not have good support people that he could let run it while he was dealing with his health issues, and when he came out, he went the whole thing bankrupted. It was a $70 million bankruptcy. But the thing to keep in mind is he had accumulated $70 million as the ability to raise $70 million that he owed people selling knives.

SPEAKER_02 48:20

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 48:25

Yeah, I I don't I mean that's incredible, uh, first of all. I mean it's uh I I don't I you know I don't think that people realize like there's there there can be a you know a business at this thing. We're not talking about chunk change in most uh in most cases if you could do things intelligently and you know use your resources and wits to to build that. Uh but oftentimes people don't think that they think you know one three hundred and fifty dollar knife at a time.

SPEAKER_01 48:53

Well, too, you're selling particularly with the these new Facebook guys that are trying to do well and buy vintage knives, for instance. Now they're selling stuff say ten thousand dollars on a good night of uh vintage knives. But when you finish, where do you go to get more knives? You don't call up a factory and say, send me a couple of more dozen. All you do is you go out and have to dig them again. So when their show ends, when their Facebook sale ends, for the next thing they want to do is where am I gonna go buy some more? Well, this is multiplying, so now you've got more people scarfing the bushes for these vintage knives. And there is a finite group of these knives out there. Now, this does cause the prices to bump up a little bit. Not a lot, but a little bit. But these people that are trying to do this to make money are feeding a cavernous beast. And it is a beast that must be fed, and you've got to keep new knives coming. I used to sell knives on television. Uh shop at home television, there was a satellite network, and later did them for America's Collectibles Network, and then Panda Network out of California. And even did Jim Shopping Channel that did some shows for them. And even dealing in modern and production, you know, you know, having access to all of these factories and things, you when you would put a one week you might sell, you put a brand new knife just come out, or a brand new set, or some kind of thing. You'd sell 20 the first week, 10 the second, and then three and four the next week. It always had to be something new. And one of the things we started to do that as a as a result of this show is I went to Gerber and some of these other people and I said, just do this. I said, These new knives coming out, just uh send me uh 50 of them, but I want you to put first production run on the knife. And that came about from me as a result of needing knives for this TV show I was doing. And so a lot of people don't do not know where that originated, but that the but that's where it came from. Gerber were the first to do it. John Reinschreiber, a friend of mine, was working at Gerber, and I was explaining to him what I needed, and the two of us kind of came up putting first production run. Now everybody does it. But uh but but you know, the it's one of the things you do, and you nobody knows it, and it doesn't make any money for you. Just like uh Michael Walker invented the Locky liner, and he didn't patent it. Everybody in America has copied it and produced it. He doesn't make any money off of it. Of course, Michael, being the artist that he is, has made up for it in spectacular stuff otherwise. It sells knives, probably one of the highest priced knives in America, and sells them as fast as he can make them. But it's earned.

SPEAKER_00 52:02

Yeah. And uh there's weird serendipity. Um, you know, I I I try to like connect threads um in in this industry. I think probably it's like my researcher's mind. And uh it it seems like you you're talking about um with Bob Loveless where you know, where one door closes, another opens right in front of you. And it seems like when you're doing uh the right things or the right kind of things, that uh there's there's really not many scenarios where uh you get pushed into obscurity. But I mean that's um that is one uh thing that I see again, talking about like attribution and where ideas come from, that I think it's a fiduciary duty for people to really understand this. That's kind of what I'm doing with the podcast. Uh I love that you are like a pioneer in that because again, you you are like my reference uh for a lot of things, um, even though sometimes I don't realize until after the fact I'm constantly coming back to the wellspring uh uh that you've created and trying to um trying to make inroads uh so that way we can contextually understand that as knife makers and people within the craft, if all that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 53:17

Well it it's it's important on to me how some of these things came to be. Uh it's sort of like the roots of it. Uh and if you don't know how it came to be, it's hard to really understand the whole picture because there's little nuances in there. You know, the just just take, for instance, the Blade Show. Uh Jim Parker was producing through the National Knife Collectors Association, we're producing seven or eight shows a year. They're all good shows. And at the knife makers guild show, after we'd bought Blade Magazine, or American, it was American Blade then, uh, after we bought Blade Magazine, we took it, uh, went to the first knife makers guild show, or at least a knife makers guild, first one for us. And we were, you know, selling knives and I mean not selling knives, selling subscriptions and meeting everyone there. And I think this was the one where uh Moran introduced Damascus at the for the first time. He was selling it for $1,000 an inch. If it's a three-inch blade, it's $3,000. And they were lining up to buy them. Cronk was there, some of his fantastic things. It was just it was a a fantastic time to be getting into the knives. It was like 70, oh it was 18, 1981, that's what it was. And uh I'd been to Knifemakers Guild show when they were combined shows, like in Dallas, Texas, in 1976, when and in 1976, that's probably where it where the idea started. Is Wally Binefield and A. G. Russell put on a show together at Market Hall in Dallas. And in this, they had the Texas Gun Collectors Association on one end, they had a national knife collectors show, they had the Knife Makers Guild Show, and the ABS had not yet been formed, and they had the formation show of the Antique Bowie Knife Collectors Association, plus they had manufacturer booths, and it was a bust. I mean, it was they had all these hotels lined up, they had buses running between the hotels, and it was that particular year, there was just so much drama within the various organizations that it just didn't come off. But I was there and to go there, it's the first time I've ever flown on an airplane even. And I was set up there buying and selling and meeting some of these guys had only heard about, and of course the book had come out, so they all knew who I was now, and it was fantastic. And I always wanted to reproduce that. I went back in 77 and nobody came. It was a very, it had been reduced, and then they never tried to do it again after that. And so I always had that in the back of my mind that if there was some way that we could combine all of those together, it would be a fantastic show. And we went and so when Parker and I went to the first Knifemaker's Guild show together, we saw them, you know, saw the crowd coming in, and he and he looked at me and said, we could do this too if we only had one show a year. And that was part of the core idea for the Blade Show, along with the Dallas Expo setup. Uh then in 1981, we just bought Blade, we went to the um shot show, shooting hand out or trade show, because they had it in Atlanta and it was close. And I'm walking up and down these aisles and I'm seeing all of these manufacturers had massive booths. And I said, man, if we could get people like the knife makers guild people here and the pocket knife people here, and have some manufacturers' booths, this would be a huge show. We need to combine all of these together. And I remember uh Dale Everett, a knife dealer from uh Cleveland, Tennessee, and I were walking, and he looked around and said, We're in the big leagues, we're walking down the aisle of shot show, said, Boy, we're in the big leagues now, aren't we? And that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be in the big leagues. And so we started, and because of, you've got to bear in mind these were different worlds. Nobody had any crossover whatsoever. So you had one side of the room that we put pocket knife people in, we put the booths in the middle, and on the other side we had the custom show, custom end of it. So really we had three tiny shows in one, but they were nobody crossed that aisle. It was like a bunch of Democrats and Republicans. And we had the interesting thing to me, that totally different styles, because the pocket knife and vintage knife people, they would be at the door kicking the door at 7:30 when the show didn't open till 8. And at 5:30, if this closed show show closed at 6, at 5:30, they're covered up and they're all gone to dinner. Over on the handmade side, they're not coming in till 9 or 10 at night, 9 or 10 in the morning. They're staying till you have to run them out. So you're not getting everybody out to the show until about 6:30 because they're still closing deals. Because at that time, the knife makers guilt group was a lot more hard parties than the pocket knife guys. Pocket knife guys were church-going people, and they were you wouldn't find them in the bar partying or anything else. They wanted to get in early, they wanted to leave early to go to dinner and go to bed, go to the room. And the handmade people, they wanted to party. And uh the beauty of it was I was in both groups, so I could transition. And and the and the knife makers, we had so few booths going down the middle. Uh, you know, Parker took a booth, we had Leatherman come in for a booth. Tim Leatherman was there, and uh Frank Buster took booth and Lansky Sharpeners. And from that, we I said, we need to figure out a way to get more advertising about the show. And so what we said is we're gonna, and I was, you know, I was watching television one night, and this car was the motor trend knife of the year, and this was the road and track car of the year, road and track car of the year, car and driver car of the year, and I said, man, we need to do that. So that's where the idea came from. So we did the Blade Magazine Knife of the Year Awards. Now, there was an ulterior motive to this, is because if you don't come to the show, you don't get chosen for the award. So you had to be there for the judging, which was an incentive to get these manufacturers to come to the show because there was a huge amount of resistance then. But, you know, they couldn't rationalize it for the sailing to wholesalers like they were doing then. But now, if they're going to get an award like that, maybe this is worth coming to. As a part of that, uh, the one year Buck was the first one to grab the idea, and they made the little stand-up that this knife had won American-made knife of the year. And from the podium at the banquet that night, I held this up and I said, This is what you're supposed to do with the Knife of the Year Award. Pretty soon, everybody and all of their ads, winner of such and the Blade magazine knife of the year, such and such, American-made knife of the year, imported knife of the year, and everybody was running these ads in all of my competitors. So I was getting the Blade Magazine name out there everywhere. I mean, you know, I I couldn't, we didn't have a budget to run ads in American Rifleman. But if Buck ran an ad American rifleman and they said Blade Magazine Knife of the Year, if a knife collector sees that, he's gonna say knife magazine. I didn't know there's a knife magazine. Where can I find this magazine? And boom, away we went. It was uh and so so that grew, and all of these other groups grew to the point that we moved to Knoxville. We had 70,000 square feet in Knoxville, so we had um umpteen tables. Well, one time I think the most we ever had there was a 700 table show at that time in the 80s. And what happened was the manufacturers had their booth set up, and it was slow for them. They were just there to try to get the knife of the year award. So the owners of these factories would go wandering around, and they would go into the vintage knife section, and where they would see some nice old vintage knife, and they'd buy it and make one like that. They would go into the handmade section, and here's these great knives. Well, maybe I can make one like this. Well, let me talk to the maker. That's where the collaborations originated. Out of the boredom at the blade show, the manufacturers had nothing to do except go wander in those various sectors. And again, another boost to the group. You know, I was I was always under the under the guise of rising tide raises all boats. Anything I could do to make the entire knife business grow was going to be good for everybody in the long run. So I was always promoting. I mean, even locally, I'd go speak at the Optimus Club. And at one time, if you had a regional club, I sent a note to all of them. If you want me to come speak, let me know. So I was driving all over the Southeast, going to these regional knife clubs for their monthly meetings, just and meeting some great people while I was doing it. But uh, and from that too, we had a lot of nice of uh knife people that were passing, and certainly getting up there in age. And I wanted to find some way to honor most of these guys while they were still alive. And B.R. Hughes had written an article in Knife World that there needed to be a Cutlery Hall of Fame. And that's all he ever did with it. But that idea stuck in my mind. And so I said, you know, we're already doing a free banquet if you're a Life member. You got a free banquet that night, it's full. We're already doing, at that banquet, announcing the Knife of the Year Awards. And it's and so we need to create a Blade Magazine Color Hall of Fame. And and we did. Now, my criteria at the time was it was somebody that not necessarily had worked in a factory job at a knife factory for 50 years and been and had worked a regular job and just did their job for 50 years. This was somebody that had to do more. And they had to have something extra to give an extra uh give something extra. Uh take for instance, George Heron. George Heron made a great knife. He sold great knives. He was a former president of the Knife Makers Guild. But he was instrumental in starting the South Carolina Knife Makers Association, and there at that time I could have named 20 knife makers who got their start going to George Heron's shop and letting him show them how to do it. That was Hall of Fame type stuff. Now the criteria has changed, and I think it has lessened the importance of being a Cutlery Hall of Fame member. And uh it's um it's sad. That part of it's sad. The uh you know, the way I got in is George Heron and Ken Warner came up to the podium when we were getting ready to announce the Cutlery Hall of Fame Awards, and they said, we want to speak. Well, you know, they're both good friends. I said, okay, you know, I didn't think so at this point they announced that by acclamation and a unanimous vote by the existing Hall of Fame members that they were inducting me because they knew as me running the Hall of Fame, and at that time I was just picking on myself, that there would be uh that me that I would never put myself in. So once they put me in, I said, Well, if they've done this by by a vote, this'll sure take me out of how. Having to worry about it. So that's when the Hall of Fame members started picking the other people that would be in the Hall of Fame because we felt I felt they were very qualified to pick that. And um so all of that basically spun out from the Blade Show. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:20

Oh, yeah. That's I mean it's incredible. I mean, uh an incredible lineage. Um I I have some questions uh as it relates to uh the Cutlery Hall of Fame uh in in its current state. So um my my understanding is it's no longer a unanimous vote, right? Um but I'm not really familiar with what the actual criteria is, and I don't know if that's actually uh if it's publicly available, is it?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:43

Well, uh tell you the truth, I don't know. You know, I've I've uh since I started it, I kind of took a back seat to everything as much as I could. Uh, you know, I vote for the people I think that need to be in it, but I don't have anything to do with the running of it or anything other than I'm just a member of the Cutlery Hall of Fame. Uh we always had the Hall of Fame members vote. We you could nominate someone, then they would produce a biography about them so everybody would know who we were talking about and their contributions and why they had been nominated. And then they would pick the votes, you know. And with me, it was always I gave a consideration to somebody that was still alive, that was older, that deserved the honor, and could receive it in person. Now, I'm proud to say that because of that, Bo Randall received the Cutlery Hall of Fame in person. And I was there to shake his hand and hand it to him, and it was one of the premier moments of my life because he was he for many ways he was the handmade industry as far as the start of it in that early era. Uh, same way with Dewey Ferguson, uh Pete Gerber. Uh when Pete Gerber went in, I went to the Oregon show and flew in a couple of days early to take Pete and Pody out to dinner and announce it to them there at dinner. It was a very nice dinner, by the way. And they were very happy to receive that award and and come to the show and accept it. Uh same way with Albert Bear, Uncle Henry Bear. Just there were a lot of legends, Jimmy Lyle, that that came into the Hall of Fame while they were able to accept it. Uh my favorite one was when we inducted uh Houston Price, because Houston Price was a competitor. But he was also a good guy. And and he had made his contributions and you know, and we associate, we get together and play guitars and stuff. He was a fantastic guitar picker. And and we and we one time we even entertained at one of the banquets, the two of us together playing. And he uh, but he was sitting at the table with us, and he said, you know, and he pretty well had said there that as long as Bruce is running blade, I'll never be in a colored hall of fame. And he couldn't understand why all of his family was there too until we announced it. And we're totally surprised and went blindsided. But one of the others was uh Ken Warner and A. G. Russell. Neither one of them were banquet type people. So what I did is I asked A. G to do the introductory speech, the announcement speech for Ken Warner. And then I asked Ken Warner, I said, I need you to come to the bandwidth because I need you to do the introductory speech for H. E. Russell. So they were gonna do each other's introductory speech and didn't know that both of them were going into Cutlery Hall of Fame. And we're sitting at the table with them, and at that time I was uh we were talking about uh there was some uh some controversial stuff going on in uh in Knife legislation, and some of these people were caving to it. And I read the I had the poem marked in in a book of Kipling about paying the Dane Gill. Once you don't pay the Dane Geld, or you'll never get rid of the Dane, and I was going to read it to the banquet. And it came as part of a two-volume set. And A. G and Ken were sitting at the table with me, and they looked at that set. That's the book we're missing. They both had the first volume of the two-volume set, and they couldn't find the second volume, but I had the second volume. And so we were talking about that, and then Ken goes to do his speech, and about halfway through it, A. G figures out what's going on. And it would the looks on their faces, I mean, so part of the Coloring Hall of Fame thing was was honoring people that needed to be honored, hopefully during their lifetime. Part of it was these little twists like that. And I don't know what they do with that. Now, you know, when I sold Blade Magazine, since it was a part of Blade Magazine, that part, that entity went with it. And there was, and so it's it's theirs. It's it's despite being a cutlery Hall of Fame, it's not a nonprofit thing. It is owned by Blade Magazine and the owners of Blade Magazine. And so they changed the rules recently that not only the Hall of Fame members would could vote, but they had special outside secret people in the business that were qualified who were going to vote. They won't, they don't haven't announced who these quote qualified people are. I'm, you know, I wonder if they think that the Cutlery Hall of Fame people aren't qualified to pick the other people in the industry. Uh that's a question they never really answered. But uh when when that that subject came up, but but part of the but the to be honest, some of the Hall of Fame people brought it on themselves because you got two votes. You got one got one vote counted two points and one voted one point. So you got your first and second choices. So you had people calling each other and saying, look, I'll vote for your guy if you vote your second vote for my guy. And they were doing this based on whatever clique they might be in. And that was not the way it was meant to be either. That was that was I I guess if there's a fault with that, it was it was when I set when I turned it over to them by popular election that I didn't put restrictions on communicating with each other and collusion. And um so I guess I'll take responsibility for that being screwed up.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:12

Well, uh talking earlier about nobody going across the aisle like Democrats and Republicans, uh, very similarly to uh what gets done in Congress with the with with the Hall of Fame. Um I'm reminded though, you know, uh I I thought that my my wife's uh uh grandparents that their their trust and will was uh ironclad. Uh, but you see, like it's it takes one generation to uh screw up the inheritance that they've received and to collude and to backstab and everything like that to totally disrupt the original spirit of a of a trust or will, and not too much different than what's happened.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:55

Well, I don't think that has ever really changed if you look at how the the kings of England were always killing brothers and stuff and nephews to make sure they had the throne uh the throne enhanced for their for their own secession. Uh and one thing about the generations that that I have come to realize is my generation were children of people who had gone through the Great Depression in World War II. And that affected them horribly. My mom said that she remembered one Christmas where all she got for Christmas was an orange. My grandmother said that they were subsistence farmers and they grew or raised everything they ate except for sugar and coffee, and they traded eggs for the sugar and the coffee. The men of the family picked up every odd job they could find just so they could pay the taxes on the property. And they did this was not a one-year thing. This went on for several years, and it affected them forever. And part of that was after all the banks closed during the Great Depression, they didn't trust banks. They did trust buying and holding something in your hand that had value. And so they were all collectors. If you look at the rise of gun collecting, it was post-World War II. If you look at uh all of this, you look at knife collecting, it arose because gun collecting became government restricted in 1968. That was the the the gun, the knife collectors and their association with guns primarily came is because most of the early guys were gun dealers, but with the restrictions of the 1968 Gun Control Act, they couldn't step and sell guns across state lines like that. But knives they could. And so that was a very strong popular thing. But but generations are have their way of thinking affected by the environment in which they grew up. That's just the way life is. But gas was 50 cents a gallon. So this generation, the future generation, had to adapt, and they have different values and different things and different connections. Like in these mountains where I live, uh we all had a and probably still still do, if you tell it, we've got a very distinct Western North Carolina mountain accent. Because what we spoke is closest to the mother tongue, Elizabethan English, because it was isolated in these mountain hollows. And then satellite dishes came in, and all of a sudden our children learned how to put like in every third word in a sentence. And I think for future generations, the COVID isolation is going to be a generational affecting thing. Life has been different ever since for everybody. But for those kids that had to go to school for a year by looking at a computer screen, their life's never gonna be the same about it. And they're gonna think about things different from the way we did. You know, there there was uh there was there was a theory one time, I think it was Marshall McLuhan, came out with this theory is that when they were talking about what they call the generation gap, is that children prior to my prior to boomers were raised with books to read and they read and everything was in a line. They called them linear thinkers. And when television came along, and children of the fifth born in the 50s, the television became a babysitter for them. And everybody watched television. But if you go slow with a television or you shoot it with a camera, you can see the whole picture is never showing. It's a rolling bar, and you're only seeing half the picture at a time. But your mind's making you think it's a complete picture. And his theory was he called those simultaneous thinkers that see that. So he said the reason that the older my the older generation for me was different is the linear thinkers that had read straight lines in their early formative years versus people that were seeing half a picture at a time in their mind having to compensate for it. And I always accepted, well, okay, that made sense to me. Uh and some of the kids' things uh we had we had a good kid we liked, had a lot of common things in common with my wife and I and his family, and we liked him very well. My daughter was dating him. And to him, he would have made the, to us, he would have made the ideal son-in-law. And we mentioned this to my daughter. My daughter said he might have made a great son-in-law for you all. It's the problem is would he made a great husband for me? And I don't think so. So I accept now that we have different values and different ways of thinking things. And with some of these, some kids anymore, I I can't talk to them. Even my grandkids, it's really hard to find something to talk about together.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:21

Yeah. Well, um there's several things I I think on uh with that. Um, you know, my my wife and I talk about that. So uh I'm I'm 37, uh, she's 42, um, we'll be will be 42 this year. Uh but what what we talk about is the difference between how we relate to our children, because um my my wife firmly grew up as uh I would we would call it Generation X, right? So she grew up in an analog world, but then was introduced to technology later on, right? And I have this very weird um compilation because I I grew up not not only analog, but I mean, you know, you know how the hills are. I mean, I I grew up in Pennsylvania in the in the hollers basically, and I grew up very poor. In fact, what uh you mentioned about growing up in depression and having a orange for Christmas, there was one Christmas where um my my parents bought a case of oranges uh for me and my seven siblings, and that's what we had because that's what the what money we had. And so it was a rare treat, but we ate on those oranges until they rotted, and that was it. Um but you know, the uh there's an adage that you that you see go go uh around in the uh the I guess the zeitgeist of uh memes and stuff on the internet today, and it's uh hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times, right? And this uh this cyclical nature of uh you do something hard and endure, and then you try to course correct and make sure your kids don't ever have that problem, and then that is the thing that creates weak kids, and then they create hard times, and then the cycle repeats. And um, I'm I'm pretty sure uh as analogies go, that's fairly accurate. And we're on the the uh weak weak men create hard times uh phase of society right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:26

I I do think we're gonna see with the hard times for certain. It's uh and and you know, it it what worries me is um is the str is the uh ability of of basically the warfighters we're not raising. Uh I had a good friend of mine, special ops, retired special ops guy, and he said and we met at a winery in Myrtle Beach weekend before last. And we were sitting there talking, and he said, you know, to me, he said, he moves still moves in those circles. And he said, uh the only war fighters we have right now are basically the airborne troops and the special ops units. He said, your rank and file guys, uh it's just all of this, all of this uh diversity stuff, they're worrying more about that and teaching them how to shoot a 50-caliber machine gun. And and I and I heard a quote the other day about the diversity that one of the issues they were having was the 82nd Airborne was having trouble recruiting enough LBGTQ people to fill out the roles, which is I well when I grew up, I would go outside and play army because I had heroes, and I read stories of these heroes, and these heroes were put to me up as examples, and I read books and stories and taught in school about Daniel Boone and Kit Carson and uh Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp and all of these John Fremont, all of the even Custer, all these people that did great things, and that was um I don't see that in my children anymore. I had to explain to my grandson, who is born in Texas, what the Alamo really meant. And uh it's it's just uh a strange a strange world that I have trouble dealing with. And dealing with, I'm dealing with it, but I have to understand it. I have trouble understanding the motivations of some of these people anymore.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:56

Yeah, I uh it's an identity crisis, I think, at the end of the day. Um What were you gonna say?

SPEAKER_01 1:25:06

Let me break in here and say one thing. And it's a quote from Ron Lake at the Knife Makers Guild Show meeting that I think is perhaps the most profound thing that I've ever heard in a guild group. And to me, it should be the core foundation of every knife-related group. Ron stepped up, he was vice president of the Knife Makers Guild at the time, and he said, if we want to be a great organization, we have to do great things.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:44

I think the things that are the most profound are the things that you actually have to sit and think about. Like what does that actually mean? Great things, right? And for me, great things are often the hardest things to do. You don't you don't ever get anything good out of sitting on your ass and waiting for them to happen to you. You have to go out and get them, right? It's a whether you're like a scientifically minded and believe in the you know the laws of entropy or or whatever, it's far easier for things to be destroyed than it is to create. And if you're a creator, um, if you innovate, if you find new ways to do things that are that put thing random things together and make it better, that's greatness, right? But you leave things alone and they start to decay, just the same way as society, the same way as um, you know, rusty blades, the same thing as homes or uh you know cities or things like that. You leave it alone, you don't care about it, and it starts to fester and then die off.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:45

Yeah, well, well, but I think it's well said because you you have to take care of what you have. If you've got a bunch of Damascus blades, you better keep the suckers old. And I've seen some in our latest auction. We had a Ron Fraser knife that a very wealthy collector had had, had a massive collection. And this one was in a case, and I don't know if it got wet or what, but we opened the case when it consigned it to me for auction, and it was rusted all to pieces. And this was a super nice art in a in a fitted case and everything, and Ron Fraser stuff's top-notch. Uh, it brings huge money. But this one, it was just, it just made you want to cry. You know, it's just it was just a sad, sad thing. But, you know, back to the the the the working of the it's I think part of it's a work ethic because it's not easy for kids today to have a work ethic like we had. Uh my dad worked as a union pipe fitter, and he drove two hours one way on these curvy mountain roads to commute to work in union jobs in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He did this for twenty something years. He did this every day. He would get up at four in the morning, ride down, work a construction job all day long as a pipe fitter, come back, come home, have supper, take a shower. And then they were building a resort community over on the lake, three miles from where we lived. I would go with him and hold the flashlight, and he would work doing plumbing in these new houses because he was the only plumber in that end of the county. And this was not PVC pipe, you just put dope on and screw together. This was cast iron pipe. You had to saw off, beat off with a chisel, you had to pack the joints with oakum and pour hot lead in them and then beat that in. And it was all copper tubing that had to be sweated with lead. And I mean, it was hard physical work. There was a full-time job for somebody. He was doing this in the night after he got home. Next morning, you get up at 4 o'clock and go again. They also ran at the same time that my mom was running a small country grocery store and it had a three-unit motel. Plus, they had rental properties. And if they rented them furnished or unfurnished, and invariably, if the guy had it furnished, the next guy wanted it unfurnished, we had to move all the furniture out of it. Constant. And so I grew up thinking that you didn't waste time on anything. I mean, we went swimming two times a year, went camping once a year early on until I got old enough to go on my own. And but as far as my dad's activities, he was too busy working and trying to build something to give to us. And so I had that in my mind because it seems like I've always worked three and four jobs. If I was editing a magazine, I'm still buying and selling knives on the side. I'm still writing on the side and doing other things. At any given moment, I've had three or four jobs. Like right now, at this moment, I've got, you know, I've just written, finished three novels that the the the protagonist in it is a knife guy. One's called the Carolyn Factor, and the other one is called Vengeance Creek. And the hero in it is buys and sells knives and guns and things like that. And that's available on Amazon and most book outlets, Mars and Noble. Unfortunately, it's not hit the New York Times bestseller list, and I don't think that it's going to. But I enjoyed writing. I'm doing a column in my local country weekly every other week. I'm doing two columns a month in Knife magazine, plus I'm running an auction business. And this is because my dad taught me to do it that way. When I was 16 years old, I've got a grandson that just turned 16, so this is why this is in my mind. When I was 16 years old, I was playing in a band. And, you know, we were doing gigs when people hired us. But at 16, it popped into my head, well, this location over here that's rentable, why don't I rent it and let's put on our own gig there?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:09

And we did.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:11

So I was promoting, I was promoting dances at 16. And there was a lot I learned in that that helped me when we started promoting knife shows. And and every one of these, you know, it's, you know, I I promoted the Blade Show and I also handled it for the Knife Makers Guild on various times and then shows of the Spirit of Steel shows and things that we still do now twice a year at Pitch and Porch, Tennessee. Uh it's so yeah, I left the shows out on the other things I'm doing. So it's just but it the nice thing about it, most of this relates back to nines for me. It always circles back.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:58

Yeah. Well, and um kind of summarizing the way that I think of uh where we've gone so far um is I think that there's a a difference between benevolence and malevolence, right? In in either case, one hand washes the other, or a parasite is just gracious enough to its host that it doesn't kill it so it can walk around, right? And I think that there's two different types of people, right? Uh you either you either are a parasite or you are you know hygienic and you wash the other hand, right? And um uh I've always found based on the context in which I've uh I've understood your work, that you're the one uh one hand washes the other, that what's good for the goose is good for the gander, that uh there is there's a symbiosis uh that's required uh in order to in order to have people accept that something is good for them. And that then you basically have to uh convince the uh them that it is good for you, like or good for them.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:05

Well, I've I've always figured we're all in this together. And if if I help somebody sell more knives, then they're gonna have more money to buy ads in the publications I was producing, or they're gonna have more money to go to shows. And uh, you know, it's like Tony Bose. You Tony Bowes would have drawings for his knives. And I told him one time, I said, Tony, you're selling these knives for $1,500, and you're watching the guy turn around and sell it for $2,000 right behind you. He says, Yeah, well, I like to leave a little room in it for people. And so I said, Well, why don't you get some for yourself sometime? Let me, you make a knife for me and I'll put it in auction, and I'll just worry about the buyer's premium, and you can keep all of it. I won't even charge you a percentage. And you don't even have to put out a card or go to the show or nothing. If you want to do one of these in auction, I'm good with this. And so his knives, he was selling his knives at his drawings at the Blade Show for two grand, something like that. He made an ivory handle back when it was legal, a two-blade bullet style trapper. I put it, and I think we got $5,000 off it for him. Gave him the $5,000. I said, make me another. He said, Well, okay, when I get around to it. Never did. Uh he was, but he always left room in it for somebody. Uh in 19, when I first started collecting trading knives, uh I went to this little knife trade on the Courthouse Square in Lawrenceville, Georgia. And when I first started a case canoe sold for $8.20, wholesale for $4.10. Uh you could go to Downtown Supply on the square in Lawrenceville, and uh, if he knew you, you could buy those knives at about $40 off. And if they had really pretty bone handles, you could take them to a knife show and sell them for $15. Uh, I heard one guy brag, I may have paid $20 for it, but I got the nicest knife in the room. At that point, I mean, bear in mind, retail on this knife was $8.10. And all of the case knives at this time were doing this because demand had outcreased what they could produce in their small factory. This was before they built the South Bradford plant in 1976. So you had high demand, you had the prices. Within two years, that same canoe that had been selling for $4.10 was now $25 retail. It's over $12 and a half. So you could still sell it for $15, but your profit down is less. Because somebody at Case had noticed the aftermarket value, and they took up all of that market and cut out tons of middlemen. And you know, and some of the factories have have done this too. They they get some new sales manager in, and he said, Oh, these distributors that are buying 50 less 25 are ruining our business. We just need to cut them off and just go 40% off. And so then they go 40% off, and they can't understand why their business slows down. And that's some of the some of these companies have gone out of business playing games like that. You know, the the the way Bill Adams says it, Bill Adams is a very astute friend of mine who used owned Atlanta Cover. He said that people put grooves in their heads on the way they think, the way they like to do something, the way they like to go to a show and come in that centrist, blah, blah, blah. And he said, when you try to put new grooves in somebody's head, it's very difficult. And it's generally going to affect you. When you move a show location, not everybody travels with you. A show in a new location or a brand new show, knife show somewhere, uh the core group will come and say, we're going to help you establish this. It's not that we're going to come here and make money this first year. First couple of years on a show anywhere are very tough. And if you don't have a big client list, they're even tougher.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:19

Yeah. Um I I I do want to circle back um where we left off on uh Blade Show and everything, uh, but in a kind of a different avenue because I I know that you've covered kind of the progression of how that that came to be. So my my understanding um from what we've talked about previously and everything is that uh uh Jim Parker and you had uh founded uh Blade Show and uh Blade magazine, effectively, right? Uh and and that he he was a majority shareholder and you're just um uh barely majority, right? So it's like some 60-40 split or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:57

Well, he well, I ran it. And he was basically a financial investor, but he was also one of the most astute businessmen I've ever known and basically a genius. Uh when I went to uh when his father-in-law died, I went to the funeral home and he introduced me to one of his teachers that had retired after 50 years in teaching. And I asked her, I said, was Jim the smartest person you ever taught? And she said, Well, no, uh, there was one girl that was smarter than him, and she's a librarian. But of all the people I taught in 50 years of teaching, he's the smartest boy I ever taught. And so uh at one point when we first started the Blade Show, bear in mind we were in head-to-head competition with the National Knife Collector Association. He was a former president. They had ousted him politically. They had basically told me I had a they were printing uh my printer friend that I would go to lunch with was printing National Knife Collector Magazine. And he told me three months in advance that, Bruce, you better be looking for a job because when they open the museum in May and have that meeting, they're gonna fire you because they've always been already been asking me to give them a referral to somebody who could edit a magazine. And so this was a tough situation. Jim Parker said at the time, Well, I know one thing, they can't out advertise us. They can't outspend us because he was he took this personal and he was gonna make it work. So the way the agreement was, I designed Jim's catalogs using our equipment, and I did all of the editing, publication, and all that, and basically he just oversaw the money. But he was very astute at that. So that was a very, very good workable combination. But I bought his shares out and was a sole owner uh around 1986, and that's about the time we went on national newsstands, and that was a big, big bump in things too. Uh at that time we had done, I think the blade show started in '82. So we had only done three blade shows. And basically I did all the management on all of those. Um so Jim was uh, you know, it couldn't have been done without him. But basically he was he was too busy selling knives to to meddle around with the publication end of it. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:34

But yeah, I mean one hand washes the other, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:40:38

Well, uh well, I can well it's it's like this when uh we bought the magazine. We bought Blade magazine at the time for uh uh sixty-five thousand dollars. We borrowed another thirty for operating expenses. And Jim Jim co signed my note for forty percent of it, he put in sixty percent. Uh as as far as for the purchase price, and then like I say, we borrowed that money and paid that back to to each other. So when I bought him out in 1986, this is only five years later, you must understand. I paid him two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. So he he was well happy with his investment. And I was too because I all I ever did was run magazines. And then when I sold it in 1994, uh, I'll just say it was substantially higher. But I was I was well pleased with my investment too. But we'd worked our asses off to do it. Uh the the first issue of American or Blade Magazine under my ownership with Parker as a partner. I worked 30 hours straight. I did all the layout and the paste stuff and all that. And it was a hundred-page magazine. It'd been being like a 50, 60-page magazine. And I did it all. Uh we had a typesetter, but we were using that old copyographic stuff where you had to print out a page and paste it down. You had to wax the back of it and roll it down. It was crooked, you had to straighten it up. It was uh it was tedious. And uh that's the most I've ever worked at one time without stopping. It was 30 straight hours. And about four o'clock the next day, I said, I mean, we were on a deadline. And about four o'clock the next day, I said, I'm gonna go in my office and crank out my chair, and I'm gonna rest for about a half an hour, and you all wake me up. And half an hour later, I couldn't move. I was just that was I I I I know what my limit is at that age, where it's 30 hours. But uh, you know, once one one thing we didn't get into is it Jim and I did not start. It was started by Blackie Collins and John Cullers, and then Blackie Collins owned it, then Jack Meravich, a dentist in New Orleans, bought it, then Wally Binefield did it, and we bought it from Wally Binefield. And that was from, say, 1972 to 81. 1972 is when it was founded as American Blade Magazine. We bought it in 1981. Now, we were Jim Parker came to me one day and said, Look, uh, I've got one of the Japanese suppliers that bought me two first-class tickets or and uh a first-class ticket, and one of the other companies bought me two second-class tickets. Uh, how would you like to go to Japan for free and tour the Japanese knife industry? And you could write about it in the magazine. I said, Hallelujah. Put me down. So for two weeks, we went to Japan and I wrote up the Japan, Japanese knife industry. We did a special issue of the magazine on it, uh, and I even did slideshows at some of the regional clubs about our trip there. But when I went to, I went to uh with Parker to Japan, and the first morning there, we're sitting at breakfast, and in walks this big tall guy who's Bob Ernst. He's the sales manager of Schrade. And Schrade at that time was our biggest advertiser. And in those days, we sold covers, and Schrade bought the covers six at a time. So drop serious money. I mean, you know, a huge part of our ad budget. Ernst sits down and I said, What are you doing here? And he looks over at Parker and says, Do you want to tell him or do you want me to tell him? I said, I'm just kind of confused. And Jim said, You tell him. He said, Well, we're over here to start a new company that is going to take over the American hardware industry because all these nice importers and stuff, nobody's going after the hardware industry. We're going after the hardware industry, and I'm going to be a partner in it, and we're going to take over. We're going to knock off all the patterns, et cetera. And I said, Well, what are you going to name the company?

SPEAKER_02 1:45:20

He said, American Blade Cutler. And I went berserk.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:27

I said, You cannot do that because it will confuse people with American Blade magazine, and the magazine is what I do. And no, we're not, we can't do this. And Parker said, uh, well, Bruce, uh, let's put it like this. We're holding a stockholders' meeting, and my 60% vote that we're going to use American Blade Cutlery, uh, use the Eagle and the name American Blade for this cutlery company, and we will pay a royalty for it to the American Blade Incorporated. But uh my 60% votes we do this, I assume your 60, your 40% votes no. We have the motion, the motion carries. So I got a very important lesson on being a minority stockholder. And I was in a quandary because what on earth are we gonna do? Because I couldn't stop. So the one thing we did do is we took American off of it and just called it Blade Magazine from that point, so we could differentiate between that and American Blade Cutlery. And I was whining about it, and Parker just said, Bruce, I bought this company just to get use of that eagle. Said, I can shut the magazine down, it wouldn't bother me a bit. I bought it to get use of that eagle. I didn't buy it for it to have a magazine. And so that's when Blade Magazine was born. So before we got back, word had reached Schrede that Bob Ernst was in Japan creating a new knife fair. So when he arrived, they went back to work at Schrade. He was on his vacation, went back to work at Schred. They walked him right into a room, handed him a non-compete agreement, non-disclosure agreement. So you sign this now or you could refired. And he said, Okay, I'm fired, and walked out the door. Uh Strade, so Albert Baer and Henry Baer, this was he was their number one boy. I mean, they trusted him and thought a lot of him, and all of a sudden he had betrayed them, in their opinion. And therefore, anybody associating him with him was thus betrayed. And if there was an American Blade cutlery company and they were advertising America Blade Magazine, we can fix this. We're never going to advertise American Blade Magazine again. So in one fell swoop, I lost my biggest advertiser by I'm talking about probably 30% of our ad budget. Wow. This this was almost a deal killer. Uh this could have been the end very easily. And but realizing that, we started digging in, we started calling people a little bit harder, we got a little more aggressive in our ad ad sales, we uh went other areas that maybe people hadn't thought about advertising in our knife magazine, and we we hung on. But it was a very important lesson for me because after that, I never let a big customer or a big advertiser try to tell me how to run my business because I knew if I could survive that, I could survive anything. I mean, we recently had a had a one of one of our good customers, and he said, you know, said I go to I've started going to bed early, and so I can't stay up to the end of your auctions, and I like to throw my bids in at the last minute. And I need you to uh back your auctions up, start closing them earlier. I said, I can't do that. I said, there are people on the West Coast that want to bid in our auctions. I said, I learned this much when I was selling knives on television at shopping home. I said, you know, we we we sold knives till two in the morning because we wanted that West Coast market. I said, so we start closing at 10:30, and that's just the way we do it. He said, Well, I can't, uh if you do, I'm not gonna bid in your auctions anymore. Okay. See ya. And uh that all went back to that thing with Shrade. I, you know, if you want to do business with me, if you want to do business with me and be my friend, I'm one of the friendliest people you'll ever meet. If you want to go to war with me, it's time to start shooting at each other. Uh Wally Wa w what Wally Binefield told me when we were buying buying the magazine, his his quote was, I had a very soft voice. He said, You know, I've never harmed a fly, but I've slowly pulled the wings off every wasp that's ever stunk. Now I'm not quite that vindictive. I wouldn't pull them slow, I'd just jerk them off.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:29

Yeah, I've uh uh I've been kicked when I've been down a lot. And the thing that I really detest in life is when I feel somebody's boot on my neck, it just makes me want to be ravenous. Uh so I've always uh I've always uh uh thought that if I ever think that there's a possibility that your boot is on my neck, uh then I will keep you in a certain place and I will trust you only as much as I have to.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:54

Well, you you may you may have seen that meme that shows two boys fighting and says, if it comes to the point that you have to fight, think like you're the third monkey getting onto Noah's Ark and brother, it's starting to rain.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:09

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I that's probably a perspective that I've gained through corporate America because the reality is, is like people throw out the fact that they're sharks, but uh you know, as a as a way to like I guess uh pump up a bravado and ego and everything. But one thing that I've learned in corporate America is that man, there are a lot of sharks in the ocean. And if you you either the biggest or the most vicious, uh, and it is really a dog eat dog type of world uh in there. And um I I've I've taken the mentality over the years, it's like if you're not willing to burn down, uh burn down the bridge or topple the columns like Samson uh for what you believe in, then uh how much are you really in it?

SPEAKER_01 1:51:55

Well, I had a uh a good friend of mine that later became a credit manager for one of the largest companies in America. And he came in one day with a very nice suit on. And uh I came in, I said, Man, that's a real nice suit. He said, Yes, I'm going to foreclose on the orphanage. And that was his mentality toward things. Um it's uh it's a crazy world. But one thing I've told my kids, and try to keep constant myself, is don't worry or don't pay attention to what people say. Pay attention to what they do and what they've done. And that's generally a pretty good, pretty good indicator. Uh their actions speak a whole lot better than the words. A lot of people tell you anything, you know, sort of like that Jimmy Buffett line about uh I've read lots of books of heroes and crooks and learned much from both of their styles. And so, you know, it's it doesn't hurt to to understand how a crook is, but you know, it's sort of like lying. My memory's not good enough to lie because I can't remember what I said, especially mine. And so uh if you tell the truth, you don't have to wonder about what you said. And and that's I think that's one of the things when we're talking to people that's a potential consigner to our auctions, uh, is I'm talking sincerely, and I think it comes across that way. Uh I don't lie or evade or oversell, I just tell them the way it is and uh what they can expect and what they can't expect. And you know, we we're not miracle workers. We can't take a $5,000 knife and get $100,000 for it. But we can take a $5,000 knife and get five or six thousand dollars for it. And on a bad day, we'll get four thousand.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:56

Yeah. Um I I am uh I've used it in business before, but I refer to it as the Missouri rule. Um if like I'm a show me guy, right? So the show me state. Like uh uh if if I can't see that you're actually practicing what you preach, then I am like genuinely distrustful. Probably from being beat as a kid, like you know, physically abused. I just have never really trusted anybody fully. Um, but I'm kind of that way. Like you you will you will gain a lot more respect from me um if I see the way that you act uh in in in in process or in progress uh than if you just tell me uh something and blow a lot of smoke. And um I've I've used that as a business principle and really just a life principle. Like all my kids know that's like uh you can say sorry to me all day long. I love you, like I'm giving you grace here, but the the reality is that I need you to show me that you're sorry, not just say it to me. Yeah, absolutely. Um I'm interested with with everything that happened with uh with Schrade and and this process, um, where exactly did the um the parallels uh run with the knife makers guild? Because you talked about Blackie Collins, which I actually have a book that he wrote on uh repairing pocket knives. Um I think it was sometime in the uh early 70s he wrote it. Uh but uh where where did the relationship with the guild uh exactly come from, or was that just a natural progression of the kind of circles that you were in and the inroads that you were making?

SPEAKER_01 1:55:32

Well, uh first you have to keep in mind Blackie Collins was a genius. Probably had more knife patents in his name than just about anybody except George Schrade. You've certainly George Shrade of our generation. Uh, you know, Gerber uh Pete tried to, Pete even bought Benchmade Knife Benchmark Knife Company out of Gastonia, North Carolina, because they had part of Blackie's patents and rights, and he bought it just to keep control of Blackie's creative talents. Of course, Blackie, he's going right now and doing somebody else. Uh he told me he said he had a male slot, old mail slot thing in his office, and every slot had a different idea he had been working on for knife patents. And one time at uh one of the guild shows, he uh he had a guy come in and I saw him hand him a check for like $20,000 for the original prototype for one of those Gerber patent knives. Had to take a picture of it with him. But Blackie started Blade or America Blade. When I say Blade, I'm speaking it interchangeably with America Blade in the early days. Blackie and John Cutter started it. John Cutter later go on to edit uh Outdoor Life. Uh and then they started uh sporting classics. I think he was involved in that at one time. Great magazines. And Blackie did did that. And at that time, you're thinking about 1972, I think. 74.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:25

74. That's all there was.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:31

Was you had American Blade Magazine, you had the knife makers guild that was organized to serve as a place to set up a certain board of standards in that you're not going to screw somebody over a knife. Because what had happened earlier, prior to that, is there were a lot of guys when this knife making thing started good, they were a lot of the guys were doing it. And they would take advanced money and they would spend the money. And then by the time it came to deliver the knife, they didn't have enough money to even buy the supplies. And they were made great knives, but they weren't good businessmen, and they spent money that should have like been in an escrow account or something. And it was so prevalent that there were people talking back and forth about I'm not can't buy any knives anymore because everybody, nobody will send me a knife. Everybody's just stealing my money. And so they created the guild. A. G Russell rented a block of tables at the Houston Gun Show. At that time, the Houston Gun Show had five miles of aisle space. And A. G put all of those tables together, and I think he had 13 or 14 people, Chubby Husky and uh uh G.W. Stone and a whole bunch of the early guys. And the reason a lot of them were in Texas is because this is where the show was. And they agreed that they they'd start the Knife Makers Guild. Just basically to have a set of standards that if you're in the guild, they're gonna police you being honest. And if you're not, they're gonna kick you out of the guild. So very soon there was nothing but the knife makers guild. And pretty soon, as word of this got out, if you weren't a knife makers guild member, nobody buy a knife from. At least very few people. And there were people who would only buy from knife makers guild members. And they had a set of standards. You had to go through a probationary period, then you had become a voting member. And uh so and Loveless was prime was instrumental in getting all of that started because he had the vision to see what was going to come if they didn't do it. And and you know, and he he became a president, then Bill Moran became a president of it. And uh these two guys were totally opposite. One one was wanted, you know, spend and everything, and the other one, Bill was more tightly conservative, and he didn't he resented paying taxes, period. Uh and and he wanted to take the guild tax exempt, which was going to be a difficult thing, and so they argued over that next year. They had somebody else. And so it was it it evolved that way. And it but the guild became the only game in town if you were a knife maker. And it meant something. I mean, it it really did. If you if you were a knife makers guild member and you walked into a gun show, it was you had some all factor there. But and they were and and they didn't just promote themselves, they promoted the makers. And and the writers of the time uh that were writing in outdoor magazines. You had you had Bert Miller and uh John Sundra and some of these and uh B.R. Hughes, they're writing in these major publications, gun publications primarily. And the first thing you say, you know, he's a knife makers guild member, he's a knife makers guild member, he's a knife makers guild member. You were conspicuous in your absence if you were not a knife makers guild member. And then as things evolved, all of a sudden you had the ABS on one hand, and all of a sudden, with with the coming of the internet, you didn't have to be a member of the guild to sell knives. There was a time you did. So it made a huge difference, and and I think the the guild's impact has decreased a lot when they got in the arguments over the machine parts things. Uh a lot of it is one of the top shakers and movers that were men of vision, like Frank Centifonti, uh, he passed away. That was a huge gap in the business. You know, his death left a hole in the business, the only way to say it. For handmade that. And because he he was an excellent manager. And some some of the other guys, you know, when when you're putting somebody in charge because they make a great knife doesn't mean they have a great business sense. There's two different animals. But if the criteria is making a good knife, making a good knife doesn't make you a good manager. And that's part of the issue now, I think, with the Gill. But but, you know, even now the the the once one show if you went to one show a year was the Gill Show, now it's the Blade Show. Uh if and now Blade has, if I'm not mistaken, Blade has now merged to a Texas show, and which is now considered the Gill Show and the ABS show.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:10

Yeah. Um, well, I'll I'll ask uh questions on uh like show rights and venues and things like that in a minute, but uh for clarification's sake, um the guild as it stands today owns no rights to any shows, right? And the the Blade Texas venue was previously ICCE, which was run by Jerry Moen, which was previously, I believe, the Kansas City show, if I remember correctly, uh which was I I if I remember the the lineage of things, that was a uh combination of the guild show and ABS show. Um but what uh uh like so the guild doesn't actually have an official show at all. We have presence at other uh um shows like venues, uh, but the only thing that as as a guild that we have is um meetings that correspond with shows. It uh last year, last year it was at Texas and at Atlanta, so we'd had two for the year um that was to accommodate uh growth and expansion and whatnot. But um, you know, from sometimes from year to year and voting body to voting body, that'll change a little bit. Um what uh do you remember exactly when uh the uh transition occurred with the with the guild not actually uh having that Atlanta venue? Was that something under your purview or after uh you had already sold the magazine?

SPEAKER_01 2:04:39

Uh well, uh to best of my knowledge, the guild never had an Atlanta venue. It started, we we had a special section for the Knifemakers Guild members, and we hung a sign over it that this is where the guild members are. And we did the same thing for the ABS. And the ABS was basically using the Blade Show as their annual show for because that's where they're doing all the testing and things. And then they expanded that uh later on, much later, after I'd sold it. So um some of that I'm I basically don't know enough about to be commenting on, to be quite honest.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:14

Yeah. Well, I mean, that and that that's okay. Uh it's uh I I think the point uh to be made is that a lot of people um in the general public associate the guild now with a kind of defunction. And I'm I'm just mirroring uh what I hear from people who are you know collecting knives and talk about you know getting into uh you know the politics, I guess, of knife shows and makers and things like that, right? It's not you know, the guild, the guild has its politics, but I'm talking about you know the customers and their perception of things, right? Um I there's a general distrust now in the industry of of the knife makers guild because of the politics that have happened within the last what 20, 20-ish years. Um, and so as a result of that, whenever somebody hears the guild, there's one of two things that happens. Either they understand the pomp and circumstance of the guild, or they eye roll because the politics are the things that have shin through. And that's really uh where the uh knife makers and general populace converge is that uh that's pretty much bifurcated amongst those two types of opinions. It's either you respect the guild because of what it's been, or you disrespect or uh dis uh uh uh don't acknowledge the relevance of the guild because um it's just a bunch of infighting and boys club type of mentality.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:40

Well, the the one thing going back the to me that the end the or the not the end, the decline began when they argued over the machine parts. Because at that time, the two hottest knife makers in the country were Bob Trizola and Ernie Emerson. They were selling everything they made, and people would drive halfway across the country to get a chance to buy a knife that they were selling. And if if you recall what we mentioned earlier that that when I was handling, was helping manage the knife maker skill, the first thing I did was I polled all the honorary members on what are you looking for when you come to a knife show? Why do you come to a knife show? And almost in the unanimous or almost unanimous one thing was they wanted to come to see these top makers and to hang out with them and talk to them and visit with them. And the knife makers guild itself, I don't think they ever grasped that. That that the guild show was famous because it was a fabulous celebration of handmade knives once a year. And when you went there, you saw everybody. What I'm saying is all the top makers. If you wanted a list of your top ten makers, they were all at the guild show. And they were all guild members, and they were all running the guild. And so, I mean, you're talking about officers that were this officers in the guild were Ron Lake, Frank Sanafani, D. Holder, Bernie Buster Worinsky, George Heron, Jimmy Lyle, Bob Loveless, William Moran. I mean, think about these guys and their stature now. If they were still alive and went to one show a year, it was the one you'd have to go to. And when they did the machined parts thing, first thing happened was Bob T said, I'll come back when, you know, when it's okay. I'm not here to fight with anybody. This is the way these are the two parts that I have machined, and if that's an issue with you, don't buy the knife. And he put it out there. He's totally honest with it. And they left. And so Ernie quit coming, Bob T quit coming, and your draw went away. The thing, the, you know, the the in the auction business, the the knives that I want up front is I want a knife in there that where somebody's gonna look at that knife, pick up their phone, and call their best knife buddy and say, Are you believing this knife that Bruce has in that auction? And they pick up the phone and they call to other people. And the best knife shows was when when, you know, look who all's gonna be there. I've got to go to that show. And if they are name makers, then yes, that's good. But if they're average makers that you've never heard of, even though they're all in a group, they've got you need the stars, I guess is what I'm saying. And the stars left the guild or faded away from the guild, and and part of the reason was that the guild membership at one time was was very expensive, and the tables at the show were very expensive, and it was very hard to make money at that show. But if it was the only game in town, you had to go because you had to be seen there. Now you've got other places that you can be seen as close as going to your computer and showing them a knife you've been working on for a week. You know, you've got some makers now that are showing you the knives they're gonna have available at the show and they're showing them in production. And the people that want to buy these knives are lining up for them. And so you know, the Gill Show, times have changed since the Gill Show was what it was. I would love to see the Gill Show back the way it was. Uh, you know, unfortunately, the the thing that made the Gill Shocial for me, uh, a lot of those guys, a lot of those legends have passed on. And it's sort of like that George Jones song about who's gonna fill their shoes. Uh I went into one of those uh tactical knife invitationals, and Bob Truzzola came up and he looks at me, and I looked at him and said, Is it just us, or we don't know anybody in here? So, you know, that market's kind of moved beyond us. That's me, because you know, I don't have a magazine where I have to keep up with it anymore. So I'm not not as in tune with that whole world and it's changing as I used to be. And so, but but we have a thing now, it's almost like some of these guys become what I call internet famous. They're flashing the pan, they're getting big money for their knives, and then six months later nobody's ever heard of them again. Because it wasn't what they thought it was. You know, the the the the best way I can say it is I write. Because I like to write. I collect knives because I like knives. The best knife makers are the one that, if they were not getting paid, would still go out there in the shop and make a knife. It's just I had a friend of mine that knew Jerry Reed. And Jerry, Jerry Reed, you know, he was contemporary of Chet Atkins. They played together. Chet Atkins gave him a certified guitar picker designation. He only gave that to like five people. And he said he sat there with Jerry Reed in his living room. And Jerry Reed was sitting there watching television, and he had a fender telecaster he's playing the whole time. That's a solid body guitar, so it doesn't make a lot of racket. But he was playing while he's watching television. And he is a master. I mean, he is good enough to kind of play with Chet Atkinson. And he's playing his guitar in his living room. Instead, if he walked into the kitchen to get a drink of water, he carried the guitar and he played it all the way in there. And to be a star knife maker, you have to have that kind of dedication. And you have to want to make it that bad. And it's almost like some of these guys, it's too easy now. You can watch videos, you can go to some guy's shop that's been on television and pay him a little bit, and all of a sudden you're walking out of there making knives. You know, I went to the ABS school at one time when I was when I old Blade, we gave the ABS a $500 a year scholarship to pay for somebody to go to the ABS knife making school that wouldn't normally get together to do it. So as part of that, they said, Well, since you've done that, you can come anytime you want to. So I said, okay, I'm coming. So I went down to Hope, Arkansas, 112 degrees, beaten on hot steel in a forge. And all I can say is the knife I made, proudly, would pass a journeyman smith test if I wanted to make knives for two more years before I could get my Journeyman Smith's name. Because it's pretty bad. So uh but it's it's it's something else I do because I like knives. And I I I think that you can I think if you if you put one motivation on me being in the knife business and all of these different things I've done, it's because I like knives. You know, write books, editing magazines, putting on shows, buying and selling, auctioning. I'm still knives is knives of central core there. Still like them.

SPEAKER_00 2:14:55

Uh yeah. Um I I was talking to a local uh knife maker here. I had them on the podcast, and um I I was we were talking about the fact that we get bored easy. And um I pretty much everything that I've ever done in my life, um, I've been able to figure out pretty quickly. Is it a scheme or is it a salvation, or what it, you know, what is it? Discernment is like kind of my thing. Um and uh I it doesn't take me a long time to figure out kind of what's what. And knives has been that one thing uh that I've just always found that it touches something else or can touch something else in a way that always renews my passion for it. I could you know not actually make a knife like I, you know, I work in IT. Um I don't always have the most time in the shop, uh, but I have the podcast that I do. If I'm sitting on a computer, I can also be working on something on the podcast. If um, you know, I'm doing something where I don't have access to technology, I can be scratching something with Scrimshaw or researching something. I can be reading a book on knives or whatever. There's there's so much to it that to me, it just constantly drives this passion for wanting to uh create or dream about creating or what it does when we get people together that love to create. And um it it to me it's it's unending, like it's a non-exhaustible flame. Uh, and there's there's really very little uh that uh gets in the way of knives. I I've I've uh like my wife told me recently that I just talked so much about it. Um and uh you know you know the common culture with knives uh and how the the guild is relevant and things like that, uh well, and how shows are, is that um social media is very quickly deplatforming anything that is uh is weapon or gun adjacent, right? And knives are one of those things. It doesn't matter whether it's cutlery or not, really. Um even payment processors won't work with you if you have a um uh a website that you're running transactions through and they find out that it has anything to do with knives. Um my question is is uh what's gonna happen when that dries up? All these people that have been selling on Facebook for forever or Instagram or wherever, right? Um, you know, it used to be Blade Blade Forms was the place to go on the internet because it was uh uh not associated with the politics of anything other than knives. Um, but you know, everybody who's like base based their business off of social media and invested their time in building like a customer uh uh and collector market on social media is going to find very quickly that that's not gonna work anymore. And then where are they going to resolve that um that need for business and attention? They they either have shows and publications and uh organizations that help promote them, or they're really not gonna ever be seen. And that's really going to separate the wheat from the chaff in the industry.

SPEAKER_01 2:17:59

Well, you've got to keep in mind that the knife show and the knife market was very strong and very good before there was such a thing as the internet. And what what would in the scenario that you talk about if everybody quits using Facebook? Well put it like this. Facebook's easy. You buy a bunch of knives, you pick a time you're gonna do your little live feed, and they call you and they send you messages, and you you sell these knives. And you know, the thing I've noticed primarily which drives me crazy, is they call these auctions, but now they can't call them auctions because the the state auction boards that are, you know, these licensing groups are coming after them. So they say they have to say be a time sale. So they'll put a little timer in the back. Half the time you don't even see the timer turned on. And then they still auction them. And then at the end of the auction, the guy says, uh, oh yeah, I said, well, no, I'm my top bid on this is 250. And I can't sell it for that, Bob. But Bob, if you'll go another $50, I'll sell it to. And I won't let anybody else have it because you because you ended up being the high bidder. That's not how an auction works. And these guys, some of these guys are still doing business with people that do that and tolerate it. Okay. That's free market, you can do what you want to. But if all of that collapses, then it has to go back to the people that are willing to do the work. Now, what that means is when I started in knife collecting, the early days, early 70s, um what a guy would do would have a direct mail mailing list, and he would draw, he would trace the outline of the knife because nobody had any books or anything else. So you trace the outline of the knife and put about four of those on a page, you turn the page over, and you mailed like an eight-page list, maybe had eight times, maybe 30, 40 knives on it. Then when Jim Parker started, the the primary thing was Jim Parker and W. E. Shockley, among others, but those were the two big guys when knife collecting started that if you wanted to buy knives once a month, you could get this list in the mail from them. And they had been buying for a month, and all they did was write after the description. You didn't have pictures. You didn't have color pictures, you didn't have front and backside pictures. You relied totally on that man's ability to write the description. Jim Parker W. Shocky. That's why you paid attention to those grading standards that the NKCA set up and is in these books. Because you knew the difference. If they said this is an excellent knife versus a very good knife versus a near-mint knife, you understood. And you also thereby force had to learn the case numbering system because they all they would do, they didn't write a case trap, they put 6254 ten dot $20, and boom, there it was. That's all they had to do. You would see these generally try to do it to keep it in one envelope so you get four pages front and back to fit in a number 10 business envelope. Or they do three pages legal sized. Uh but those two guys were the leaders. I did a list, Paul Davis did a list, there there weren't uh Jorgen Nielsenmeyer out of Cleveland, Ohio did a list. You can count on your hands the people that did these knife lists, and we were doing them direct mail by mail order. Uh Facebook goes down and the banks quit doing it, and they ban knives, which is an idiotic thing, in my opinion, to start with. If they do that, then what we'll be doing is we'll be emailing each other and building an email list. And what once a month, we'll just like I do catalogs now. I put them on a website and we handle the transaction personally. Uh that could just as easily go on a an email with color pictures inset into that. They're not going to blow up full screen, but they're going to be there. So it it's it's it'll just change. Uh before people started putting them on the internet, they were buying and selling knives very well. So I don't think I think a lot of people put too much faith in Facebook and social media because this is somewhat of a new thing. I've got one rule, the voyal's rule of the knife business, is that people go out of the knife business at the same speed they came into the knife business. So some guy that you never heard of last week, and all of a sudden he's everywhere you look, and he's in all the magazines and all that, and he's done this in two months, and he's on everybody's uh Facebook page and all that, he'll be gone the same length of time. You look up one day and he'll be gone. The same way with all these Facebook dealers who got boom, boom, boom. You know, they've they've they've created this market, and it was very good when there were only two guys in it. Now, on any given night, you can go on Facebook and get through these groups and you can find somebody doing some kind of sale online, and they're all competing against each other now, and now it's when it gets nasty. But, you know, you we let me go back to something you mentioned earlier when we were talking about the knife makers guild and some of the things that may have happened to it that that made it uh lose its prominence. And this is one of the rules that that I live by is that you're okay doing business. The problems start when you start worrying about what the other guy's doing in his business, especially in knives. If you make the best knife you can, if you're personable to your customers, if you run your business like a business, what the fella two tables down from you is doing doesn't matter. And you shouldn't be worrying about it or thinking about it. You should be selling your products. But invariably, in those days especially, the knife makers weren't worrying about the knives they made. They were worrying about the guy down the road, down the aisle using a machine part or something. And at that time, when this controversy was up, was going on, uh, the knife makers guild paid me and a film crew to go to interview Bob Loveless in California about what was the original designation of the guild when it started. So they could play it at the guild show that year. So I went out there with a film crew, went to visit Loveless, uh, and Loveless, when he when he had been visiting me, he kept talking about this guy came in and drank my liquor and did this and drank my whiskey and did this. So before I left, I called somebody, called some mutual friends, what kind of what kind of liquor does he like? Oh, he likes Jack Daniels. So before we went there, Dan Delavan went with me. But Delavan went to the probably the first time Dan ever been in a liquor store in his life, went into a liquor store and bought me a handle of Gentleman Jack. And so when we went to the gate, Bob led us in. I had it behind my back, and I said, you know, I wanted to bring you a gift. Uh I hope you appreciate the gift and the spirit in which it is given. And I handed him that handful of gentleman jack. He's took it in and set it up. But so then we started talking about it. And what he said is very profound, particularly on all of these things. He said, I wish that I had a machine where I could throw in some steel, throw in some handle material, throw in some pens, punch a button, and it come out fully boxed and redressed to send to somebody. He said, but it doesn't work like that. He said, Here's my advice to knife makers make your knife in any way you want to. The marketplace will sort you out soon enough. And that's the message we took back to the knife makers.

SPEAKER_02 2:26:54

And they played it on a loop that entire show.

SPEAKER_01 2:26:59

And Frank Sentifani, as we were going in, and they were the controversies were going every which way, he looks at me and says, This organization has no loyalty anymore.

SPEAKER_02 2:27:13

And that's when I knew the decline had started. Yeah, what what year about was that? Good question. Prior to 2000 as I recall.

SPEAKER_01 2:27:32

Because I hadn't I don't think I'd started auctioning yet. And I wasn't working in a magazine. There's a five-year period there. Yeah. So prior to 2000, 90s, some point. I could be off on that.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:45

And I I I think that's something that people have to understand too, is that we we're really talking about um artists who their their ego to some extent is intrinsic to their their product, right? Um and it's difficult to to differentiate that. Um an example is I I I've you know, I've I've heard that a lot of the guild politics had to do with um, you know, members in the guild wanted uh a knife maker, if they were in the guild, to have skin in the game. And any anything that uh disrupted the full-time knife makers' ability to um make their living and everything, whether it was decisions on what they accepted as um, you know, uh viable products or where the machining came from or things like that, anything that affected the marketability of their knives because of the guild reputation that they were um uh averse to it. And some of the politics um uh like it seems like there's not just one um element of failure that happened because like uh that brought you know the guild's reputation or the dissemination of makers out like outside of the guild and doing their own thing, but it's a lot of that that ego uh that affected uh the guild as a as a result, like the entity of the guild. It was a uh summation of a lot of um ego-driven decisions.

SPEAKER_01 2:29:09

Well, I I think the best way you can say that is the times changed and people changed, and the guild didn't change with it.

SPEAKER_00 2:29:15

Yeah, I think that's that's very fair.

SPEAKER_01 2:29:18

Which means that could all be regained. You know, the the the the the the guild's not uh you know, the guild is has it's not as prominent as it was because there's other uh entities out there, and they're and the entity the guild is not required membership as it once was, but there's still plenty it can do. You know, going back to what Ron Lake said, be an organization, you've got to do great things. You have to do great things. That means you do things that are good for everybody, and they get noticed. And uh as Lovis said, you can't keep your light under a bushel. You have to let people know what you're doing. Can't keep it a secret.

SPEAKER_00 2:30:07

Yeah, I think all those are very fair. Um, I wanted to touch uh uh uh a little bit on your involvement in this thing that we now know as blade sports, because um, you know, part of part of what I think we need to do is make some inroads with what the modern um knife collector enthusiast sees, like the blade sports and forged and fire culture, and what you originally did in pioneering these things and documenting it all um inside of the you know books and magazines and things like all the the analog ephemera, if that makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about like kind of how all that started with um with with relation to blade sports?

SPEAKER_01 2:30:48

Well, I don't know anything about blade sports. I can tell you how cutting competitions started. Uh and first of all, the cutting competition started with uh things like the Journeyman Smith Test and doing it publicly, and then probably Jerry Fisk is the father of the whole thing. Because uh the first time I saw it was we went to a uh hammer in, uh Bats and Hammer Inn in uh near Bessemer, Alabama. There was a forge there that was a cannon forge during the Civil War, and they made a state park out of it. And so once a year they have a big blacksmith uh hand-forged council meeting there. It's primarily a blacksmith council more than knife making, but it became into a knife-making thing with all sorts of demonstrations and different speakers, and I've spoken there before. And Jim Batson was the primary organizer of it. He's former president of the ABS and a rocket scientist from the Huntsville and the Redstone Arsenal. Uh he was instrumental in the 2.75 rockets that they used on helicopters in Vietnam. That's pretty well his project. Uh brilliant man, the doctor, doctor. And he's also one hell of a promoter, and he's written books on knives too, especially on Jim Bowie. And he put this thing together, and Jerry Fisk was down there, and he got all these ABS members, and they had these certain competitions. They were the how f how deep you could cut through a phone book, uh, how quick you could could you cut a ping pong ball in hyphen there, you know, five or six of these various tasks that everybody did, and then they declared a winner at the end of it. And that bulb kind of went off in my head, and then I went to uh then we invited the Fisk and the ABS to do the same thing at the uh do the same thing at the uh um uh Spirit of Steel show. Now, prior to that, we had gone when they opened the ABS Knife School in Hope, Arkansas, we had gone down there and watched in the school itself where Bill Moran and Jimmy Crow, they did little seminars, and then we walked out and watched build a fire and watched Moran forge a knife. And so we asked Bill, who's who was, you know, my adopted daddy. He adopted me one day for a day. Tell you about that later if you want to hear it. But uh Bill would come, they'd set up a forge, and he would go out, he would do demonstrations, and he would talk about it. He's a great teacher. And it was uh became a major turning point in the Blade Show when we started having these forging demonstrations. So uh we but and but you know, when we invited him, it was Bill Moran who came in and did this. This wasn't just anybody forging, this was Bill My God Moran. And uh so he would do the forging demonstration. So I was always looking to make it different. One of the major goals in the blade show when we started is I didn't want it to be just a knife show. I wanted it to be an event. And that's what I beat over everybody's heads in the office when we would talk about it. We want to make it an event. Uh we went so far as when we first or second blade show we ever did, we had a room near the blade show where we showed on a constant loop the Iron Mistress starring Alan Ladd. We got permission from Turner to do it. And among the people, Gil Hibman, it was his favorite movie, he took time for the show to go in there and watch it again. Uh so we were always trying to do more. So we did a cutting competition when we moved the show to Texas, Spirit of Steel show, we asked them to come down and set up and do a cutting demonstration. They did a forging demonstration, then they also did a cutting competition. And from that, I thought, in my mind, I said, well, we could make this bigger. Because I saw the crowd reaction. The crowd reaction is what really lit me up because everybody was interested in watching this. And so we went to uh sat down with a couple of people. There was a guy that was a real good ad salesman for uh that had left Blade. He was he was he was loose and free looking for work, and I was looking for something extra to add to a show. So I went, so we decided we would start the international cutting international uh cutting competition trail, ICCT. And we wrote the name out in a rope, is how it was written out. And we decided we'd set up these cutting competitions. I didn't want to step on anybody's toes. So I went to Jerry Fisk and B.R. Hughes, and I said, Look, I want this is what I think I want to do. I want you to run it. I said, what we want to do is we're gonna set up night the custom makers are going to have competitions, but then we're gonna set this up for knives that they design. And we will go to manufacturers and have these manufacturers make these knives based on their designs. And then we'll even have an amateur division, we'll call it the red, white, and blue divisions. And what we will be doing is be looking like these lumberjack competitions. And we're gonna make celebrities out of these top cutters. And because of that, you're gonna have people wanting a knife like that cutter. They're gonna be selling like crazy. Factory's gonna be making more knives, they're gonna be paying royalties to the knife makers. The knife makers are gonna be entering these competitions, they're gonna be getting awards for that. And then you've got all these new people that are gonna want to start, and they're wanting to be buying some kind of lower-end uh beginner knife for these cutting competitions. And I can see this as a kiosk in somewhere like Bass Pro Shop, where getting your cutting competitions here, we do a little TV on top of the kiosk where they can look and see show actual people cutting them. Well, so I went to, and so Jerry didn't want to do it. So I went to the ABS and asked them uh to support us doing it in going for a more commercial aspect to the cutting competitions. And short version to say it is the ABS declined. And so we went ahead and did it on our own. We formed the ICCT. Uh, we had some major cutters that uh Reggie Barker, Jimmy Crowell, John Fitch, pop makers, and uh they started working, Daniel Winkler was in on it, started working with him, working his competition, and what they discovered was there were certain aspects of how to sharpen a knife and how you how the handle was. Uh Reggie Barker was good at it because he was a golfer and he said it doesn't matter how good a knife cuts if you can't hold on to it. Uh Warren Osborne came up with a way to put the string around your thumb so it would be safer. And we started doing the cutting competitions. We did them at uh Smoky Mountain Knife Works for their annual thing. We did them at uh Shepherd Hills for their annual knife gathering. We did them at uh the case, the case celebration in Bradford, Pennsylvania. We did them in, of course, our shows, and we did them at uh the Bass Pro Shop on National Hunting and Fishing today. That was shown on the Outdoor Network. And at that time, we had John Fitch, who was talking to Case about them producing one of his designs. He even toured the Case Factory while we were in Bradford. We had Sog talking to Reggie Barker. We had uh Jerry Crowell talking to uh Browning. Fisk had already made basically a cutting knife with Camillus that outside what we were doing. And so then I went to the knife makers guild because I was helping manage that at the time and brought them in on it. And all of a sudden we had uh stock removal cutting. And one of one of the ABS guys that were all for it, they said, and we were in a customized show in Arkansas, Bill Moran was there. And they said, somebody hawked across the room as we were talking about this cutting competition. Bill, there's no way a stock removal knife could beat a handforged knife in a cutting competition, answer. And Bill just looked down and said, Yeah, of course. Of course there is. Depends on how they cut it and the edge geometry and their ability. Yeah, yeah, it could happen. Well, come to find out that some of the stock removal knives beat the handforged knives. Well, the handforged guys thought this was an abomination. Not the ones that were working in the cutting competition, but the other guys. So they were resisting this like crazy because they liked the fact their little ABS thing that was going on, that well, that's ours. Why is he trying to make it bigger? So this is going great guns. And we had some fabulous pictures of people cutting these water bottles and going halfway through and just water sprouting everywhere. It makes a fantastic picture. And we and Warren Osmer came up this thing. You walk here, you do one, you got a table here, you walk here, you cut this, you do this here, you cut a ping-pong ball here, you cut a one-inch hanging rope there, then you cut water bottles at the end because that's real showy. And it was going great guns, but when I'd set this up, I'd set this up as a corporation. And I said, What we're going to do is I'm going to uh control the stock until we get this thing set up and established. And then everybody can buy in. And so everybody'd have a piece of it that was, you know, actively participating. So we got ready to do it, and I mailed the letter out, you know, it's time to ante up a little money. I think it was $400, $600, something. It wasn't much. It was under $1,000. I said, here, you know, here for your shares. And I get a call and a letter saying uh from somebody unnamed, uh, because he's passed away now, that uh we don't want to participate with your stock, with your operation. We are going to do our own group. And one of our members' wife's works for a lawyer and the papers are already drawn up and said, if you will uh turn this over to us, we will always acknowledge that you created it and give you the credit for it. And we will pay you back for any money you spent. Well, I'd run this as a corporation. I have a complete set of uh expenses, not counting my cost of driving and things like that, but just as material and equipment we had bought to put these things on. And I told him, I said, we've got $6,000 uh expenses that I can document. And the guy that said this to me said, Well, we don't have that kind of money. And so here I was with all of these things set up and all of these venues and all of this time spent, and I could uh had no cutters. Some of them had already quit. You know, someone said, you know, Dan Winkler quit before that, said this is just more than I'm trying to make knives, I don't need to mess with this. Uh but some of the other guys just walked out and went over to other groups, and I was just left alone holding it. And so at one point I eventually sold the name to them for $10. Sold my cutting table that I had produced for two or three thousand dollars to somebody for $400 that was interested in. And that's history, baby. Some, you know, uh as Mark Twain said, the story of a campaign that failed.

SPEAKER_00 2:43:29

And and and still no attribution either.

SPEAKER_01 2:43:33

Uh well, I I don't know. I I don't go out there and hear if they say this is a thing created by Bruce Walls. Yeah. But uh, but it was.

SPEAKER_00 2:43:45

Yeah, uh, but not not not the first time uh that your ideas have been shit on, right? Um, you know, I'm reminded of what we were talking about uh guild uh related uh brand ambassadors by by state and everything. I thought that that was something interesting we were talking about where you you had this construct set up. Um do you want to talk about that a little bit? Because I'm actually I think it's a good idea. Uh I thought it you know it had a lot of validity, but it's something that died on the vine, as it were.

SPEAKER_01 2:44:12

Well, the the when when I was working with the guild, the first thing I did was interviewed all of the honorary members on what the reason they went to the show. They went to a show to hang out with the makers. Uh they saw the makers as celebrities. And then we wanted, and I wanted to stir up more grassroots efforts. So I thought by giving somebody a position and a title that it would spur things a little bit, particularly so as an active knife maker who are, or an active knife collector who wants to get involved and help on these things. So we I what I told them I wanted to do is I wanted to set up a state ambassador for each state. And I wanted the guy to be a collector and let him go around and say, like, organize four or five makers to sit together at a knife show and put a gild banner up, or uh just wear the state ambassador badge when they went to the gun shows and things, just as they went around and get the flag waved out there in a lot more places. And so I went to found prominent collectors in every, in most, in a lot of states, 30 or so. And at that point, the guild board said, no, we don't we don't want you to do that. We want us to be handling this. We think we need to be handling this. So, and I'm still doing the promotion and advertising for the guild show. So I called back a few months later and I asked the guy that's in charge of it, how are you doing with it?

SPEAKER_02 2:45:51

He said, Well, you know, I can't find any knife makers in Rhode Island. And I just screamed.

SPEAKER_01 2:46:01

I said, Knife makers? Merciful God under heaven. We don't need knife makers running this. We need collectors running this. This is totally for collector involvement. It's not for knife maker involvement. And at that point, that was the last I heard. I don't know if they still do it or not. I've got some friends around I've seen them, I've seen still see their state badges here and there when they come to a show.

SPEAKER_00 2:46:24

Yeah, I don't uh uh it's not something that I think the uh the guild actively participates in.

SPEAKER_01 2:46:30

Uh but i it's like my friend Bill Adams says. Bill Adams used to own Atlanta Cutler, very creative man, one of the smartest people I know. And he said, Do you know how you tell he's he said if you want to get if you want to lead the charge, you have to get in front and blow the bugle. And the other thing he said is, Do you know how you tell the pioneers that they're the ones with the arrows in their backs?

SPEAKER_02 2:47:09

Yeah, full full stop.

SPEAKER_00 2:47:10

I mean, I I think it's that's uh a lot of food for thought. Um uh, you know, is you you strike me as a person who just has a a wellspring of of good ideas and things that are really coming from a genuine love of the craft and and the the people who make it up. I I sometimes think that the the power is put in the wrong hands as far as knives go. Like a knife maker that is supposed to have their nose in their work and you know getting to business and producing a thing really shouldn't necessarily be the ones dictating business decisions, especially when they're not really great at business. And even further compounded to that, it's like we we it it seems like collectively in the industry, um, most knife makers have some type of ego or imposter syndrome. It seems to be one of the two. Where uh you know, it I mean it it's it's just the way that it is. I mean, you either have somebody who says like finds a what a reason for you not to buy their knives, or you have somebody who is like telling you all the reasons, like uh you know, ice to an Eskimo as uh you know as to why you should buy it. And well, well, no, I I mean just kind of full stop. I mean the the reality is I just don't think um maybe in the knife industry that we should be as makers the only ones that dictate kind of how things go. You have to listen to the customer base and you have to listen to people who are also passionate, but from a vantage point where they're not the ones making the knives, but they're invested in the knives because, well, they can't make them or they don't have the time to make them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:48:53

Well, if you want to make a knife, it's pretty easy now. You've you've got a dozen places to get taught. Uh but uh the ego isn't is an important part of it because the time that you spend to make that knife, you're never gonna regain. So the knife is a part of your of your being. You have uh this is like a child. You have created this thing. And so when you put it out there on the table, you won't everybody ooh and ah over it because it's your creation. This is your your your thing, this is your product, this is your time of your life created to make this thing, and it's laying out there on the table for everybody to come up and judge. So, yeah, there's a lot of ego involved. And and and anything, a good salesman is gonna sell more than somebody sits there with a scowl on their face and their arms crossed. That's just human nature. So uh, but there are some people, I think the way the way I heard it described is uh I call them knife worshipers. They said, okay, this is my knife, I created it, and it's a beautiful knife, and nobody makes a knife this good, and therefore you should worship this knife, and as the creator of this artwork, you should therefore worship me. And uh so, yeah, there's a lot of ego involved, and some of it's just a pure artist mentality, and uh some of it, unfortunately, is they've read too many of their but too much of their own publicity and they start believing it. Uh there was a church when I was one of the churches I went to in Chattanooga, the pastor decided that he would always tell a joke when he started his sermon. And everybody would laugh, and they'd all tell him after the sermon that that was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. So he decided that he was going to leave the church and go to Los Angeles and start talk speaking in comedy clubs and become a comedian, sort of like Grady Nutt was doing on Hee-Haw at the time. He was going to become a Christian comedian in Los Angeles of all places. So he loads up and goes. And one of the deacons comes up to me and said, I can't believe he did that. He said, We we told him that we would always tell him that his jokes were funny, but we were just being nice. And some of these knife makers are like that too. Somebody hands you a knife and say, What do you think about this knife? Oh, it's nice. And oh, he said, My knife was nice. And and I know one time we're in Texas at a a show in uh Austin, Texas, and a guy came up and he says, uh, tell me about this knife. Tell me about my knife. He was proud of it. Just leave it. And some and some of the other guys, he brought a couple of guys with him, and a couple more stood up, and he said, uh, what can you tell me? You know, what do you think about my knife? I want you to critique my knife. And I looked at him, did about a 10 count, and I said, Are you sure you want me to do this? He said, Yeah. I said, Well, I'm gonna be honest with you if you want to hear it. He said, Yeah, go ahead. So I basically started off with this thing is little better than a trot line weight. The steel's too hard, the handle's too rough. Why didn't you round this handle off a little bit better? Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you taper this tank so it's gonna have a little bit better balance? I said, This thing's plunky, it's ugly, you've got a mirror finish, why didn't you put a hand-rubbed finish on it? I said, go over there, and I I forgot who was over in the other table. You pick up that knife, because I picked it up and it's one of those, and it was well balanced. Like a chill went up your arm, it was so well balanced. Or as Eward Oakshoot at the Tower of London said, it woos you to strike. It was that well balanced. I said, go over there and pick up that knife, and then you'll understand about balance. I can't tell you as much as I can that you hold it. Which, by the way, is one of the things that people buying and selling knives online are never going to understand what a well-balanced knife feels like as a criteria of their purchase, because they're not going to a knife show picking it up and feeling it and can tell the difference. And that's one of the ways you tell a genuine antique buoy, is the ones that they made when people's lives depended upon them balanced very well. Swords the same way. So, uh, but anyway, as I'm doing his critique, everybody's kind of looking and they left and wow, and somebody said, Well, you're pretty hard on him. I said, Well, it's the truth. I mean, he asked me for the truth. I told him the truth. So, meanwhile, somebody else goes by. And he said, Yeah. So, what did you think about that? He said, Well, I agree with yes, he was right on everything I said, but he said, you know, that hand rub finish, I'm glad to hear that because it'll save me a lot of time from uh putting these knives to a mirror polish. I looked at him and says, Wait a minute, you don't understand. He said, What do you mean? He says, the only way you do a decent hand rub finish is you have to bring it to a mirror polish first. And he looks and says, Oh my God. Well, that guy, the last I heard is not making knives. But, you know, but the whole thing, the whole thing that when you get to that is if if there's two or three things that you really want to sum this up with as far as knife makers. If you worry more about making your knives than you do what somebody else is doing, you're going to make a lot better knife. And as Lovelace said, make your knife any way you want to. The marketplace will sort you out soon enough.

SPEAKER_00 2:55:02

Yeah, well, well said. Um what I um I I don't think I've seen it anywhere, uh, but in your uh uh Bruce on the Loose uh from uh knife magazine, it would be great to s to see um an article where you go over Bruce's rules for the like the knife industry and just list them out. And I mean, I would I would love to see that. Like, I mean, you you have an entire lifetime, um multiple lifetimes of like pure people in the in the industry uh to be able to culminate into those same quips that you referred to from um you know your knife heroes and and friends and things like that. I would love to see that in print.

SPEAKER_01 2:55:41

Well, actually, I did that. And I'm not sure it goes back several years, but uh it was basically along the lines of how to fail at being a knife maker, where I mentioned all of these things that I thought the knife makers were doing wrong. Which is, you know, kind of elaborating on what we've been talking about. I just, you know, I just summed it up in a different way. Is if this is how you fail at being a knife maker, you do this and you do that and you do that and you do that, and you're not going to last very long.

SPEAKER_00 2:56:13

Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, may maybe a little bit more cynical. Uh I'll have to look in, we'll talk offline and see if I can find it, because I'd love to be able to read that.

SPEAKER_01 2:56:22

Okay. Well, Mark, Mark's got all of my old uh Mark on his website. If you join his website at Knife Magazine, you have all of his uh, I think he has all of those archived. So it shouldn't be a you know, I'm you know, I'm I might plug Mark just a minute. The the Knife Magazine website is trying to be the end-all website for knife collectors. They're trying to set up an archive for knife names and these crazy guys that use their initials instead of their full name on their knives. Uh he's archiving everything that's in print in his old books. And uh it's it's well worth the trouble.

SPEAKER_00 2:57:08

Yeah, uh at some point in time I'd like to be able to talk to Mark. We've had some um conversations about it, but um, I actually became aware of some of the archival work through Lynn Ray, who was talking about the Buoy knife project and everything that they'd been working on for you know, identifying dupes and other things to uh establish establish provenance for you know original buoys and and those that have been created in you know that that time span. So um to me, that is um a benefit for all time to the knife industry. And I would not um I would not hesitate to, you know, if I was in the position to nominate Mark in that effort, like that that cadre of people into the Hall of Fame as well, because you know, something like that happens and there's no going back. Like that that is pretty much definitive uh to be able to reference an Arvis.

SPEAKER_01 2:58:00

Well, I I think he has, I I'm reasonably certain he has been nominated. Ken Warner once told me, he said, Well, if you stay around this business long enough, you'll eventually garner all the orders.

SPEAKER_00 2:58:14

Yeah. Well, it doesn't surprise me. Uh he should he should be inducted, is like I guess probably the better uh phrase then.

SPEAKER_01 2:58:21

Well, Ken, we you know, we we put him in the Hall of Fame while he's still alive. And he to me was a mentor and uh a dear friend, and it it really hurt when he when he passed. But uh but you know, he was the one that did the knives, started the knives 81 series. He was a former editor of American Rifleman magazine. He's the one that created American Hunter magazine. And uh he also did gun digest for something years. Uh we were sitting at a after I had sold Blade magazine, we were sitting at a banquet table with uh he and the people that had just bought my magazine. And they were talking uh Ken and he were talking and and uh he was he had been talking to the owner of DBI Books, which owned the knives 81 and the Gundai series. And he asked Ken, he said, Why did Bruce sell Blaze? And Ken told him, he said, Well, it's every young publisher's dream to build a company and create it and then sell it. And the DBI owner looked at Ken and said, It's every old publisher's dream too. And Ken repeated this at the banquet table to Roger Case, who had just bought Blade magazine. Within six months they bought DBI books too. And that's why that's why you have all these NIS 2024 books, is they bought it based on that from that conversation.

SPEAKER_00 3:00:10

That's uh that's an incredible serendipity.

SPEAKER_01 3:00:13

But well, like I say, it it's a small business. Everybody knows everybody for the most part. If you don't believe it, do something scandalous, and everybody in the whole world's gonna know it.

SPEAKER_00 3:00:24

That's uh that's what I'm trying to do. I don't know, scandalous is not the word. Um I I I I I uh really respect transparency. Um, I do it in all my business practices. Um, I've worked with lots of uh nefarious folk um in a lot of different industry. Um and I always uh appreciate transparency, uh, probably because it allows consumers, it allows you know people uh that you elbow with uh to really see you for who you are. And I think that's an important feedback loop um in the human condition is like yeah, you you sometimes you need to be told that your knives suck, sometimes you need to be told that you're being an asshole. Um, sometimes uh you need to uh correct your ways. And how how are you going to do that if people are honest with you? And so transparency to me is a is a a way that I can be above board about everything um and and allow that natural process to happen uh without be having to be told too many times that I'm doing something I shouldn't be. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 3:01:27

Well, but you know, and and something I've uh we've not touched on yet uh is the the market out there, you know, you were we were talking earlier, I think before we started that the age group of your people that that's your audience versus say my audience and the people that I've grown up with. Um is it's important, particularly in the collector end of it, and the knife buyer end of it, to be aware of generational changes. Uh a few years ago there was a a quote I saw that the time was doing to the World War II vets what the Japanese and Germans could not do, which was killing them, taking them away, to the tune of about 20,000 a month. My dad was a World War II vet, he passed about that same time, so it kind of had an impact on it. During World War II, they would take these leather washer handle K-bars and other knives into these jungle environments, and leather handles were and they needed to have handles for them, so they would take micarta off of the train off the planes. The micarta was used wherever uh a wire or a cable was used to control the airplane. The wings and and all I mean the flaps and all that were pulled by cables. If they went to a place where they would rub, they would put micarta underneath that as the lubricant. So they had plenty of micarta and they had plexiglass from the airplanes, and a lot of that was getting shot through and you know broken and messed up. And so they and little pieces of aluminum from the airplanes as well. So they would take these and stack these up on the handles instead of those leather washers because these were all impervious to the jungle conditions. They commonly call those theater knives. I call them. I call them he wrote knives, personally. These are a distinct American knife and innovation, and they are distinctly related to a point in American history. And when these all World War II vets started passing away, I mentioned to a lot of people, I said, you need to be you're you need to be looking for theater knives now because they're going to be coming out of the woodwork. And they did because the families were selling them because that's just a knife dedicated, and they didn't recognize it was what it was. It was almost like an American art form, and it was a totally an American innovation built by necessity. And the the the ones you really look for are the ones that have the thin flexiglass in them because that flexiglass came from Japanese airplanes, and they're out there. So the reason I mention this is we're having another generational change now because the people that started collecting knives, especially Vintage knives in the 70s, are now in the 1970s, early 70s when knife collector got started and built massive collections, are now in their 70s and 80s. And I'm getting about three calls a week from collectors, some who I've sold to for 30 and 40 years. And they're saying, I'm over 70 now, and I and my kids don't want these knives, and I need to do something with these knives. And thank God, being an auction company, we can we can we we are a service for this, hope you know, and then but there's a lot of those kind of knives emerging into the market that have been in collections for 20 and 30 years. And if you ever wanted to start collecting vintage American knives, you are approaching a window here, which there's gonna be plenty of them available. They're not gonna be cheap because nothing good, nothing really nice is ever cheap. But I think there's gonna be enough of them out there that it's going to be a very good time to be investing in high-end vintage American knives. And and just to be blatant about it, if you would like to see some of those, it's jbrucevols.com. Just no no periods, no dots. J. BruceVoles.com. And it's free to miss.

SPEAKER_00 3:06:02

Yeah. Um actually I I go to your website to look at uh kind of like the dives that are trending on that um auction block um, anyhow. Um, but you know, I'm reminded, so um I at the time that uh I was kind of looking at trying to get into um making uh customized but more in a business sense, my stepson and I uh were uh uh talking to uh John Weaver uh in Glenrose, Texas, who's uh uh two E's, uh, that um I worked with his son. And so I didn't really get a lot of like uh one-on-one time with them to learn because he was going through pancreatic cancer, survived it, and then had two other forms of cancer that came in uh and was going through chemo. So he's like, you know, I can't do this anymore. I'm I'm touching 80. And uh, if you want to buy the knife shop, you can do that, get all the equipment, all my you know, patterns and everything. And he was best friends with Martin Pullen and Clay Galt. Oh, um, and yeah, and so oh yeah, and uh, you know, I never I never got the opportunity to meet them, but I actually live every day resurrecting uh especially uh Clay Galt's patterns, uh, because I found a usefulness in like the EVC crowd from knives that were previously just um you know renditions of scalpels and things for caping sets, you know, sold in the Safari Club and whatnot. Um but the the reality is is that I I got in touch uh through uh John and everything, a few knife makers or uh uh collectors that were collecting Clay Gaul, uh Martin Poland and uh John Weaver knives specifically. But what they were talking to me about was not their interest in buying my knives because I was doing something modern, um, you know, my modern take and everything on something that was familiar with them pedagogy-wise, right? Um, but what they were saying, well, my kids don't need these knives anymore, and I'm like fixing to sell them. Do you know anybody who'd buy you know Clay Gall or Mart Martin Hullen knives? And so I I knew, you know, five years ago especially that this time is arising where you know nobody's gonna know what these guys' collections are worth. Uh they're starting to thin them out or sell them entirely because of that, and they, you know, it just helps them stretch a few more years um in assisted living or they are their own uh own lifestyles, right? And so uh we're getting to a point place where people don't know what they have, um, they they don't have don't have any association with it. And I mirror what what you're saying. I I think that we're going to have a a boom here uh pretty soon where uh we're gonna start seeing a lot of interesting knives come out of the woodwork.

SPEAKER_01 3:08:41

Yep. Well, you mentioned Marty Pullen. He came up, uh we we still had a non-compete, and we were talking about doing a show in Texas in Mesquite at M Mesquite Rodeo Arena, and he came up and and he said, I hear you're thinking about doing a knife show in Texas. I said, uh as soon as my non-compete's up. And and I I don't remember what show it was, I think it may have even been the Blade Show, and he had gotten crossways with some of the people producing the show. And they'd said something, he got his Texas up, as it said, and uh he had to be a business card said, Well, whenever you decide to do a show, I want the first table there. And he got the first table we ever did at the Spirit of Steel show. And Clay Galt came in and he was uh having health issues, and he said, I can't stay long and I can't really sit in those hard chairs. And so we arranged with the hotel to get him an easy chair from the lobby and put that behind his table. And he sat there as long as he could before he left. That's the last show he ever did.

SPEAKER_00 3:09:50

You know. Um, yeah, everything I've heard is they're great guys. In fact, um when I had bought your John Shop and everything, um uh Martin um had, I believe, either gifted or his wife had given uh John uh some of his unfinished works. Um it included a few liner locks um in mono steel and um a broken long coffin handle buoy and a uh a smaller Sheffield era uh style, right? And one one like um uh uh what they call a quakin' now, like a Japanese style uh hand knife, like a Tonto, right? But American uh Tonto style, I guess. And uh John gave those to me. He said, I don't have any use for them now, like you you know, use them for patterns or whatever. And it was actually very, very recently that I was like, you know, I I really love the uh Joseph Allen and son and uh Joseph Rogers uh Sheffield Air buoys, those little you know, working type of uh you know, kind of quasi-cutlery buoys, yeah, uh with uh staggered jig bone handles. And but you know, I don't have you know $800 to $1,400 to spend on a knife like that just to carry it around every day and feel cool, kind of like I, you know, I would want to have those things when I was a kid too. It was that or like a Rambo style buoy, right? Yeah, and um so I took I took the um one of that that Sheffield uh style buoy out of this box that had Martin on it, uh, or I think I said pulling, right? And I looked at it, I uh tested it, and it was 61 Rockwell hardness, so it had already been heat treated. Uh, you can even see some of the original scratch marks where Martin was trying to hand finish it. And I said, you know what, what better way to um honor his memory? Um, you know, a man that his reputation out out lasted um his life and I you know didn't get to meet than to handle that up and everything. And so that's actually something that I just finished. And I thought it was uh I thought about him a lot. You know, I thought about the history that I uh I I've read on him and the can't, you know, the firsthand accounts of people uh that have collected his work and been friends with him. And that to me is something that um I just want to do with the people in the industry, knowing that you know, we we just have our birth date and our our death date, and we don't know when those uh the death dates things going to happen. And so my job here as a um uh auditory uh uh archivist is to talk to people and to share their stories and their experiences and try to paint a bigger picture uh to just let us know how interconnected we are.

SPEAKER_01 3:12:23

So well, the the the Dewey Ferguson called his first knife books romance of collecting knives. And I don't think that's ever really changed. It's it's almost like it is a romance. If if you're serious about knives, and you you know what I'm talking about. If you're not that it's it's like uh Lewis Armstrong said about jazz, if if you don't understand it, I've it I could never explain it to you. You just have to feel it. And and knives are like that. The the the things over the years, what I have learned is the things I loved most about the knife business, not even necessarily the knives, although I do like them. But it was the people and it was the interaction with these people. And you know, I looked up one day and I said, you know, my best friend is in uh Huntington Beach, California because we see each other at knife shows more often than we do our next door neighbors when we're living in Chattanooga, especially. Uh and and so you know it's it's it's this interaction and friendships and and that you build within the business, and particularly with knife makers. Uh you've got uh on my 40th birthday, uh Tommy Lee and George Heron, who are both honey buddies of mine, presented me with a Heron Lee knife, one of the only ones they ever collaborated on. And George had done the blade, Tommy did the handle, and they had uh David Perdue put my put a V engraved on one side and then a Roman Eagles for 40 on the other. Uh I consider that one of my most prized possessions, not because it's a knife, but it's because of the memories that are rubbed on it. And that's the way I say about knives. The ones you really appreciate the most, the ones that have memories rubbed on them. You've got you know a knife that say you bought with your dad at a knife show and you still have it, and every time you look at it, you think of your dad. That's a priceless knife. It doesn't matter what the knife is, because it provokes the memories. And the and for me, the the the buoy knives like that, any time that I held 1830s, 1840 buoy knives, it's not just like you're holding a knife if you've done the research. You're holding on to another time. And that is uh something that you can't do in a lot of places with a lot of things. But you can and uh it's like uh Gil Hibbon used to have uh on his catalogs, history in your hand.

SPEAKER_00 3:15:07

Yeah, that's uh so beautifully said. Um I oh man. There's just a a a lot to be said about knives. Um and I I I don't know, it's just a constant endeavor for me. And it's you know, I I I know it's been that way for you too.

SPEAKER_01 3:15:28

Well, it's it's like they say about New Orleans, one of my favorite towns, and since if you love it a little bit, it love you back a lot.

SPEAKER_00 3:15:34

Yeah. Well, I I think that um, you know, that that's probably a good uh bookend to this uh conversation.

SPEAKER_01 3:15:42

Um I well now uh let me throw in there Bill Adams's contrary opinion on that. Oh what said if you love if you love your knives, do they love you back?

unknown 3:15:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:15:54

Well uh it it it knives, it's all about juxtaposition, I guess, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:16:00

Absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 3:16:01

Yeah, well, uh Bruce, you know, I I I I feel like there's a lot more that can be said. Um I could talk to you for hours. And if you ever want an adopted son, I'll be more than happy to elect myself for it. Um I really uh I like you a lot. Um, but you know, it's uh I I think that it's um it almost goes without saying uh and I've said it a few times here, but you know, thank you. Uh thank you for um you know contributing your life energy to this craft and to make it for dipshits like me to be able to even have this platform. It's it's because of people like you, and it is because of you. Um that that is uh such a profound observation to me. I think about it a lot, and the the very least I could do is pay homage uh to your influence. Um I hope that we have many more conversations that we can record and talk about on this podcast. Uh, but if uh you know that ever doesn't uh become a thing, uh at least I'll take the time to say it now. That you know, thank you for all that you've done and all that you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 3:17:08

Well, it uh it's nice to know that what you do is appreciated. Uh since you mentioned adopted, I I've got to tell you one quick story before I go. I was uh at the ABS when they inducted me into the ABS Hall of Fame, I was there and Bill and Margaret Romain came, you know, Bill and Margaret Roman came up came up to speak. And Margaret and my wife, which is always my best friend, she basically was an adopted daughter of Margaret. And they said, Did your parents come we'd like to meet? And I said, No, ma'am, they didn't. And she said, Margaret said, Well, Bill and I will be your parents today. I said, That would be ideal. So I can proudly proclaim it would have been his 99th birthday this week. Actually, I can proudly proclaim that I was once adopted, even if only for a day, by W. F. Moran and Martin. And I consider that one of the finest moments in my life. And it's a story that I love to tell. And uh, and you know, it's it's just like as a writer, the only the ultimate compliment to a writer is somebody read what you're writing. And as a writer, too, that's all you can ever ask for is to read what you write. And if you're doing stuff in knives, uh for somebody to understand what you're doing and why you did it, at least to give you a little bit of appreciation. So I do appreciate that. You know, and I've got to worry anymore. Some people come up and they say, Well, I enjoy your column in Knife magazine. I read it every time. I said, Fine, if you uh do you like my writing? Oh, I love your writing. Uh well, I've got three novels here. Would you like to look at those? Oh, two of them are about a guy who's a knife knife dealer. And then you hit them with price, and well, I find out that they don't like my writing quite that much, but some do. And if if anybody's interested, you can read excerpts on it on Amazon. The books are The Carolyn Factor, uh, The Carolyn Factor, the uh Vengeance Creek, and the third book is Storyville Sirens, so a novel about New Orleans in the Storyville days. The books are not listed under Bruce Voles. They are listed under J.J. Bruce. The reason is my mama, who was who was a walker, married a voice. And she always told the children, my daughters, marry up the alphabet. Because if they do things in alphabetical order and you're a voice or a walker, you're always in the back of the room. So one of my daughters married at Bradford, and the other married at Moore, so they accomplished their goals. So when I started to find a pen name for my novels, I figured J.J. Bruce would be working for J. Bruce.

SPEAKER_00 3:20:14

Everything with a purpose and an intent, and I love that about you.

SPEAKER_01 3:20:19

Well, uh read the novels first. I like, I enjoyed writing them. And uh it may be the last three. I don't know that I'm ever gonna do another one. And uh, but I'm still gonna be doing things in Knife magazine. Matter of fact, I'm sitting at home today trying to figure out what on earth I'm gonna write about this book. Yeah, well, yeah, I'll I'll definitely but generally somebody's gonna somebody's gonna aggravate me and I'll I'll come up for something.

SPEAKER_00 3:20:44

Yeah, the uh the greatest honor is to be uh immortalized in somebody's uh random rant and publication, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:20:51

Well, uh the the beauty of my column is when I first started it, Mark gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted. And a couple of times he said, You're you know, you're PO and a lot of these old guys when you talk about some of this stuff. I said, Well, it was the truth. And uh you get said I could write about anything I wanted to. So he said, Yeah, I did, didn't I? And that's the end of it.

SPEAKER_00 3:21:14

Yeah, my wife says like just so just because it's the truth doesn't mean you have to be an asshole about it.

SPEAKER_01 3:21:20

But you know, I I was thinking the other day, though, is is I started writing columns in publications about knives in 1975. And I have I wrote a column in every issue of Blade and every issue of Knives Illustrated, and a bunch of them in National Knife Collector Magazine. The reason was my old editor, the old, my old, not my boss that I was telling you about earlier, but my old editor who was a World War II vet, China Burma, India Theater, and a true newspaper man. He had everything except the green visor and the garters on his arms to keep out of the ink. And he said that if you couldn't write an editorial once a week in a weekly newspaper, you weren't doing your job. And so every time there's a publication come out, I'm trying to make sure I've got a call for that very reason. So just kind of stuff sticks with you. Well, I enjoy talking to you too. Uh come up with questions or something, just holler. It's good conversation.

SPEAKER_00 3:22:33

Yeah, absolutely. I I appreciate um you taking the time and talking to my uh uh me and my listeners to be able to hear it. It's uh an amazing honor.

SPEAKER_01 3:22:43

Well, as I said earlier, I hate to disappoint you on that, but I appreciate the fact that you thought.

SPEAKER_00 3:22:49

Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 3:22:52

All right, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 3:22:53

Thank you for listening to another episode of the Good Old Blades podcast. Remember that you are loved and God bless.