SPEAKER_02 0:00

My name is Aaron LeVere, and welcome to my podcast. I explore the deep reaches of space and time to talk to the people influencing or influenced by Nice. In an effort to unpack the rich and complex culture and history surrounding edge pools and adjacent crowds. I jump off into the abyss to talk about all things nice with special guests all the time. Join me as we reminisce of the good old days on the Gold Blades Podcast.

SPEAKER_03 0:36

Arguably, R.W. Loveless is one of, if not the most, influential knife maker and designer in the last century. Bob's designs are some of the most copied and reproduced in the market today, and you can see his impact on knife making in a majority of knives as well. Bob was an enigmatic man, as notable for his generosity as his tantrums, and those who knew him personally either loved, loathed, or did business out of love and trepidation. It's hard to decouple the man, the myth and the legend of Bob Loveless from his personality. But I think that's why I needed to talk to John Denton about his long relationship with Bob, his dad, J.W. Denton's legacy in business, and John's personal history of collecting. With Bob passing away in 2010, John is the closest we get to the horse's mouth, as he and his father not only were close to Bob, but were the foremost collectors and dealers for his work. Today, John still deals in Loveless Knives and has handled probably more pieces of his shop's work than anyone on earth. John, what an honor it is to talk to you about you, your dad, and of course Bob on the Good Old Boys Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

I was intimidated with the uh technology, but yeah, this would be great. Thank you for asking me.

SPEAKER_03 2:10

Oh, yeah, it's no problem. Um, yeah, I you know, I often wonder sometimes if the the way that I've decided to do uh this interview uh podcasting thing uh was a little bit complex. Um I've actually found that that it's a little easier when I can walk people through it. And you know, the the format of the software that I use seems to be okay. So I mean it really didn't seem to uh take you too uh much time to to catch on to it.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

So yeah, yeah, it was pretty uh it was spooky. The sound of it was real spooky, but once it went through, I mean, this is more pain painless than uh what is it, face uh FaceTime and all that sort of stuff. Oh, yeah, that's really awkward. That's really awkward.

SPEAKER_03 2:54

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, and I I've actually really been surprised that some of the uh the old timers in the knife industry have been able to get on and and muddle their way through it too. So I'm I'm really proud of anybody. If you can if you can hop on this thing, then you're uh you're a technology guru as far as I'm concerned.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Good, good. We better quit before you uh go any further, because I'm sure I'll push a wrong button any at any moment.

SPEAKER_03 3:18

Well, um for my listeners, um I I I think the context in which I wanted to have you on here is that um arguably you are the foremost expert on on Bob Loveless and Bob Loveless knives. And in addition with that, you're a prolific collector and arguably, you know, an artist in your own right. And I think that uh because we don't have the ability to talk to Bob Loveless, and we have some sound bites and mostly stories on you know the negative or positive side, that I thought it would be real great to talk to somebody who is as close to the horse's mouth as we could possibly get. And so um, you know, first I want to thank you for making the time. Um, you've been somebody who I've I've wanted to have on the podcast for a long time. And it's it's really great to be able to finally coordinate and to have you here and talk about Bob and yourself.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Well, it's a good it's a good place to start because I mean there's collectors like me, whether it's uh, you know, paintings or knives, wristwatches, whatever it is, and you sort of want to go in depth with people that have seen certain things, asked certain questions. You know, it'd be fun to talk to somebody that grew up uh next to Picasso and they could say, well, this is what he was like, and this is what he really did, and this is how things worked, you know. So that sort of history needs to be, you know, put down to where people can can read about it, think about it.

SPEAKER_03 4:49

Yeah, absolutely. And and to me, context matters a lot because I mean, you know, uh I mean I I know I know Loveless through the context of other makers, especially. I have it in written text. Um, but you know, we get into the personality issue in knives where you know people have bad things as well as good things to say about everybody. Um and we lose that context a lot of the times. If somebody writes something bad about a person or they write it good, um, it's you know, it is what it is. Uh having somebody who's been so close and has been a large contributing factor to a maker's success and the investment that's required for that. Uh to me, it there's no better contextualization than that. So um kind of on that note, um, I I want to, before we get into Bob's um, you know, legacy and unpacking that, I really want to know more about you, like you know, your earliest times in life where collecting or things like that were it was a thing, like how how your life progressed to where it is today. So could you give me a like a uh as long as you want to take on on who is uh who is John Denton and and what got you to this place of you know intersection with with Loveless?

SPEAKER_00 6:12

That is a really interesting question, and it goes back uh probably a hundred thousand years of just I don't know what hunter-gatherers maybe, but there's people that collect, and then there's people that create. And somebody pointed out to me one time because I collect a lot of paintings, and then I said, you know, why is this? What's what's the deal with with collecting? They said, well, the thing is the artist has to produce it, but also they've got to have somebody that appreciates it and buys it. So you're just an integral part of the wheel, just like the artist that creates it, and then you have the collectors that go out and buy the early Matisse, that go out and buy the early Salvador Dolly when it comes out. So as a kid in the 60s, uh I grew up loving pottery. Uh I collected pottery when I was five years old, uh, collected paintings, and I don't know where that comes from when you're in first grade and you want to be around art as much as a cigarette smoker has to be around a cigarette. So my whole life has always been leading toward, I guess, something like Loveless. And my father was the same way, and we just sort of fed off of each other, you know, because he started he started racing sports cars in 1957 on the beach in Daytona with with Bill France, the founder of NASCAR. He was uh he was driving a Jaguar XK-120, 1957 on the old track. And so the people we knew, the things that he saw, the his his ability to be a mechanic was uh something that through my life he was always pointing things out to me. Look at the quality of this, look at how this is done, look at this, uh, for example, a quilt. You know, think about what it took to do this. This is handmade, this is not, you know, run through a sewing machine. So I was always very aware of the hand uh involvement and also the the initial spark, you know, because anybody can look at a say a Salvador Dolly painting and you go, that's great. You got an elephant and the feet are like swans, and there's the necks are like giraffes. And once you see it, somebody can go out and reproduce it. They go, well, it's not that hard, but it's that original spark, you know, and that's what Loveless had. He had that original spark when he was uh 23 years old and walked into Abercrombie and Fitch. I mean, there's not a whole lot of people you see in the music world, you know, you see these bands that come out, whether it's Guns N' Roses or at Clapton, they just have this initial feed to the world that when they hit a chord, it's a chord that 20 million people like. The same way with Loveless, he his design, and my dad and I used to talk about this a lot, was the fact that Bob chose knives, he could have chosen anything and would have been a top designer. He could have chosen refrigerators, he could have chosen houses, he could have chosen cars, uh pencil sharpeners, anything he wanted to design, he could have done it, but it just happened to be knives. So that is really kind of impressive. That he, for some reason, and I think it goes back to his childhood when he was 10 years old, he said, I went hunting with my grandfather and a couple of his friends, deer hunting. And he said they shot a deer, and he said one of the old guys pulled out a three-inch jackknife and just went to town on the deer. He said, At 10 years old, he said, that impressed me more than anything I had ever seen in my life. And I thought that's a pretty strong impression to have at 10 years old, where you're impressed with somebody with a jackknife cutting up a deer. So that made it a lot, I guess, a lot easier to understand that when Bob walked into Abercrombie to Vich, it wasn't just off the top of his head, he goes, Oh, that's a knife I can I can make it better. I think he already enjoyed knives, the craftsmanship, what it meant for survival. Uh so he comes from a he comes from the creative side, and I come from the collector side. And so when they both meet, it's uh it's really pretty magical.

SPEAKER_03 10:10

That's uh that's interesting. Do you um do you only like it primarily collect knives? I know you mentioned about paintings, but what um what is the extent of your collecting and uh what do you I mean other than the technical uh side of of I guess creation or manufacturing things? Is there any other like uh ideas or things that uh are evoked when you're collecting things? Like kind of what what drives you to to do that?

SPEAKER_00 10:40

A lot of it has to do with with history, with the item, how it ties back to something. Uh lately I've been buying a lot of Ferraris, but so we had Ferraris my whole life, and it just brings back memories of you know the 60s and the 70s when things were simple and the the cars, the 250 GTOs back then were you know eight to twelve thousand dollars used, and now they're bringing around 40 million. So we understood what they were back then, but nobody was buying to collect for the future because those old things you couldn't fix them, you couldn't get the parts from Italy, you basically took the engine out and put a Corvette engine to keep it running. So everything to me, if it has beauty, if it has uh some sort of intrinsic value that that you know doesn't necessarily have to be to me, if it's if it's beautiful to me, it it seems to be beautiful to a lot of other people. So I'm lucky that I can that I have an eye for certain things, but I certainly have no creativity. I mean, I can't paint, I can't draw, but I appreciate people that can do it. So for me, that is uh a big kick just to just the experience, you know. I mean, I've got about a thousand pieces of artwork. I mean, that's a lot of stuff, and a lot of times it just stays on tour for four or five years to museums around the nation, and in a way you miss having those pieces to look at. But then on the other side, somebody told me years ago, they said, as a collector, it's your duty to get these pieces out to where other people can enjoy them. And all of a sudden that made a lot of sense to me, and I didn't really mind if they went out for four or five years. You know, it was kind of like having a rock band. They would go out on tour, then they come back home, and they go on another tour. So that's kind of my whole life is uh based around things that were really unusual, things that were really unique, and I also enjoy the the chase. You know, if somebody's looking for a rare 1975 uh Turbo Porsche, which only 200 were made and none were sent to America, um, a guy in California was looking for one, and I had a blast finding him when I found one in Australia for him. And so to me, the chase and the education I get while looking for things is very, very intoxicating. I mean, last night I was up late looking at uh some paddock fleet wristwatches, going back as to where does this fit in the history, how has it changed in the past 40 years? Um, so it's really interesting now that I'm old enough, I could go back and revisit certain things that maybe I thought I really didn't like or maybe I did like. But being a collector is uh is pretty confusing. When people come to the house, they're they're pretty confused.

SPEAKER_03 13:32

I I I I can get that. Um I you know, I kind of like on that note, I've been really interested in old style Rolls-Royces, um, even though I don't have the money to buy them. But the the fact that, you know, the wood paneling, you know, this entire culture of wood paneling in like the rap community and Cadillacs and other things like that is all veneered. But then you had like real thick pieces of you know rare burls and other things that were fit into Rolls-Royces and the mechanics that went into all that. And and so early um in you know, this industrial revolution context to me is a fascinating component. Like who who decided to put all of those elements together and define what we consider as posh today.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

I agree. I mean, the the old Rolls-Royces, the old, old Mercedes from the 30s and 40s. I mean, you just look at the wood in there, you look at the dials, you look at how they maybe engine turned the dials, how it was all sorts of very futuristic. And it was made in 1920, and you're like, man, that's a hundred years old, and it still really looks beautiful. And at that point, Aaron, it becomes a work of art. You know, you'd like, I could just take that dash out and look at it. It's like a gun stock. There's some gun stocks that just absolutely the wood is so beautiful, you really don't care what caliber the gun is, you don't care if it's a shotgun, you don't care what it is. But the, you know, the beauty of the the maple or the you know, knives, you have the ironwood, you have all sorts of purple heart. Um, so yeah, just just stuff like that can really make or break an item for a person.

SPEAKER_03 15:11

So uh, you know, in the in the concept of knives at the time, uh, you know, my understanding was that Bob's were a little bit on the pricey side. But that um was that also the way that it was in the Ambercrombie and Fitch catalog? Because my my understanding was he was actually selling them fairly reasonably through Ambercrombie and Fitch, correct?

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Absolutely. They were $24, is what you know Abercrombie and Fitch priced uh priced them for. And I talked to a doctor in uh Nashville and he said, I actually walked in in 1954. He said, I walked in Abercrombie and Fitch and bought a loveless knife, and he was still using it. He was like 85 years old, but he would use it for deer hunting and had been using it since 1954. So it was kind of amazing to hear somebody that actually walked in and saw it, you know, it's like Elvis buying his first little guitar, you know, like wow, that's kind of a big deal. So yeah, there's people that walked in and bought them for 24 bucks. Um but they did say in the in the 60s, of course, the 70s, his his knives were just outrageous, and you had to wait to get them. And they said once we got them, they were so beautiful we didn't want to use them. So Bob kind of shot himself in the foot making the collector piece, but he said this is for the working man. And I'm like, Bob, the working man doesn't have six thousand dollars to uh use a knife. He goes, Well, it's it's for the working man. And it just burned him up. It's like I don't make wall hangers, people should get out and use them. I'm like, Bob, they don't. They they hang them up. So that was that was with him the whole period. You know, they were always expensive, but also in my in my world of collecting over the past 60 years, I'd rather have four or five really, really great pieces than to have 30 run-of-the-mill pieces.

SPEAKER_03 16:55

Yeah. Um now when it when it comes to your early collecting and everything, kind of going back to your history, my understanding is like you you and your father had done collecting together. Was that something that he was also a collector? Or kind of how did that dynamic work out with you and your father?

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Yeah, I think I think he was a collector just as much as I was, maybe possibly more, but we both were definitely from the same foreign planet. Uh, we started out collecting, for example, Kimber Rifles early on. A friend of ours, Greg Warren, and his father started this uh rifle company, these little 22s called Kimber Rifles. So we would buy, we bought a hundred of those over a couple of years, and then we realized they're starting to stack up, they're starting to rust, you can't, there's so many of them, you can't get them out and look at them. So we sold all of those, every single one, and we started collecting Loveless knives. But the funny thing is, when we would go through a blade magazine, we really didn't know anything about knives in general. But the if there was one photograph, we'd we'd look at it and we'd say, Man, that knife really looks good. And you'd go look at the name, of course it'd say Loveless. So it was just so weird that without really knowing visually, we were drawn to this certain knife. And the same story happened when uh this big collector died and left some loveless knives and Jess Horn knives to the Smithsonian. And one of the knife dealers was up there and was gonna help the lady pick out, you know, what what they should use. And he said, I'll be right back. So while while he was gone, she she picked out some knives from about a hundred knives laying there. They were, like I say, Jess Horns, Buster Worinski's, all these things, Ron Lake. And when he came in, she goes, Oh, I've already picked out the knives. And he's just kind of uh, really? You picked out some knives. And sure enough, she picked out 10 loveless knives. And he said, Why did you pick these out? And she said, visually, these are so outstanding that you want to pick them up, you want to look at them, you know. So it's it it to me, it just hit me. And that's what's so fun about when I do a show, especially when the when the the women come through the shows and they totally totally look at a knife differently than a guy. They're not thinking about collecting, they're not thinking about investment, they're just looking at what looks good, and they'll pick up the loveless knife. And it's just uh it's just fascinating to know that happens to other people subconsciously we like something. You know, you hear a song on the radio and you don't know really why you like it, but it just it just hits a lot of people, you know. So the same way with the same way with loveless knives, they just for some reason they just draw that. I guess it goes back if you if you look at Rolex watch, you see the submariner. That's a perfect when you think of a watch, you think of a Rolex, and you think of that design. Same way with the Porsche 911. That's just an iconic car, and that's what you think of. And the same way when you say a drop point hunter, Loveless just comes to mind. When you say the name Loveless, there's a knife that pops into your head. You know, you could say uh some other maker, and there's no nobody's gonna get a visual on it. So Bob Bob was really in a unique situation with his knives. And AG told us after we sold those guns, we said, AG, who would you collect? And he said, Loveless, loveless, loveless, and maybe somebody else. And we said, What's so great about Bob? He said, Well, the thing is, Bob's up here on this planet, and down here are all the other knife makers. But he said since he had been in business and since Bob had been in business, he said, Loveless knives are going up every single year. He said, There's not another maker like that on the planet. So, you know, AG and Bob had their ins and outs and had decades where they didn't talk to each other and they finally patched it up. And even though they didn't get along, he still respected the knives. And that's where you have to separate the personality of Bob versus the product. Because if you take him as 100% of the product, he can be pretty hard to deal with. But the product itself is worth the hassle, if that makes any sense.

SPEAKER_03 21:04

Yeah, you know, it does. Um would would you say was there ever times when you were collecting Bob's work that the that the man uh was hard enough to deal with where you didn't want to collect, or was that was it always the product first and then you took Bob kind of as he was?

SPEAKER_00 21:22

Oh yeah, it was a hundred percent product, you know, it's just it's just like Formula One. Enzo Ferrari said you always pull for the car. You don't ever don't pull for the driver. You said drivers are a diamond doesn't. It's the car. And the same way with loveless knives, it was the loveless knives. Bob's personality is gonna come and go, don't take it personal. But the knives are there's nothing, there's nothing else like them. You know, you pick them up, the feel, the balance, the weight. That's the reason I like dealing with the Japanese people so much, the collectors. When they saw a loveless knife, they would pick it up, feel of it, roll it around, and they'd hand it to their friend, and they'd say, Look at this, look how he Change the solder. Look how the guard is tilted a little bit. They caught all the little minute things that made it feel good. Whereas the American collector bought it because, oh, it's got a double nude on it, or this is uh got a certain handle, or basically because it's a loveless knife, and we've been told to buy it because it's a collectible. And that's what that's what I don't want to harp on to people. That, you know, I mean they have gone up, but as a collectible, you know, you gotta you gotta really like it. If you if you put them aside for a um investment, you know, it's it's just like anything else. It it's not a lot of it's not a lot of fun if you're just sitting there waiting for them to go up. You've got to have the love of the the item you're collecting, because it may not always go up. So you've got to be prepared for that. But with with Loveless, he is really in a unique situation.

SPEAKER_03 22:51

Yeah. So when you were collecting Loveless, uh, had you ventured out into a lot of other uh knife makers, or kind of what was the scene at the time?

SPEAKER_00 23:02

Wow, we we bought a knife from everybody we had read about in Knife Digest, everybody we read about in Blade Magazine. We bought Corbett Sigmund, we bought George Herring, we bought Durbin Howard, we bought uh Wayne Clay, we bought uh Bill Moran, we bought Ron Lake, Osborne, uh Loveless, uh Johnson's, everybody, Buster Worinski. We we bought knives from every single person out there. And when it kind of, you know, after a while you get a lot of knives. You're like, okay, let's it goes back to that theory of let's get 10 really great ones and sell the other 60. So that's what we started doing. We thought, okay, we'll sell these other. Well, come to find out the other pieces that uh we had didn't bring 50 cents on the dollar. You know, they were really hard to sell. There was no collector market once we were we were hyped up because hey, we knew the maker. Wow, it's fun. We read about him, wow. Uh Ray Beers had had made a knife for the Pope. We're like, wow, his knives certainly got to go up. I mean, he's made one for the Pope. Uh, but it just doesn't work that way, you know. So collecting versus the investment, that's where it gets, that's where it gets sticky. Investment-wise, Loveless was brilliant, way above everybody else that we ever bought. Um but other than that, we just enjoyed his knives and the look and the fit and the finish. Even though Bob always said, he said, you're gonna catch your thumbnail somewhere on my knife. He goes, You want a perfect knife, buy a factory knife. I'm a benchmaker. But you go to Steve Johnson, and you're not gonna catch your fingernail on anything. It is so smooth, it is so everything's just put together like it's all one piece. But uh Bob's like, no, we went to the hardware and we bought nails. We put nails in there, we grind the head down and you know, send it out. So, you know, Bob was never about the fit and finish. So there's better, there's better, better quality makers, but for some reason, his balance, his design, um it's a it's a huge gap. And a lot of people don't see it. They say, Oh, we make a loveless drop point hunter, and then you pick it up and you squeeze it, and it's really square, it really bites into the hand, uh, the guard's too thick, the tang's not tapered enough, uh the handle is maybe more of a slab than it is sculpted. So there's a it can look like it in photographs. You see knives that look really, really great. But when you pick them up in real life, you're like, man, this thing is a dog. It's just like that Loveless that went for like $180,000. It was the Delaware, had the big buoy with all the engraving on it. Um, we bought that when we bought the Al Williams collection, and that knife was in there. And before we actually saw the knife, we thought that's the greatest knife in the world. But when we got it, out of the 300 knives, it was the least favorite knife because it was heavy, it was clunky, it photographed beautifully, but when you picked it up, it was a it was a door. I mean, you could just it was an anchor, basically. It was real disappointing. It didn't feel like Loveless. So we, you know, that's one of the first knives we saw. We just didn't like it.

SPEAKER_03 26:18

That's uh that's interesting to me. Um when when it comes to I I guess what I'm thinking about is uh, you know, going back to when Loveless got started, um, my understanding is with Amber Crombie and Fitch, um his motivation was uh was competing with Bo Randall, um which you know at the time uh he had a a large following because of all of his uh not knife work uh during World War II. Was there a lot of competitive nature uh between uh Randall knives and Loveless knives inside of Amber Crombie and Fitch? And kind of what was the the dynamic between those two makers early on?

SPEAKER_00 27:01

No, it was it was never really any riff in there, you know, because Bob was making what he saw as his knives, and Bo was making the knives that that he needed to make. So they were really two different makers, but they were both in the same market, if that makes any sense to you. Uh the fact that Loveless, and he always said, you know, if you come out to my shop, he says, I'll show you how to make a knife. If you're having problems with a handle, I'll show you how to do it. And if you can make a better knife than me, by all means, please go make it. So, Bob, if you approached him on the knife making side, was way, way, way more giving, more friendly, would help you out on anything you needed. So he was very open. He's like, anything I design, you can have a pattern of it. Please try to make one better than I do, because he says, I make what I make.

SPEAKER_03 27:56

Um, I mean I'm interested to know, uh, and because I don't I don't know if you have this context, but you know, between makers, um, there there are a few makers who went out and got patterns made by um by Bob or they were you know scribing things or whatever, but the but the loveless pattern is pretty coveted um amongst makers. So I I know that there's some like uh gatekeep out there that won't give any of the patterns that they originally uh received from Bob, even you know, like copies or whatever. Um are you yeah, are you aware of that kind of like subculture within knife making that people kind of like guard and don't uh share uh loveless patterns too much if they got them directly from him?

SPEAKER_00 28:42

Yeah, I I do uh I'm a little bit aware of that and and I'm kind of shocked because uh I always encourage makers from around the world when they whenever they come to the table, they say, you know, I've never seen a loveless, I've never held a loveless. I'm like, pick it up, feel oath, and you can see the light bulb going off in their hand. And I say, come back and trace this pattern, trace it, go home, try to make it. Try to now that you know what one feels like. So it's very important that you have that as original as you can because I don't know the reason. Uh, because Bob never did that. Bob always gave you his pattern. He's like, here's my here's my design, do it. So why people hold it back, I really don't know, because I don't think people can make it's like just say in a strativarius. It's like, oh, you know, you may you may have the uh the paperwork on how to make it, but can you make it? Can you make it sound? No, you can't. You can't get that sound out of it, you know. The same way with Bob, there's so many subtle things about it. I mean, we've owned over we've owned over 3,000 loveless knives. I have felt a lot of knives, and it is so obscure and finite that even the some of the best makers in the world miss the simple things that make the loveless click. You know, when you pick up their knife, it's really, really close. You're like, that's really a good knife, but but it's off, you know. So I don't think holding the pattern back is is going to help anybody's career.

SPEAKER_03 30:16

Yeah, that's it's fascinating to think about. Um when it comes to uh the loveless shop and then other makers like uh uh Merritt and Johnson and them coming in, like what's the general appeal for knives based on the era that makers were, you know, in uh helping them with this work? I mean, do you have a specific era of loveless that you prefer over others or knives that you see that are um, I guess, more collectible during a certain period of time?

SPEAKER_00 30:49

Yeah, there was a certain period of years to where it seems like everything he did was magical. And that was from about 70 to 78, through the 80s, into the 90s. Uh, there's always great period pieces to pull out of there to where you can see that little gerbil that was running around in his head was really working overtime. You're like, wow, this is a this is a great design. And it'll be like 1992, and he comes up with a design that's like, wow, wow, what you know, you didn't make that back in the 60s. But really, the thing that rips everybody up is the Loveless Johnson logo. I mean, that is just uh that that's the magical period. That's Camelot right there. You got a Loveless Johnson logo, so you got the best fit-and-finish man with the greatest knife designer on the planet. Uh, it's like having Portion Ferrari make a uh car for you or Matisse and Picasso, it's working together. So you've got two, you got two giants working there. So the Loveless Johnson, without a doubt, is just a magical period because there's less than maybe 40 or 50 knives that are stamped that. So it it also goes back to legend, it also goes back to a simpler time, it goes back to where Steve was the very first helper that Loveless had. But in 1971, when Steve came, Bob was really not by himself anymore through the 70s, 80s, 90s. He had Jim Merritt in the early 80s, uh, he had Kuzan Oda with him in the in the 70s. So he always had somebody, you know, in the shop. And I asked him one time, I said, What you know, what'd you do in the late 70s? He said, I didn't make any knives for two years. And I'm like, Really? What'd you do? He said, I laid around drunk. I was just taking royalty checks from Gerber, because Gerber had taken his design. And I said, You didn't make any knives. He goes, Oh, I might have made four or five. He goes, you know, I just didn't, I just didn't make anything. So the periods of Laundale, he's definitely in the shop by himself. He's got wide tang, he's got weird, weird-looking knives. Um, I remember being at Al Williams' house, and Al had 150 loveless knives out there. And Bob walked in the door and he goes, Well, that's 50 years of mistakes right there. I was like, Well, Bob, most people don't have their mistakes copied. You know, and Bob's like, he's like, I would I would pay you not to ever show that knife to anybody because it was an ugly knife in Laundale. I mean, it was a big, thick handle. It was just embarrassingly ugly. And Bob Bob was quite aware of it. And he he said, I just I just hate for a knife like that to be seen. So he he had some, you know, he not everything was a was a home run for him, that's for sure. He he experimented always.

SPEAKER_03 33:33

I'm I'm interested to know um a little bit more uh context-wise, because you you've seen the loveless market holistically, um, but then um there's there's also a lot of makers now that that reproduce loveless patterns. And I know that we talked a little bit about um, you know, you're like the the look and the feel and the the provenance of uh of loveless is not really always matched in in makers. Um do you see as much collectability in um in loveless reproductions today? Because it seems it seems to me like you either make a a unique design or something that's inspired, or you're really trying to reproduce a an authentic loveless pattern. And I'm wondering, kind of like from some from somebody who has collected the the man, um, what how you feel about the market holistically in trying to you know replicate his previous works.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

The market, it seems like uh you're correct. I mean, everybody wants to make a loveless drop point hunter. And that's what years ago people told me. They said, you know, when we started making knives, we got the book How to Make Knives, and we all wanted to make a loveless drop point. Even people in Italy, Germany, Japan, South Africa, they're like, we wanted to make the loveless drop point. So yeah, they all wanted a copy. And I asked a couple of the top makers a few years ago, I said, now that you've proven you can make a really good copy of a loveless knife, how do you break out of that shadow? And they said, we don't know. You know, so how do you how do you reinvent? How do you make something better than the uh Rolex Submariner? You know, how do you make how do you how do you make a standard utilitarian thing any better? I mean, you can start adding diamonds and emeralds and do an inlay and weird blade shapes, and then you lose the functionality of the blade. So how do you make such a, you know, and that's what the Japanese like about their pottery. Uh some of their thousand-year-old pottery that's been broken uh it's been repaired with gold, and that's a that's a sign, that's a great sign that it's you know been repaired, that they they take into account the age of it and you know how how it was made. Um but with Loveless, it's hard to it's hard to go in your own direction. You know, I mean Corbett Sigmund had his own knife style. I mean, he certainly tried to step outside of Loveless, but it it just didn't work. I mean, nobody really knows who Corbett Sigmund is anymore. But that that is tough. That that is a tough one. And there and there's great makers out there that make a really great quality knife that you, you know, because with Loveless, you're gonna pay, you know, five or six thousand for a drop point hunter. So are there knife makers that can make a really good drop point hunter for $800? That's that's a fact. Uh $1,500, sure, $400, absolutely. So there's decent knives, but not everybody's gonna be collectible. You know, not everybody can be Rembrandt. There's a lot of people that can paint like Picasso, but Picasso already held, you know, held the market. The original spark was there. So it's it's tough. I don't I don't know how they do it.

SPEAKER_03 36:54

Well, I think that uh something I think about and I'd love to know from you is um you know you've had this this era of um collecting and handling a lot of loveless knives. Um do you uh do you actively collect other makers' knives today? Is there people that you like track? Like how kind of how how do you fit today in a world where you know you had previously collected a lot of loveless, but like what do you what are you what are you doing today and what do you uh what do you keep an eye on uh when it comes to knives?

SPEAKER_00 37:28

Over the decades, we've pretty well just thinned down to to loveless only because it was um it was so complicated to keep up with the Ron Lake market, the uh, you know, Jess Horns market. So in in a way, we took we took the easy way out. You know, we took the top men in the field, loveless. And that's like picking Ferrari. It's like, okay, that's all I'm gonna sell. I'm gonna sell only Ferraris. I'm gonna be an expert in Ferrari. I'm I don't care what Mercedes does, I don't care what Bentley does, I don't care what Pagani puts out, you know, you you're not in competition with those. So uh I don't collect I don't collect anything else other than Loveless. The only thing I still have would be uh some loveless, I mean some uh Steve Johnson knives. But um I just really, you know, if I'd really like a knife, I'll buy it and you know, use it or something like that. But as far as collecting to the point where I really enjoy having it, I've realized over the years that bulk doesn't really satisfy me. You know, so I've really at this point after you know so many decades, you you come to the point where you feel comfortable with your choices and you know what's gonna make you hap, what's gonna make you happy, you know what's gonna make you unhappy. So you just don't let yourself go into those places, and that's collecting across the board, whether whether I'm buying a car or a wristwatch, it's got to fit somewhere for me to want it. Um, and with Loveless, that's that's kind of because he hits me on all sides. The financial side is fun, the collecting side is fun, the artistic side is really great. So he he checks a lot of boxes for me personally.

SPEAKER_03 39:14

Um something that I've uh been thinking about a lot, you know, um the the knife makers guild is something that I've gotten more immersed in over time, and you know, like um Bob being a pioneer of the guild and whatnot, have uh come to appreciate the you know, like the business or guild side of his life, right? Um But uh one problem that knife making seems to have today is that um there is not as many collectors of really good handmade knives. It it seems like that that the renaissance of collecting has changed a lot to more of like a consumer-based, you know, sub $800 type of uh of world. And I'm interested to know from somebody who who had collected and who started out um, you know, kind of endearing themselves to knives, um, how how do we get more collectors like you were back then into the industry? Um is it something that we just make and then expect people to collect it? Or do you think that there's a larger fiduciary duty, as it were, for knife makers and organizations like the guild and whatnot to foster um collecting and and uh you know nurturing the education component of it?

SPEAKER_00 40:37

The guild was really, really strong and it it really pushed knives to a you know a whole different level. Unfortunately, we don't have that sort of mechanism in place anymore. Uh the the whole the whole landscape has changed in knife collecting, uh how knives are made, whether they're uh tactical and they're semi-factory, semi-hand assembled, or they're all factory. Uh it's totally, totally changed uh from the way they're made, the financials, the the age group. Um, as far as making a handmade knife and making a living at it, Bob said years ago, he goes, uh, well, I hope you enjoy starving. Once somebody would say, you know, Bob, I just became a full-time maker. He's like, Well, I hope you enjoy starving. And that's still kind of the same way today. I don't know how you would go in and compete. I mean, you you think about it, who right now can really compete with uh, say, um McLaren, Ferrari, Porsche, and Lamborghini. Is there is there those guys already have their seat at the table? So how do you how do you outdo that? In the same way with Loveless, he he already has a seat at the table. Ron Lake, great folder maker, he he's already the top of that heap. Uh and one thing AG did say years ago, he said, you know, there's there's loveless and there's all there's all these other makers. He said, but the thing is there's room for all these other makers. You know, there's room for Jess Horn, Steve Johnson, uh Jim Schmidt, all these people. You know, so it's just it's I would be scared to be a knife maker because I don't know how you would, I don't know how you would get seen. I don't know how you would promote your work. I don't know how you would get people excited to buy your knife versus somebody else's knife. You know, maybe it's really maybe it's best value if you got a $450 knife that feels really, really great. Maybe you can sell the daylights out of it, you know. But as far as collectibility, you know, I don't know. Um you know, eight years ago we tried to find the next loveless. I mean, even 40 years ago, we're like, okay, we've got we've got Bob, we know what he's doing. So we thought we could bring these other people up to loveless level, and we tried really hard for several years with a lot of different makers, it just didn't work out. I mean, it just really did not work out. So it's um it's tough to be a maker in today's world. That the then something Steve Johnson told me. He said, these kids that are coming out now, the first year of knife making, he said, they're making better knives than I made after you know working years doing it because the materials, the information that's out there, uh the machinery available, you can you can just start out making a much better product now, but there's a better product sale. I mean, how exciting is a Lexus? It's better than a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. But is a Toyota gonna bring 35 million? It's really not. So it's just uh the collecting world is such a weird, it's an odd one. You know, you can't really you can't really pick it, you know. I think the stock market is more predictable, and they always say if you throw a dart at the stock market, you're gonna beat what all the analysts say. So in the knife world, I I really don't.

SPEAKER_03 44:00

know how you would pick the next uh the next person yeah i've i've also often wondered that too i mean you know as a as a knife maker myself it's uh it's a really weird industry to navigate because you know in standard business um things things are pretty predictable it it has a lot to do with visibility it has to do with a good value proposition but as you get into crafts um yeah i can make the most unique looking knife in the world and there'd be nobody there to buy it uh and you know the the juxtaposition or or weight of a maker is that it's really hard to make things if you don't have somebody there to buy things and you need to be able to you know pay for the process of creativity right and so um that's that's a large dilemma that I think we're in where um I I wouldn't know either um there's some knife makers that sell better than others there's some that you know they they're working off a slim margin and they do it because of you know pure passion um kind of what I've tried to propagate is that I'm really not interested in looking at loveless reproductions too much although I know that lots of people you know still like it or pay uh homage to them um I really want to be able to see in the industry more unique um takes on knives and to see people doing their own things and and you know I at least spitballing um design principles and whatnot um rather than just you know trying to ride on the coattails of Loveless or some of these other great makers but you know I'm just as guilty as it is anybody I see a a great pattern I'm like I want to make that thing and then I chase that unto I don't know maybe a corner or or not I'm I'm just interested to know if there's um if there is any secret sauce but you know from from your indications it seems like uh you kind of just you hit it it's kind of like viral videos on the internet today yeah we didn't uh we we didn't find any you know takers for the for the Loveless uh for that level and uh you know we certainly looked and they and they still could be out there you know and and also a a maker can make a really really great knife but it's it's sort of like Durvin Howard I mean the guy took uh six months to make a switchblade probably one of the best switchblade makers in in the world but nobody really knew who he was and when he went with Barrett Smythe uh his knives went up and then he just dropped off the planet so you've got people that have had like Wally Hayes in the 70s good golly his knives were so far advanced in the folder market it was just crazy uh Royal uh Hansen was just his fit and finish in the 70s was just magnificent but these people today you can't hardly give them away you know so it's uh if the quality's there it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna have a winner you know and a lot of people do it as a as a hobby you know Bob didn't go full-time maker until 1969 so a lot of people kept their regular day jobs and you know made these as uh you know Jim Schmidt was a teacher made a great knife made 12 knives a year um but still just kept a regular day job kept insurance all that sort of stuff so reality sets in yeah I kind of want to uh I kind of want to uh segue into talking a little bit about Bob the uh the man the myth the legend right because you know I I I think like talking about his knives um is one thing but talking about Bob the person is is another complex nut to crack right and um uh contextually you know I I've heard from some knife makers that they were like you know I don't bring my wife to knife shows you know back in the day uh because uh Bob had a mouth on him uh and and and you know ruffle the feathers of the of the housewives and stuff of other makers or things like that, right? That there's a culture inside of knives and especially something that Bob had um you know he was a larger than life character in the way that he conducted himself. And I kind of just want to dig a little bit more into uh your knowledge about Bob from you know his early uh childhood and everything up to when he passed like and could just kind of segment out his life and and and how you intersected with that.

SPEAKER_00 48:57

Yeah Bob as a person was very um very much hidden sort of like the Wizard of Oz he hid behind this big huge curtain and he was larger than life and he'd go to the gun shows and he'd come in hung over and he'd have his 45 on the table and he just you know he just presented himself as a as an outlaw sort of thing and the Japanese seemed to really you know like that and it seems the more Bob pushed and the tougher he was the more people were you know excited about him. I just remember being in the shop and I'd always try to you know unwind his head you know get him out of the knock for because he Bob tends to go on very deep subjects he's one of the most well-read people I've ever run into in my life and so he always had a conversation that he dictated so I would always try to get him to reverse and go into something maybe he's not comfortable with and that was you know growing up and he he said I said what about your grandparents what you know I said did you sit around and talk to them about who their parents were and where they came from and his answer was no we were too busy making a living I'm thinking you know you obviously at nine years old you really didn't care to ask your grandparents about it because you were obviously just living and you know trying to be a kid but he his his answer was just no we didn't have time like he was so busy like no we didn't have time to think about you know fun stuff and maybe that was the way his early life was it certainly didn't sound like a a fairy tale by by a long shot and I think that developed uh a lot of his personality and a lot of his um you know he put people he let them see the worst side of him sometimes to to test to see if they were still there after some were and some weren't you know so it was um he he was um some days he was really really great and some days I've heard he'd pick up the phone and just absolutely cuss people out and I said Bob who was that and he goes I don't know so I was just like wow he just he just ripped into somebody on the phone uh so you know you never knew what was going to set him off um but I talked to his daughter last year and she was really interested because I said what was it like having Bob as a dad I said we all know him as a knife maker we all know the loveless knife but we don't know what it was like eating dinner with him we don't know what it was like riding in the car going on vacation uh she just said I remember going out to my dad's shop you know in Laundale in the 60s and he'd look at a blade and he said I remember my dad you know if the blade wasn't right he'd bounce it off the ground see if it snapped see if it broke and you know he'd he'd throw it all over the room and uh I keep trying to get Steve Shackeford to write a story from Bob's daughter on the on the human side of Loveless because nobody knows what she knows even I don't know because Bob wouldn't talk if you talked to Bob you wouldn't know he had three three daughters. You have no idea he even has any family you think well he was just you know some honey badgers brought him up so I Ruby would would like for his daughter to do an article in Blade magazine she could say you know this is what this is what we did this is how daddy handled certain situations this is what we did for supper you know some of some of that because that's that really is a total mystery it's like the bottom of the ocean we we don't know much about it.

SPEAKER_03 52:38

Yeah I didn't I didn't know that about him either um that I mean I knew that he had been married and everything but um you know I mean the I think that would be a fascinating um a fascinating journey in humanizing somebody who is legendary now um but I also wonder you know like uh Steve Johnson you know he's a uh latter day saint and everything there's a there's a lot of uh preoccupations with LDS and you know human conduct and I always wondered like how how easy it was to get along with somebody like Bob in the context of you know a a a really uh pragmatic real religious worldview and everything and everything I've heard about you know with Steve Johnson is that you know he he just loved the man and uh respected him and everything. Now I mean I'm sure that some of that is I don't really want to speak ill of people or the dead but then I also wonder you know for the years that they were together there was some redeeming qualities to to uh Bob that uh you know he had to be able to endure and other people did it in the shop uh john john wilson you know uh worked with him as the the last apprentice in the in the Loveless shop and I'm kind of interested to know about uh their perspectives on on how easy it was to deal with the man too that's that's a funny thing I asked Steve I said what I said what was it like with Bob back then I mean you know you you think here's this nice normal normal kid that's you know just smart and intelligent and there's Bob rough on both sides and you know cussing like a sailor.

SPEAKER_00 54:24

I said how did y'all get along and Steve said we both enjoyed shooting I was like really he said yeah we both really enjoyed um shooting and um back then Bob was absolutely burning the uh candle on both ends he would uh he used to tell me stories about him and David Crosby when David would come to the shop or he said a lot of days they'd take David's uh sailboat out and it was just absolute uh debauchery I mean I'm like Bob how how how did you make it he's like I don't know he said I tried he said I tried to burn the candle on both ends as hard as hard as I could he said you know went out with David Crosby one night said went to uh some sort of fundraiser the next day David comes in he goes Bob did do you remember did I did I write a check for $20,000 Bob said yep sure did he said you could write five more just like it and he's like oh heck so Bob um in Steve I mean that was uh he would have been with Bob when that was in the fire in brimstone period. I mean Bob didn't calm down really until after the year 2000. So in the in the 70s and I think that's the reason uh he really didn't like John Lennon I was trying to think why he he Bob said uh John Lennon's the most overrated musician on the planet like really he goes yeah he and his this little Japanese girl came to the shop and stayed all day he said the guy was just complete uh he he didn't have anything in common and it hit me I thought well there's you know John Lennon it's love and peace and long hair and there's Bob who looks like Sergeant Carter with a uh you know crew cut on and he's he's either black or white this way or the other there's no in-between there's no give and take so I don't imagine that the peace signs with uh John Lennon and in the loveless uh philosophy would would match and then it hit me that the little Japanese lady with him was not yoko so that was that would have been the connection would have come properly through David Crosby in LA when John Lennon had the break from Yoko and they spent that what two or three weeks in in LA that everybody talks about but he was out there with some other Japanese woman and I would assume that was when he went to the Loveless shop and I think the only way he would have known the Loveless shop is through David Crosby that's uh that's pretty fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 56:57

I didn't I didn't know that job lennon had uh been out there at all I I is I'm I'm not sure has that been written about at all I mean because I that's uh absolute news to me uh I'm you know I may have mentioned it through some articles or something like that but um Bob said he did talk to Paul McCartney on the phone he said now Paul is brilliant and I'm thinking well how did you know he's brilliant by talking to him on the phone and John Lennon is the most overrated musician in the world and the funny thing is Bob played the harmonica and according to Al Williams he said it's he's the most wicked harmonica player you have ever heard in your life and Bob told me he said you know David Crosby's always trying to get me to come record you know with him do some stuff but he never did but Bob played the harmonica obviously really really good yeah do you do you wonder if um like what I guess uh you know we talk about uh people of Bob's caliber and uh I guess he he seems to be somebody who's like genius level like um in in the way that he thought about things um yeah maybe a little rough rough and tumble in uh in his behavior but the way that he thought about things and the talent that he had for just being a renaissance man makes me um really think that maybe he was just on a different uh different level of thought and how he um I guess how he how he perceived the world yeah his his his brain power was intimidating he really was one of the most intimidating people you'll be around just because of his not only his bluster but his pure lockdown knowledge of what I mean if he's talking about a soybean crop in South America he knows how many liters per hectare that they need to put on it to make it grow.

SPEAKER_00 58:50

I mean the guy went in depth on everything and he really was a complete complete genius didn't mean he had a lot of common sense you know he didn't pay off his house until the 1990s uh he'd been renting the house and paying on it since 1974 and my dad's like Bob you've never paid your house off Bob's like no so we started getting loveless on a schedule to where he finally paid off his house you know he'd call us up when he bought a truck and he'd say oh I need $30,000 we'd say what'd you buy Bob he goes well I just bought a new truck I need $30,000 so back then we would send him you know 30 000 cash in in the mail you know if you can believe that and we'd put rocks in it to give it some weight but Loveless kind of used us as a as a bank and then he would send us eventually send us knives you know we were getting uh about 60 to 70 knives a year out of the shop when nobody else could get them and plus nobody in America wanted them. So we just said you know we'll Bob will take everything you want. Bob's like no no no I still like to I still like to think I've got collectors out there.

SPEAKER_03 59:58

So when he tried to do the cheap knife in the 80s he tried to do a little thing called a half tang because knife sales were down his fame was down his and he said I'm gonna make a $350 knife and I remember George Heron said I'm gonna do the same thing several several in Corbett Sigmund several other makers were talking about we're gonna make a cheaper knife make it more affordable affordable and my dad said Bob don't don't do that don't make a cheaper knife you're already established up here at this level don't cheapen your product don't cheapen yourself don't make a you know don't make a cheap knife keep going with your integrity but he did make about 25 of these little half tanks and they're really beautiful some of them are very ugly but when you feel of them they're really great they're really magical uh but it was it just shows you there was a time where I was trying to figure out how to make a $350 knife that would sell so um I kind of on that note I w I do want to talk a little bit about the the slump and how um how that ended up working out. So you know but you you said that he was having um a hard time selling his own knives do do you think that you and your father's investment is what carried him uh through that duration or was there any set of like things that stacked up to eventually bring him through that that period of I guess economic downturn or popularity downturn?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:27

I would say during those 15 years when we first stepped in that we had a huge uh we were basically his market he didn't know that and we would have other people call in to him and order knives. So Bob thought he was selling it to some different dealers he thought he was selling to different uh collectors because he wouldn't sell everything to us and so he said you know I've got orders coming in from these so these people would turn around and send those knives directly to us. So he didn't know that we were being fed by his collectors here in America because there were no collectors here in America and the people in California Paul Bash and those guys they said you know we were talking about you and your dad we're like either y'all are the smartest people on the planet or you either the dumbest people on the planet and maybe you know something that we don't know because they they said we can't figure out why you're buying loveless knife. I mean every single knife Aaron that came up for sale we bought we bought if it came from Loveless if it came from AG whoever had it we bought loveless knives and we took them to shows because at that point Bob didn't do shows for about 20 years because he was so backlogged it was embarrassing for him to show up because people would say hey I ordered a big bear I paid you $600 I want my big bear and the big bear was selling for like $5,000 and Bob's like you know I don't have your knife so about 20 years he didn't go to knife shows. We went to knife shows all over America that Bob would have never ever gone to and we introduced his knives back into the US market uh because back then the most the people we could sell to was the Japanese we we just sold the Japanese would take everything we could make and everything that that Bob could make and that that was where the market was but we we were his secondary market for about 20 years. There's no doubt about it.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:21

I mean he he would have gone a whole different route had we not stepped in yeah that's um that's fascinating to me I don't it it's hard to kind of unpack that because I don't I I don't know of anybody today um that would bankroll an artist like that. But I'm real I am reminded that you know Frank Lloyd Wright you know famous our architect and everything um would kind of had the same the same semblance where uh his you know all of his houses were over budget um you know people were waiting a long time to to see what he came up with he was kind of cantankerous in his design principles and built in a lot of uh you know fixtures that you couldn't remove because he didn't want anybody to change his his grand vision and he was bankrolled by the people who wanted his his uh architecture in their houses so they just kind of dealt with it and gave him an egregious amount of money for it. Um did you guys ever have like any uh ill will or was there any um uh resentment harbored towards Bob because of that entire interaction or did you guys just know that you were in it for the long haul and just got kind of dug into that in in integrity that you guys had we we we knew enough about Bob's personality to not get on the wrong side of it but the the funny thing is good golly and I've never seen anything like it but he and my father never ever over the decades had a crossword.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:55

I mean he respected JW Denton I mean what whatever J.W. Denton said Bob never popped back at him he never snapped at him uh it was it was just amazing everybody else you talked to they had you know falling out bob would do this and they'd try to come you know come back and fight with him and it just always turned up in a horror show but there was uh there was total respect on both sides because my dad was absolute genius and I I felt like every day I talked to him I was in a Harvard graduate school. I mean the things I learned were just the way he handled people the way he did business the way he handled people around the world the you know through the race car world all the all the people that we met you know my whole life it was just I was just so amazed. I'm like wow how do you how do you do that? How do you know this? How do you how do you how do you assume how what do you what do you how do you read people basically and so he and Loveless never had a single problem. I mean one time we sent Bob a knife out Bob Bob called said JW Send me a knife out. It's a little half tang. It's in the Al Williams book. He said, Uh, I'm going to make one for me and Jim. So, like idiots, we sent him the knife out. And about four months later, we saw that same knife on eBay. And we're like, we just sent that to Bob. So we called the guy on eBay. We're like, Where did you get where did you get this knife? He goes, Yeah, I was just down at Bob's shop and he had this thing for sale and I bought it from him. We're like, wow, that's pretty neat. So we we we ended up buying the knife back from the guy on eBay. We never told Bob about it because if you confronted Bob about it, you would never get any more knives. You know, so why cut off the golden goose? You know, we were getting 60 knives a year from the guy. So if he sold a knife out from under us, we're like, that's just the way of dealing with Bob. So pretty soon you learned not to uh send him knives out to look at. You know, you'd send him stuff and it would just vanish around the shop. I remember I brought back some scales from rose petal handles. So they were compressed rose petals made into these handles. And I brought them back to uh to Bob's shop and I got back from Tokyo and he said uh he goes, Oh, so that's that's the rose handles that I've been because the Japanese would never send him the rose petal handle stuff. And he said, So that's what it's like. He goes, John, I'll tell you what. He goes, I'll put this on a smart little knife for you and it'll look great. I never saw that knife. Where did those handles go? Somebody else did it. Um I remember in 1992, we went to the Blade or Guild show in Orlando. So we take Bob around. He's gonna make some knives for us, some big bears. So we end up buying him $3,000 worth of really great sheephorn and mastodon. And we get to the New York show, and all these dealers, all these people have these sheephorn knives and all this uh mastodon. We're like, where did you get this stuff? And I said, Oh, Bob called us up and said he had some sheephorn knives. So we got uh we got two knives out of all that sheep horn, you know. So that's just the way Bob did business. You know, we used to trade him IWC wristwatches for big bears because we had a friend that could get IWC wristwatches uh at 50% off. So if the watch was listed for 6,000, we had 3,000 in it. So Bob would want 6,000 for a big bear. And we'd say, Bob, we will trade you this IWC for the big bear. He's like, That's great, you know. So the other side of that is when he took a watch or something like that, his partner, Jim Merritt, didn't get any piece of the action. You know, so Bob, Bob, you always had to, you always had a different uh different view about finances and sharing what what's shared, you know. So it was uh he he was tricky to deal with. He he was always tricky.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:51

Yeah, that seems like a a complex relationship to uh to navigate. I mean, you know, even even in the context of you know you telling me this, I I don't know that there was there would be a lot of people around that would tolerate that today. Um, you know, the the the reputation of makers and stuff, you can you can hardly have a an argument with other makers on online or on Facebook or anything like that without you know collectors saying, nah, I'm just not I'm not interested in a maker who's going to uh cause such a you know kerfluffler or whatever. Um it's it's insane to me to imagine that the the unorthodox and you know questionable uh business practices of Loveless and then that you guys would have tolerated that so long. But I I guess uh my that what I'm interested in is I would assume based on kind of like the wheeling and dealing with Bob that you guys still ended up being able to come out ahead on the dealings holistically, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:55

Well, there's no doubt. I mean, we were making we were making hundreds of thousands of dollars, we were making more by selling Loveless Knives, and Bob was making making the knives. I mean, it was it was a gravy train for a while. It was just insane. So we're like, why, you know, why kill the golden goose? It's just too, you know, it doesn't make any financial sense at this point to do it. And there, and there's no reason, you know, even though he was painful to deal with. What where where's the next game in town? Who, you know, who who does that? You know, like I say, you and I, if we acted like that, we'd never sell another knife. But uh Bob said, if you want the knife, take it. If you don't, I've got 20 other men that'll take it. And he was just flat across the board. He's like, You don't want it, I can sell it to 20 different people. What are you gonna do? So, you know, you either put up or shut up.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:47

Yeah, and do you think do you think that that was true? Did he have uh, you know, uh a lot of people that were lined up to you know take take that out from under you if you guys didn't want to deal with him?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:57

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He definitely he definitely had people to to sell to at that point.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:04

Yeah, um, I'd like to, if you're okay with it, uh dig in a little bit more about your father because you know the where from where I sit, um, you know, you guys obviously had money to play um and to collect and could kind of do all the stuff. And you know, mentioned about your your father and you know and and your education and business and things like that. I really don't know a lot about your father, and I was wondering if you could give me, you know, like a brief history on him, kind of like what what set him apart and what was like how did he get to a point where he could do stuff like this, where you know, with collecting and uh investing and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:43

JW, which is my father, he uh I mean books could be written about that guy. It's it's unbelievable. Born in rural Appalachia, Highwasse, Georgia, population of 420 people, 1930, uh the year after the depression. Uh there's nothing but farmers up here, nobody's got any money. I mean, it was just uh farmland and dirt and it just a very hard life. I said, What's the greatest thing you've seen since you've been alive? He said, the indoor plumbing. He's like, without a doubt, indoor plumbing was the greatest invention in my life. So he he grew up, he was really a brilliant, brilliant person. Uh I mean, I could just go on and on about the things that he did as chairman of the hospital and chairman of the school board and chairman of the Georgia Mountain Fair and how it became one of the top hundred attractions in uh the United States. Um, everything he did was on was on a global scale. You know, his mind was so far-reaching. You know, he he could he could foresee 20 years down the road about things. And one of the first people he ever put into politics back in the 60s was a guy named Zell Miller, who later became governor of Georgia and senator. And Zell lived right here in Towns County, taught at a little bitty school called uh Young Harris College, and my dad said, Okay, you're well educated, you don't know what you want to do, Zell, but you can debate really great, and you've got some good ideas. He said, We're gonna run you for the legislator in uh in Georgia. This was like 1963 or 1964. So JW had a he he could he had a vision for people and what they could do, and he had a vision for what the town needed. He had visions for the way things could grow, and it rubbed people the wrong way because they just didn't see it. They're like, JW, you're crazy. They're like, there's nobody going to be moving to the mountains. There's nothing up here. We don't need a bigger school. Well, sure enough, we've got more people up here and the little local college, which he and Zell Miller tried to get a road going around in 1977. They tried to do a bypass around this little college town, and college professors are like, no, no, no, you're not going to build a bypass around us because that'll bring people up here, and you're not gonna do it. We don't want anybody to find us. We look we love it, it's so quiet. And JW said, what you don't understand is if it's a pig trail, people are still going to come to the mountains. And this was before the mountains got really popular in the 90s. And right now, as we speak, they're tearing out a multi-billion dollar bypass around Young Harris, around that little college town. They have been begging for the um for the bypass. There's so much traffic, there's so many semi-trailers, but that's how clear it was to my dad back in the 70s, and it just goes on and on. I mean, when he was racing cars, he's like, I knew I had to either become a mechanic myself or quit racing. So one winter he took a little fiat, took the whole injury part, laid it all out, everything on the floor, and rebuilt it. So his his brain power was just absolutely spectacular. And I still get emails from people in Italy, Japan, and Tokyo talking about, you know, your dad told us this, and this is what your dad, this is how he helped us with this, and it's just uh I'm I'm still blown away with with his knowledge. I'm still like, how did you how did you know how do you know how to do that? Where where does all that knowledge come from? So he was he was he was very unique, and the people that met him realized he was very unique.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:36

Um, did did he grow up that way with like an aptitude? I mean, what is what was his you know experience in school and things like that like?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:45

Oh gosh, he said by the first six weeks of school he would already go through his entire uh algebra book and do every single problem in there. He was his his brain was just it was off the chart. I mean, he could he could see things in almost, you know, people can see things in 3D. Well, he can see things in 4D. You know, he could he could look at an engine like in a race car. He was walking around the track and he saw this um race car, and he looked at the transmission, he looked at the gear shift, and he's going through his head, and he's thinking about this, and he's the cobs are spinning there, and cigarette smoking, and he's like, hmm-mm. He goes, if we turn this thing upside down, put it in, it will fit in our race car. The gears, instead of going from one, two, three, four from left to right, well, I'll be far right, will be first, second, third, fourth will be over to the far left. You know, but he totally put the thing upside down in his brain, saw how it would fit, how it would work, and already he would tell uh the people building his car, he'd say, This is what this is what I need. He would explain to them, and then they had the ability to build what he what he saw. And that's the reason he really liked people like Durbin Howard. He could give Durbin, he could say, Durbin, we need a knife that's gonna do this, it's gonna have a different pivot point, it's gonna have a different spring, it's gonna be different loaded. And sure enough, Durbin knew how to build it. And Durbin ended up getting patents off these uh A-bar knives because of the locking mechanisms on them. So he was uh he was always way, way above anything I could ever. And the thing is, like in in his hometown, I mean, his his parents didn't do any of that stuff. It wasn't like it was you know handed down. He he was the only one in the family that knew how to crank the car. He said when he was 10 years old, his dad couldn't get the car cranked, and he'd be like, JW, come crank, come get the car cranked, and he'd go out and crank it.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:50

Hmm. That's uh it's fascinating. Uh I mean, what what do you feel like your um what you retained from that? I mean, the most like valuable components of it, because I know that we, you know, you talked about uh like how to deal with people, but is uh what has followed you throughout your life and your accomplishments from from that experience holistically, just his overall intelligence or just the vast amount of uh experience that he gave you and just like this this really multifaceted approach to you know seeing genius?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:23

The biggest thing is always do what is right. No matter how bad it hurts, you've got to do what is right. Your word is beyond anything else, and you've got to keep that. You've got to treat people decent, you can't rip them off. You've got to you've you've got to be so honest and so trustworthy and do everything that you say, and that's that's one thing that just drives me every day. It's like if I tell somebody I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna do it. It's it's a very that's the biggest thing was the way he treated people. And sometimes it cost him money. There were deals where he said, you know, I'll do it at this, and come to find out he can get another 50,000 from somebody else, but he said, No, I've already committed, I gotta do it. You know, he always told me it's like if you underprice a knife and the guy takes it and you go, Oh, I made a mistake. He's like, No, you you've already priced it. You you've got to hold it. You know, so it was all it was all integrity. That was the biggest thing, was just pure honesty and integrity and treat people decent, you know. So the bit so the business side of it is is do it above and beyond what anybody else does. Do if somebody else sends it uh regular mail, well, maybe send it FedEx overnight. You know, always go that little extra step and don't worry about the Nick Lundan stuff. You know, don't sweat the don't sweat the small stuff, the big picture, stay focused. You know, there's gonna be some deals that aren't as smooth for you. There's gonna be things in life that aren't smooth, but at the end of it, that's when it all comes back around.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:59

Yeah, it's um really, really emotionally an uh an intelligent person uh to be able to see that. I mean, especially in in those industries that you're talking about, um, there is lots of dishonesty and a lot of like robbing pay uh Peter to pay Paul. Um, and to a certain extent, that's uh condoned, right? I mean, I've been in business for a long time and that's kind of still the way it is. It's uh, you know, one one big smoke and mirror. Um but I'm interested uh I mean, what what do you feel like your legacy is going to be? Um, you know, obviously you're still active in uh collecting and distributing loveless knives in the in you know in this in the secondary market. Is that what you want to uh continue to do, or kind of what is what do you think like your your next thing is?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:54

That's funny because it because the next thing is always uh grouped into the same to the same thing. It's basically collecting. Um I've got one of the largest collections of uh artists, and I'm I'm as well known in the art world as I am in the knife world, and same way with the car world. I'm just as deeply connected into Ferrari as I am into Loveless as I am into paintings and artwork. So all three of those to me, they're they're the same thing. And if people remember anything from me, I hope it's just the education that they'll get from my writing the book on Loveless, because I said you're not gonna learn how to make a sheath, you're not gonna learn how to grind a blade, but you're gonna see great loveless knives, what made them great, why they're different, why these are unusual. And that's basically what I want to be known for is helping people build a collection so they don't go through the same missteps that we went through. You know, that paying your tuition is pretty painful. We did that in the art world and we lost our rear end. We did it in the knife world, we lost our rear end, you know. And I wish somebody had been there to say, hey, skip, skip this step and go here. So that's what I really try to do, you know, particularly in the knives. Uh I really want people to build. I'm more of a collector than I am a dealer. You know, I actually love the knives. I've still got loveless knives that, you know, we bought back 40 years ago that I've never ever offered for sale. I mean, big bears that are hidden tang with maple and brass on them. I mean, beautiful stuff. And and I just I love the thing so much, it's like, what would I do with the money? Because I I like the knife. I I I buy it because I like it. I don't buy it because it's gonna make money, it's gonna go up. You know, if it goes up, great, if it doesn't, I really don't care. But I would just like to be known for helping people uh build a collection or at least become aware of what to look for, you know, in knives.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:01

Yeah, I mean I think that um everything I understand about you um that fits kind of like my my perception of you. Um I think that uh even within the context of your collection and whatnot, you know, I'm reminded uh I I got into looking at Sheffield era uh buoy knives and and the um exhibition knives through oddly enough, this old YouTube video that I I can't remember when it was made. Um uh you know, it was sometime probably in the 80s or maybe maybe early 90s. And then through a series of um uh book purchases and stuff, I really became uh a lot more aware of the uh the Sheffield and Solingen uh buoy knives. It'd be really great to be but be to be able to have like uh some compendium or something where all of these knives, even some that nobody's seen before, are photographed so that way, like in in great detail, so that way you can um uh provide a visual um element um uh to for the rest of us and for posterity. Uh I know that in the in the Georgia Knife Makers Guild, you've done some uh um uh demonstrations and things like that, and that's always fascinated me too.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:19

Yeah, it was Loveless. Uh it's just it's just so natural for me to talk about Bob because you know I can't sell anything if I don't believe in the product. You know, I can't just say, hey, buy this just because it's I I had one guy ask me, the guy had just sold his business for $600 million. He called me up and he said, John, I'll give you half a million dollars to build me a loveless collection. I said, I can't do it. And he goes, why can't you? And I said, Because you're only doing it because you want it as an investment, and you've been told Loveless is the guy to buy, and you don't know why you want to drop 100, you don't know why you want a big bear, you certainly don't know why you want a New York special. You've got no idea about why you want this stuff. So I had rather sell to somebody that knows exactly why they want it, just because you've got the money, you know, doesn't mean you have the the passion for it. So a lot of times the the money, I know, especially in the art world, you can have the money, but uh Leo Castelli would not sell you that Jasper Johns. You know, you had to be already in the system with him. So that's kind of that's kind of the way it is. I just really want people to be fascinated the same way I am.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:33

Yeah, and I've uh I've never actually held a real love list before. Um it's a it's one of those things that the the access uh for a lot of knife makers just is not there. Um that's why I've kind of envied uh your demonstrations for the Georgia Guild, um, because that gives a an insight that it's just for most knife makers, you just will never get.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:57

Oh, it's it's unbelievable. And I love for knife makers to pick them up because, like I say, you see the bulb going off in their head. They're like, wow, wow, okay, feel feel the balance, feels, feel where it does balance. You know, Bob said, anywhere you squeeze that knife, he said, if you're working on a deer upside down in the river, it doesn't matter. That knife, if it's turned upside down and you're squeezing it, it's not going to leave any hot spots. Everything should be rounded, smooth. You know, and Bob loved Micarta. He would uh I think he would have built his house out of micarta. He said, if you drop stag, he said you come back in 400 years and you know your your blades or your your handle's gone. You come back in two years, your handle's gone. But he said, if you got micarta, he said, you lose that knife 500 years later, you won't have a blade, but you'll still have a handle. So he really did not like using stag because stag had its own properties and it was hard to get the you know the the sculpting that Bob liked to fit the hand with. And when he found Micarta, I mean, good golly, the the feel and the balance he could get is just it's absolutely spooky of how how those things feel. I mean, somebody can lay down a hundred knives and you can pick up a loveless and tell it tell that it's different from the other 99. It's it's that big a deal.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:14

Yeah, that's fascinating. I've uh I've often wondered, yeah, you know, like the since the uh the loss of phenolic resin in the United States because of all the carcinogens and whatnot, uh, it's actually a lot more difficult to find really good micarta of the same ilk as what we call, you know, vintage micarta that Bob was using every day. Um and so I think that that's also something that a lot of knife makers don't think about is uh the the material choices of makers uh really had a lot to do with like look and feel. But uh a modern knife maker really has to pursue the same material, which are now vintage and a lot more rare and sometimes really expensive, um, in order to to. accomplish the same kinds of things and you know just with workability. So there's uh there's there's all sorts of things that I think that uh you know the good old days are gone in some ways uh you know that the Bob experienced and had um had access to and us knife makers now yeah we we might be able to walk out with a a a really nice well you know fit and finished knife a little bit quicker but there's just some things that you just will not get context into anymore because it's you know those days are gone.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:36

Yeah that's true. I mean you look back at some of the old vintage guns or or whatever that the the materials have changed enough to where there is um you know it's like you look at the old houses built in the 1600s and they've got the really wide plank boards and you're like man I'd give anything to have that sort of you know old growth tree that had that sort of width in it and it's just not available now and even stag of all things good grief in the 70s stag was just it was just stag and it was pure amber stag and now the stag you get has to be dyed so it try they try to look like the old amber stag but there's there's some things that we just we just because of civilization and the amount of material it's just not available as you know as a product to be sold to you know people the collectors it's really hard same way with woods you know they're starting to really crack down on certain woods that come out and you know different different things but yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of little pieces that are that are no longer available.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:37

Yeah well you know kind of kind of on that note um you know people like you are rare as hence teeth now um to be able to share firsthand accounts of you know legendary makers and to uh you know give perspective into the collecting world I I hope that um people listening to this will um be invigorated to uh you know to try their hand at collecting in a way that um that emulates the same kind of passion because uh I you know I I think about it a lot but the uh every old time knife maker that I've talked to they're like all mo like all or most of my collectors are dead you know they uh they they bought for a time they supported me well and now uh you know now they're gone their kids you know sell off their collections or whatever and uh it seems a little bit of a darker world um without that same kind of uh you know history and and passion and um patronage that the collector has for the knife maker. And it it is in it's it's there still in some ways. But it it really does seem like the good old days were um were some fun times to be in. And I uh I hope that uh I hope that new collectors emerge and that we can collectively um relearn that there's a symbiosis between the collector and and the knife maker and without e each hand washing the other uh that we we're not gonna have the same kind of thing that we uh did you know back in the you know 50s to you know maybe the n the early 90s I I agree I think uh I think that in the large part with all the makers that are out there now versus you know 1969 or 1970 it's like panning for gold you know you've got to look through a lot of the other pieces and that you know once you've separated everything out you'll you'll dig your way into you know the right knife makers but it it there's so much out there right now it's it's really you know you really have to look deep to try to go in to find uh you know any of those things and I I remember back in the 80s asking Bill Moran I said Bill how many Damascus knives do you think you made he said maybe a hundred and I thought wow that's just that's just hardly that's hardly any you know especially even back then his his Damascus was so expensive. Yeah uh do you think that um that the proliferation or like the the total volume that a knife maker makes has any bearing on the on the collectibility or the uh the factor that you look for in a knife um you know like it did did the number of knives that Loveless made have any bearing on you wanting to buy more of them uh not not particularly um not not overall because there there were like I said there's a lot of great makers that made even now there's some top makers that make seven or eight knives a year and that's hard to create a secondary market.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:54

So you do you have to have enough product out there to have a secondary market. You know otherwise you're sort of like um Roy Hansen you made a great product but nobody knows who you are now. So there's not enough to create a secondary market demand. So if you're a very limited maker if you're not careful you can totally be forgotten. You know and that's the scary thing. I mean uh D.E. Henry in the 70s his buoy knives were bringing seven eight thousand dollars and Bob's fighter at that point was worth about 300. So D.E. Henry was massive I mean everybody has dreamed of uh D.E. Henry and now the those prices just you can't get anywhere near them. They're just he's totally he's been totally forgotten. Same way with Cronk. Good golly Cronk used to sell for seven or eight times the price of a Loveless and now you're lucky if anybody's even heard of the guy much less wants to pay you big money for it. But these those were the top makers uh it's just like um the Hudson River school painters Beerstadt and Tom Moran all those people in the 1800s they would have people stand in line in New York City in 1890 when they would unveil these paintings but by the time the 1920s came around they were selling for like pennies on the dollar. So that is a massive market that just vanished and now of course the the prices are you know two or three million for a beer stat the prices came back so things can get lost and if you live long enough they can come back around but most of us won't live to see that second second burst of energy but I do wonder in a hundred years who who will you know who will they go back into the our period go okay this is a great knife let's let's pick this out you know you've got Loveless and Lake and some of these other people and then you know is there going to be a resurgence for you know people we've totally forgotten about I mean will Royal Hansen or Wally Hayes become legendary you know I I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:03

Yeah do you think um at the end of Bob's life that he was starting to come to terms with his own fame and and his own mortality like what what did the the later years of his life look like in your experience yeah he was a lot uh a lot more kind a lot more forgiving you know a lot of the edge had come off of him um as far as the fame good golly he was he was always quite aware of his power and but but the funny thing is also the fame doesn't give you confidence and that was it's always so weird to me is when we would go out to San Diego in the 90s to the uh art knife invitational the AKI that Phil Low Brad would put on Bob would call us and say you know I'm really worried that nobody's going to buy my knife and what am I going to do if nobody buys them and we'd say Bob don't worry we'll buy everything you've got just go out there but he really did have a fear of not being able to sell knives.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:04

He thought you know I'm well known I'm famous but then there's that insecurity that he had even with all that fame.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:13

So it wasn't uh it wasn't something he felt really secure with and I think towards the later part of his life he realized okay I'm wearing down I'm getting old I'm getting sick I can't produce uh and Bob was never really a financial genius I mean he was like a three year old with money you gave him forty thousand dollars it would go into Rolex watches like a cameras planes cars he just he just never had any money so as far as a personal knife collection he just didn't have anything set back you know because he his wife was so funny she would I would go I would go talk with her we'd go out and see Bob so I'd go see his wife and just to hear a different side and she was just the nicest nicest lady and she could cook really great southern food which was so funny being Japanese Bob loved his um fried chicken so she made some of the best fried chicken you've ever had in your life and she said I she goes he goes Bob comes in here and comes into my collection of knives he takes knife out he goes she goes the knife never comes back she says I know he sells my knife you know so Bob always would come in and she's like once he took the knife she's like I never saw it again you know Bob's like I'm just gonna borrow this knife honey take it out and shop and show these boys and she's like I never saw the knife again so he was always uh he was always burning through money and later on he realized he didn't have if he couldn't make knives he couldn't make a living you know and that that that happened and that sort of was uh a realization that was was hard for him to deal with because he's like wow I have to work to make money yeah I'm from some of our earlier conversations before we started uh recording and everything you mentioned that um uh Bob's relationship with his wife was also completely different than uh what he had with everybody else and I I'd love for you to kind of like anecdote that a little bit because I you know again like uh you wouldn't wouldn't hardly think that Bob was marryable in some ways um let alone had a wife and that she you know they had a great relationship and you know they had daughters and everything like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:36

I I'd love to kind of understand a little bit more about the dynamic between them oh man it his wife was was this beautiful Japanese lady and just uh when when Bob was around her it was a whole different ballgame he was a kitty cat because she would she would tell him she'd say Bob when you go out tonight with friends do not yell you yell at friends all the time don't yell Bob and he goes she goes also when we go to eat put your teeth in because Bob was always eating without his teeth in and it was just so embarrassing to his wife and you know she would say Bob you put teeth in and you act nice you know she's like you can't be mean to your friends you're so mean you're so mean to your friends. Why do you do that?

SPEAKER_03 1:39:20

Bob's like yes mama yes mama I understand yes yes yes you know so she uh and sometimes he'd come to the show and he'd go well I've already been you know told what I need how I need to act so she she she could control him but man you if you got him in a crowd of people he was absolutely uncontrollable I mean he just got louder he got more powerful he got more boisterous you know and then you pull him back to the side and you know it he'd calm down and you could sort of halfway talk with him but uh his wife was just uh but I'm telling you that southern food she could cook was just amazing good golly some of the best meals I've ever had have been uh cook by her yeah that's interesting to me um uh do you do you think that some of Bob's personality comes with his uh uh being abandoned by his father I mean it seems it seems kind of like uh for those who have dad issues um that a a lot of that confidence or a lot a lot of that being loved and not feeling abandoned comes from early roots. Um and I mean I've I've experienced that some inside of the dynamic of my own family but I've always uh kind of had a an inferiority complex you know coming from a large family uh absentee dad and things uh you know it always felt to me like I needed to earn approval or to earn a seat at a person's table and there wasn't really like the uh unconditional love I guess uh that like I showed to my kids and I'm just wondering if uh maybe Bob showed that a little bit more than we'd like to think in his own behavior uh uh throughout the like the the different periods of his life yeah I I have no doubt doubt that that was a huge um traumatic experience but when you're a kid that's all you know if you don't have the you know if you're raised by your grandparents and your parents are not really around he's got nothing else to judge it against you know but you can see from his his actions he was very insecure yet very much uh you know bloated on his fame and and fortune but he was still very insecure on on the inside and he just didn't have like you said there was no unconditional love and that's the reason I want somebody to do a story on with his daughters what you know how how was Bob like to his kids you know because it didn't sound like he was as a I mean when you run off to join the uh merchant marines at whatever 17 years old I mean you know you're you're obviously you're ready to get out and do something.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:08

So I just always wondered with his own kids how you know what was he like how what what did what did they learn from him?

SPEAKER_03 1:42:15

You know I think one is a lawyer one is a uh a guard at a prison somewhere in upstate New York and another one still lives near Riverside I think but um I've just talked to him on the phone but I I don't really I've never met him uh but it's kind of interesting that they're that they're out there and nobody really has said hey let's let's hear a story on Bob the human you know if he is human he may not be yeah well I I don't know I mean I I rarely uh talk to people that I just cannot find something to like about um and I've talked to some real rough and tumble people um but I I do wonder that you know it's uh you you we have the uh ability with those who have passed to kind of get a 365 degree view of their personality if we have context and I I hope that somebody does pick that story up and and is willing to talk to them because uh you know we're we're going to approach a time where the context for Bob's history and how he was as a family man and things like that is is lost to us and we just won't have it again. So I I think that that's you know uh something that somebody as a writer should focus on and get interviews with them and everything. And uh you know definitely if somebody's listening to this and has the connections talk to John Denton he'll be able to facilitate it and then uh give context into Bob and then his daughters into Bob is the as the dad right yeah I would like I'd like and because that like I say is a total unknown about his whole history we his knives from 1954 until the day he died you can chart how he changed how you you can see a lot of that but that's just shows up in his work you know the personality of him as a human as a father as an everyday 24 hours a day seven days a week person we know nothing about what little I could get from his wife about how he would act you know you could you could see that but we don't know anything on the family side I mean nothing. It's just absolutely it's like aliens dropped him yeah well you know I I don't know there's lots of food for thought in and what you've uh brought in this conversation I um I don't know it'll take me a while to unpack it because uh you know I I I think that we're all we are all just human uh at the end of the day I'd like to know more about um him that way too but I think you've been able to help uh uh provide a little bit of a context and it's a context through the juxtaposition of you and your father right you and your own father and and the kind of uh passion the kind of integrity the kind of business dealings that you guys had and working with Bob and and bringing his art to the rest of the world I don't think that uh Bob Loveless would be a name that is synonymous with knives if it wasn't for uh John and JW Denton, you know uh and that's something that I think that uh you guys should be really proud of and I know um yeah I know in talking with you it's something that really fascinates me.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:34

Yeah it's uh it's been a labor of love you know usually a hobby you get tired of it you know you buy a telescope you look at the stars two or three days and it sits in the you know closet for 20 years but with Loveless I never get bored because every knife is different. You know if somebody says hey John I've got a drop point hunter I can't wait to see it because I know Bob has probably changed something, done something. It could be a a one-off something I've never seen so I never ever get bored with his knives. It's not like he had cookie cutter knives you know oh yeah oh yeah yeah really okay it's like wow let me see you know it might one time he did an upside down gut hook he made two gut hooks but he made them upside down. Now why did he do that? I don't know but they're out there you know so stuff like that is just I'm still looking for stuff that uh has still not come out of the woodwork. You know like those Loveless Johnson daggers they were hidden for about 35 years and they came to light a few years ago and nobody had an idea there was any loveless Johnson daggers ever created. And there's three of them.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:41

Yeah it's pretty amazing well a a life of collecting a life of uh being able to rediscover things and I'm I I hope that uh you continue to find things within the lover uh loveless lexicon that uh that continue to wow you yeah it's it's easy to talk about something that you really love so it's it's it's no you know there's no stress involved it just it just comes out you know it's very very easy. It's given me a lot of food uh for thought and uh you know sometime I'd like to be able to meet you and hold one of those uh loveless knives and kind of uh get my own wheels turning on it because I I think that that's that that's one of my goals is to be able to see uh knives from the old guard and really be able to you know tact look tactically figure out um how I personally want to do things as a maker. So um hopefully we can sync up sometime and I can uh you know pick your brain in person.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:35

Yeah it would be great. I mean I'm always at the blade show and uh it it would it would really help for you to actually hold one see what you think about it. You know, like it or hate it at least you're exposed to it and that's that's the biggest thing is exposure for people no matter what it is they do let them you know see what they can get out. You know you and I watch a movie we may think it's it's totally different. You know if we watch Citizen Kane we may really love it. Somebody else sees it and they go that's the worst movie I've ever seen you know same way with Loveless you know at least experience it at least feel of it feel what it it it's doing to your hand and then you decide what where you want to take it. So it's it's like a big cloud it open it opens up in the sky there's there's no limit at that point. You're like okay I can go for it at this point. And that's the exciting thing is there's still like AG Russell said there's still room for plenty of great makers in there. So it's not all done. Yeah well uh blade blade atlanta you show up to right you do ever make a uh to the Blade Texas show uh I used to do Texas Texas shows years ago but I'm only down to about one show a year now so Atlanta is really the only one I go to but um we used to go to Tokyo we used to do all the stuff in LA Atlanta and New York Chicago Dallas everywhere but um you know back then you that's the way you saw the knives there was no email there wasn't any way to do anything so you had to actually go to the show to to see the stuff and you know so it's uh now it's just easier to sell it over the internet totally totally changed the marketing.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:18

Yeah yeah for sure yeah we all we all kind of deal with the ease of use uh the internet but the lack of tactical experience I'd uh tell anybody to pick up my knives and uh and feel them and everything that's what I want them to to catch from the conversation is uh you know it's a at the end of the day it's a tool and it should uh it should feel good um to uh to pick up and everything kind of you know picking up on the the same uh concepts of loveless like if you if it doesn't feel right it's not right and I think that that's the same way I feel about um relationships and everything too. It's like if it if it's right, it's right and you know it. And you know that's that's kind of the thing. Knives are personal to me. I'm not making them try to make money. I'm making them because I want to put out a piece of myself for posterity. So, you know, it's uh uh I'll try to see if I can make it out to uh Atlanta next year. And if you're there, we'll I'll try to sync up and maybe I can see some of your stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:17

Yeah, that'd be great. Or just come out to Hiawassee sometime. There's it's still a town of about 900 people up in rural Appalachian, so we got nothing but lakes and mountains and trout fishing.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:28

Yeah. Well, I grew up in uh in uh the mountains in Pennsylvania. We're still uh Appalachian up there too, so um, I'll just have to uh drive from Texas over that way. My wife and I love road trips, so maybe we can uh maybe we can make a trip out there sometime to see you.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:46

That's right. Swing swing down to to the northern part of Georgia.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:51

Yeah, it's not it's not too bad though. We just uh got back from a 4,300 mile trip. I went up to Pennsylvania to uh show her around because it was the first time that she got to see uh where I came from, and then we went up to Boston and Salem and then came back down. So we should uh she she hasn't been a lot uh a lot over the eastern seaboard, so we uh she got nine or ten states under her belt with that entire trip. So we uh we really like driving.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:18

That's that's that's a good trip right there. That's the way to do it. You see a lot of stuff. Uh Boston is an interesting place. Good golly. Uh yeah, there's a lot of neat places on the Eastern Seaboard. I mean, it's uh but of course, you know, I like it out west, you know. I like going to like Death Valley, I like monkeying around in the desert, and it's just so different than what we have out on the east coast, you know. It's just uh and Bob always said, you know, Bob grew up and was born in Ohio, and uh he he was always constantly talking about the old days, you know, he's like, I want to come back to the East Coast. The people were friendly, it was a handshake, you know, California is so you know, wishy-washy, and you don't know who to trust. And you know, he just had this memory sort of of what he thought, you know, back east was like. So he he sort of just always was pining to come back east, even though he never would, but he was always like, Man, I'd like to get back there.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:11

Yeah, well, I was kind of the same way as a kid. I just thought out west was so uh as a rock hound, I just love the idea of being able to go out and pick up uh stones in the desert and see rattlesnakes and all that stuff. And living in Texas for half my life now, I could tell you it's just it's hot. I love Texas. So we're we're here for the long haul. We got kids and everything, but it is, you know, the difference in contrast, like 90 degrees in Pennsylvania did not feel the same way as 90 degrees in Texas because of the heat index and you know, lack of wind and everything. It was different. So my my wife, you know, seventh generation Texan, uh, she really likes the the the east, the northeast. So uh we have no problem making an excuse to go up that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:57

Wow, seven generations in Texas. That's that's true Texan right there.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:01

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hard to uh it's hard to compete with that. We're uh I mean I I was I I was many generations Pennsylvania, and I mean pretty much New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. That's where my family was from before they emigrated over from uh uh Germany mostly. Um but you know, even still uh Texas has a culture that you it's really hard to appreciate if you don't have uh somebody telling you to appreciate it, which is the Texas way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:28

Yeah, that's exactly right. If you're from Texas, it's it's a whole different ball game. Where do you live in Texas?

SPEAKER_03 1:53:35

Um we're in the DFW area, so uh yeah, north northeast Texas.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:41

So y'all get some cold, icy weather and some extreme heat then.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:45

Yeah, yeah. Uh the it's not uh winters are pretty mild. Um almost never get snow. When we do, it's only for a few days, usually. Um, so it's not it is not like uh being up up north or dealing with uh well any anything on the eastern seaboard, really. Um so yeah, we'll uh we'll continue to venture out that way a little bit more since my my wife seems to like it so much. But um the next trip is probably this fall, so that way she can see the fall colors because she's you know, be being in Texas, you don't really have fall. You it turns brown and then everything dies off and it's just cold and icy. Um, but to actually appreciate the colors, that's kind of what she wants to see.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:28

Wow, wow, yeah. Those color changes, I mean, they're um it really is. I mean, you get up toward New England, it's just it's just crazy, you know. And then comes winter, it's like wow, but during fall, it's like man, that's a place do you ever go down to Martha in Texas? You ever been to Martha?

SPEAKER_03 1:54:45

We have never been. Um, I'd like to be able to go down there. I just don't know what I'd do. There's a lot of uh, you know, the art scene and everything is uh pretty interesting down there, but we just haven't made the trip down yet.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:57

I'd like to see it too. I'd like to see the Martha lights. I just sort of like to see the layout. Uh I don't know, I just kind of want to go there, you know. It's a long ways from anybody, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 1:55:07

Uh yeah, pretty, pretty well. Um, I mean Marfa has its little uh micro chasm of uh culture and you know lodging and stuff like that. But I know I I worked with a guy that would go out there and he he did a lot of like avant-garde um uh DJing, and so he'd you know do do music production and stuff. And so he would go out there, I guess, and you know, do acid and uh look at the stars and things like that. So I mean yeah, so I mean, yeah, it's it's it's on the list uh for sure. Uh we get we sold our camper a few years ago, and I'm I'm thinking about getting another one and just being able to go out and do some road trips so that way, you know, anywhere that we go, we don't necessarily have to spend thousands of dollars on hotel rooms. We can just you know stay in the camper uh that we pull behind and you know go and see the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:58

Yeah, can you imagine? I mean, you just park it there for a while and explore and you know look around. And do you have do you ever see any is there any fossils much in Texas? Or is that more toward uh like Montana and North Dakota?

SPEAKER_03 1:56:15

Um it depends on where you're out at in uh in Texas. Um, you know, in the in the DFW area, it actually sits in a in a sort of ancient lake bed or basin, right? And so there's all sorts of places that you can go for fossil hunting, like big ammonites. Sometimes you can find like dinosaur feet. There's a place down as you go down a little bit further uh near Waco area, I believe, there's a uh a place called Fossil Rim. And they actually have uh old dried up uh creek beds and stuff where you can see uh dinosaur footprints.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:52

And so yeah, I've seen photos of that. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:56

Yeah, it's it's pretty it is pretty crazy, and all that um all the limestone and white rock and everything has captured a lot. Uh, we used to go out and uh go by the creek beds and see if we could find big um big ammonite and other you know ancient crustaceans and whatnot. So it's yeah, it's pretty cool, but it's you know it's very specific, like to that air era of uh of of uh lake bed and fossil structures and whatnot. Um I've never I've never found any dinosaur uh fossils out while hounding, uh, but it's it's pretty fascinating for where it's at.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:30

Gosh, yeah, that stuff like that's always been f I wish I was as a kid always wanted to be like an archaeologist and go to like you know the pyramids and just dig around for six years and sift stuff and look for dinosaur bones and you know, e even the big megalodon teeth. I'm excited about people when they find that in those rivers and stuff. I'm like, man, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:54

Yeah, I've always uh been into pro like gold prospecting, you know, up in Pennsylvania, the only thing you can really find is natural silver deposits. Uh but you know, the gold, the gold rush and all that was really cool to me. And I can't even imagine going out and uh like snorkeling to find megalodon teeth in in you know the lower appalacians and whatnot. That to me, all that seems uh man, if I if I had time and money, I would just sit and uh do that kind of stuff. But if you're if you're out sometime, you should go to Marfa. I mean, I've I've only heard uh really fascinating things about it. And uh you can while you're in the area, you can go to Guadalupe Peak, which is the the highest uh the highest mountain location in Texas. I think it's like yeah, it's like five thousand feet or something.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:41

Jeez. Yeah I didn't know that was uh where where would I fly into? Would I fly into uh El Paso or where would I Yeah?

SPEAKER_03 1:58:53

Yeah, I think that probably if you were trying to cut out some uh drive time, uh you'd probably fly into El Paso if you could and just uh you know go around that area there.

SPEAKER_00 1:59:03

Where's the where's the big bend area from there?

SPEAKER_03 1:59:06

I don't know. Let's look here. Big bend. While I sit here on a recording and talk to you about this. Um see if my map foo is uh it's it's not really too too far away. Uh if as I remember it, I mean you you gotta think it's Texas, right? So um the big the Big Ben uh National Forest and uh and area there is uh oh Big Bend National Park. Let's go there. So the Big Bend National Park is the Alpine's probably closest. It's it's pretty it's pretty far down on the panhandle. I'm trying to think where you'd probably fly fly into. Yeah, I don't you could f you could uh drive into San Antonio, and I think that that would be probably the closest.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:06

That's where my brother lives is is in San Antonio.

SPEAKER_03 2:00:09

Yeah, it's pretty he loves it. Yeah, it's pretty far from El Paso. I think that it's a little bit closer, maybe, to San Antonio, but yeah, you you you could hit it from um you could hit it from Odessa if you can get into uh like a a Midland Odessa, uh if they have an airport big enough, you could hit it from El Paso, and you can hit it from San Antonio, but you're still uh you're still looking at a pretty decent drive uh from San from San Antonio, even uh I think it's probably like it is seven and seven-hour drive from San Antonio. So yeah, that's kind of one of the reasons why we've never actually um gone down there is because uh from us it's I think it's an 11-hour drive. Yeah, it's it's five and yeah, five and a half hours from El Paso, seven hours and thirteen minutes from uh from San Antonio, not to go to Big Bend.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:09

I mean, I can get to DC in ten hours. Oh yeah, that's a that's a long drive.

SPEAKER_03 2:01:17

Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, when we were driving uh from Texas, we spent three, eight, three hours. I mean, we're in DFW and we spent three hours driving to the border. And you can I might be able to get to maybe get to Knoxville um in nine hours. So uh but then after that, when we were driving up through Pennsylvania, I'm like, you know what, let's just do it. We could spend six hours driving and we're gonna be in the eight different states. It's just it's it's more more like uh being over in Europe, but Texas is so big, it's like forget about it. You're gonna take a you're gonna take a half a day just to drive.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:53

Yeah, just uh yeah, just to try to get out of the states, you're gonna be in the car for a long time. Yeah, that'd be deep down into Florida, 10 hours.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:03

Yeah, it is no joke. Uh, but you know, uh yeah, it's uh it's nine nine hours and eighteen minutes from where we're at to get down to Big Ben.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:12

Wow. Boy, that's tough. That's tough.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:14

That's not a if yeah. Yeah, that's a spend two weeks there if you're going to.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:21

Yeah, really. When you get there, you don't want to turn around. You don't want to turn and burn real quick.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:26

Yeah, no. I mean, yeah, so you could probably fly fly into El Paso and Marfa, I think, is about an hour away from Big Bend, um, and it's before um Big Bend, so you can hit that and and then go down in that area. But I would probably I probably plan about a week and a half, uh, just because you know you have to plus I bet they've got really dark skies out there.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:47

You can really see the stars.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:49

Oh, yeah. Yeah, very little light pollution. I mean, that's wow. I I I think it would be good. I mean, if you're if you're looking at something to spend a little bit of time at, uh, and then you know, it's really not that uh that far over the border, although you know, questionable whether anybody wants to go to Mexico across the Texas border right now. Yeah, well, yeah, that is that is one of the things.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:13

Um but yeah, cartel's a little spooky.

SPEAKER_03 2:03:17

Yeah, yeah. I don't uh I don't envy anybody that has to live down there and deal with that. But uh yeah, but well, uh John, uh I will I'll definitely try to make a a point to to see you. Um you know, getting to know you more has been a pleasure for sure. And uh, you know, I uh anytime you want to come on and talk about uh loveless stuff, or if we uh get a little bit further on his daughters, uh um you know, being willing to talk about it. I if if uh nobody will do it in print, I'd be more than happy to have them as guests on the podcast and talk through that. And if you guys wanted to do that as kind of like a panel, that would be really cool too.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:55

Yeah, that would be pretty neat right there. That would be uh something to think about to at least get it down because I know nothing about that part of his life. You know, that's just a that's a big zero right there.

SPEAKER_03 2:04:05

Well, I'll tell you what, if you uh proctor that uh you can be a co-host on the Good Old Blaze podcast where we actually uh break that open, um, you know, and then hopefully that'll be covered in print too. But I I know some people we could probably uh work it out where we can use uh podcast plus print and uh and get the story out. So anytime you want to, I am an open book on that.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:26

Yeah, we may try to do something with that just just to get it down, you know, because eventually somebody's gonna want to publish it at some point. Yeah. But we need to get the story, you know, to start with.

SPEAKER_03 2:04:38

Absolutely. Well, that's what I'm all about. I mean, just trying to record a certain aspect of history on audio. So I you know, I appreciate your time and you investing so much of yourself and in the community. And uh again, I it's been a real honor.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:53

Any anytime, I appreciate it. Like, say if you come to Georgia, come see me or whatever. But uh, you know, call me, Aaron, if you come up with any questions or you know, I can even if you want to make a knife, I can send you a loveless, I can send you a real loveless out there and you can draw a pattern straight off of it or something.

SPEAKER_03 2:05:11

So I don't I don't know if I'm that comfortable with uh with post and and holding stuff that I don't have the paycheck to uh reimburse you on, but I do appreciate the generosity for sure.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:23

Yeah, yeah, but that's uh I appreciate it. I thanks for all the hard work.

SPEAKER_03 2:05:26

Yeah, well, thank you again. I really appreciate you.

SPEAKER_02 2:05:29

Thank you for spending your time with me on this episode of the Good Old Blades podcast. Remember that you are worthy, love, and may God strengthen and bless you on your own journey in this crazy thing called life.