The first time I saw Mel Pardue, he smiled and said in comfortable Alabama tones, “We haven’t met before.”
Immediately I liked his smooth-southern charm, but I kept wondering what was behind the man who spent the best part of 35 years crafting custom knives.
Mel’s strongly built frame, clear brown eyes and neatly trimmed salt and pepper beard suggested a back-woods hunter. He came to love the countryside around Deer Range, Alabama, where he married and settled down.
I learned his easy-going rural manner hid a perceptive mind. He once said to me while we were riding his tractor around the 22 acres he and his wife Dodie own, “What happened at the World Trade Center was an act of war. If I had been on that plane, I would have rushed them.”
Clearly, Mel is a patriot. He has a strong sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. He is also a man dedicated to his wife of 34 years and their three children.
The workshop where “Pardue Knives” are fashioned sits next to the four-bedroom house he built and overlooks their bass-filled pond. As I took my morning jog with his dogs along the red-clay road that snakes through the pine forests, I felt serene and at peace. The birds sang, the sun was warm and I knew that life was good in Alabama.
This element of tranquility is obviously necessary to fuel the creative engine of a master craftsman. I stood in Mel’s shop, staring over his shoulder as he put 1200 grade sandpaper to the finish of a Damascus blade. He patiently explained that the steel was made from several different alloys that are welded together, patterned using dies, then extruded into shapes with either a trip hammer, hydraulic press, or by hand. “However,” he said, “you cannot see the pattern until it is etched with an acid like ferric chloride.”
To my untrained eye it looked like a normal piece of stainless. He grinned as if he’d explained the same thing to a thousand other “green-horns” before.
What struck me was the fact there was no sense of talking-down to me in his voice. He presented his subject with all the sympathy of a Socratic teacher. I was starting to learn what it takes to be a master blade-smith.
Mel was concerned about the new Federal Law after the World Trade Center attack. He leaned back, reached for his pack of Pall Malls, lit up, took a swig of his ever-present Pepsi and said, “One of my clients who is a knife collector and lawyer, just called. Apparently, the new Federal Law prohibits anyone from flying with an implement that slightly resembles a knife.”
He was visibly upset as he blew gray smoke into the air. “That means our rights are being taken away,” he said with the resolve of an Alabama rattler. “Now I must pack my knives in the checked-in luggage where they might get lost or stolen.”
Then he added, “The airlines won’t let us insure our knives for more than two thousand dollars. If my luggage is lost, I’ll have nothing to sell at the show even if my luggage is found two days later, because most sales are made on the first day.”
He took a long drag off his unfiltered cigarette and said, “I checked on loss of business insurance and it is just too expensive.”
Mel set the cup of Pepsi down on the workbench and picked up a beautifully finished folder, with Damascus blade and bolster, mastodon-ivory handle, and pearl-inlay file-worked backstarp. “What’s worse is the collectors must take the same risk with the knives they purchase at the shows. Sometimes luggage gets lost and when you’re a collector who spends $5,000.00 on easily transportable goods, he or she may be reluctant to place them in unsecured luggage.”
He said, “I saw this same thing happen with the gun makers.” He paused to reflect. “It killed their business.”
Here I was sitting with a man who had spent the best part of his life perfecting his craft, believing in America and its values, yet the look on his face was one of having been betrayed. He was enraged because his freedoms were being taken away, the freedom to make an honest living crafting raw materials into works of art with his own hands.
Men and women like him are the long-term victims of over-zealous governmental intervention, whipped up by a cooperative media circus. The voice of reason has been pushed into the wings where it is being forced to shout over the roar of the emotional crowd.
Having freedoms extinguished is an argument that permeates these cottage industries and on closer inspection we will see that the liberties of the majority are being constrained because the Clinton administration mistakenly took Sky Marshals off of domestic flights.
As Mel worked on his next project, I watched. He was one-to-one hand-machine milling a duplicate handle frame into which pearl inlay would be set. He cut out ten-thousandths of an inch per pass with a drill press turning at 30,000 rpm. His brown eyes concentrated on his work. His hands were steady. His body tensed on the more exacting parts and relaxed on the easy parts like a wave rolling up an uneven shore. I could tell he loved the creative process of seeing something come together.
Our conversation turned to website design. Mel recently downloaded a program so he could have more hands-on participation in the marketing of his products. Late at night, after the family has gone to bed, this 62 year-old man sits patiently at his digital Internet connection, and teaches himself the programming language HTML (Hyper Text Mark Up Language) so he can express his creativity and better market his knives.
He realizes the Internet is the future and with his photographic talents he uses a digital camera to post pictures of custom-made knives on his website, along with their description and price.
I was impressed by his progress in web design, as I looked at his own site’s rich-cork background, clear pictures, and functional layout. I read the opening statement with interest: “After the fall of feudalism in Medieval Europe, guilds were formed. They enabled master craftsmen to sell their products and support their families independently of the political influences of the time.”(http://mpardue.mystarband.net)
What Mel has learned about the new technology, he unselfishly puts to good use as vice-president of the Knifemakers’ Guild. Sharing with the other members and making their guild a better organization, is one of the driving forces in his life.
My thoughts returned to the recent tragedy at the World Trade Center. The French philosopher Jean-Jacque Rousseau (1712-1778) argued governments should make strong laws and make people to abide by them. For Rousseau, this is a case of forcing people to do what they really want – to be dignified, rational, human beings rather than stupid, selfish animals driven solely by their appetites. He argued extreme legislation helped make people free. Of course, this concept is open to abuse as we saw with Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler in the last century.
The reasoned fear of free men and women like Mel, who are used to their independence, is an overzealous government trying to protect its citizens from harm. Robbing a man of his liberties is a crime the American body politic must be careful to avoid. Men and women who are self-employed need to be able to travel freely and sell their crafts to support their families. The present policies go too far in protecting people from a possible harm that’s so ridiculously small you couldn’t get odds on it from a London bookmaker, provided Sky Marshals are onboard.
Mel Pardue and people like him are what made America great. Their ancestors came to this land, took raw materials and fashioned a living with their sweat and personal drive. They are now an endangered species. We must not let the American knife-maker go the way of the dinosaur.
RAUF BOLDEN is an American born in Colorado. He studied languages at University where he became a polyglot speaking German, French and Dutch. As a yacht master, he spent twenty years sailing more than 100,000 nautical miles while circumnavigating the planet with his wife Jeannette Dean, an internationally known sailor and writer. They plan to sail around the world again being very much in love while continuing to write fiction and feature articles. Their motto for life is, "Never Ever Give Up.”