EAIA fortunate to have able, enthusiastic members

Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, Inc., The, Jan/Feb 2001 by Hall, Elton

TAKING NOTE . . .

Matter for the January/February Shavings prepared by those of us who tend to work to a deadline is produced in the days following Thanksgiving. In addition to the beneficial influence of the day itself, our annual family visit with my brother in D.C. included a performance of The Capitol Steps, a band of Capitol Hill humorists who take familiar songs and provide new lyrics lampooning some of our political leaders. The Capitol Steps have suffered no want of grist for their mill recently, and they provide a valuable service in helping the electorate maintain a suitable perspective.

Fortunately, the EAIA is blessed with many earnest, able, and enthusiastic members who contribute a great deal of time and effort to the Association in various ways to help us keep moving along. Some have been at it a long time, some are more recent arrivals, and some have changed from one task to another. For all of these we are thankful.

There is more coordination and cooperation between the various activities, partly, I think, because of a greater realization that many of our programs have an interest in one another.

For example the work of the Annual Meeting Committee, the Web Site Committee, the Library Committee, and the Membership Committee are all of interest to one another and have the potential to support one another. Fortunately, e-mail makes both intra and inter committee communication so much easier than it used to be.

The new line-up of the Library Committee and the renewed activity there is a good example. Lisa Reber has brought energy and enthusiasm to the committee, and Dan Reibel, one of the most perennially helpful of all EAIA members, has joined the effort. The library is a resource with considerable potential for rendering service to members and to the field at large.

The membership implication of course is that the more service we can provide for our members, the more members we will have. But in order to make the library serviceable, members have to be able to find out what it contains and get hold of the materials they need. The catalog of the old EAIA library is long out of print, and the inventory of the Cooke Collection was made with software incompatible with the EAIA list.

Enter Phil Cannon with the necessary expertise to get the lists together and merge them. While the entire library is still a long ways from being fully cataloged, a list including title, author, location, and whether the publication may leave the Spruance Library or not will go a long way to making the collection accessible.

The benefit to Phil and his web site operation is that the library list will be another valuable piece of information to include. The bene. fit to the membership effort is that a good representation of the library as an advantage of membership on the Web site will make FAIR all the more attractive to potential members. In these ways we can all help each other.

This issue contains both a report on the EAIA tour to England and France last fall as well information about the 2001 tour to England and Scotland this fall. These tours have been very successful in providing outstanding opportunities for seeing, learning, and collecting among a congenial group of fellow members.

Lord Addison Travel does a very professional job in managing the details and making sure everything goes smoothly along the way while allowing a good deal of flexibility should we get any bright ideas as we go along. I have paid attention to the prices of tours offered by other historical and cultural organizations, and there is no doubt that we receive very good value from Lord Addison. Anyone contemplating going on the tour should feel free to contact anyone who has gone on the past three, whose names I can provide.

The EAIA-Eastfield Summer Camp, which had its first run last July, generated such enthusiasm among the participants that we will run another one next summer from July 16-21. Full details will be included in the next Shavings.

There are three aspects of the program that made it especially effective. The first is that the participants chose a workshop each day in which they learned through instruction and use of the tools how to perform some of the tasks related to a particular trade. In many of the workshops they pro. duced an object by the end of the day that they could take home.

The second element was the setting of an early nineteenth-century village where we drew our water, cooked on an open fire, and lit our way by candles. That experience added a dimension to our understanding of life in the preindustrial era that no amount of reading or museum visiting could match.

Finally, the uncommon opportunity to spend a week with a group of likeminded, enthusiastic, fellow members generated a camaraderie with an exchange of ideas, information, and good humor not ordinarily attainable in the usual meeting or workshop.

While not everyone can participate in these special programs, the more of them we can offer, the more useful we will be to all who are interested in tools and the mechanical arts. There is no way of foreseeing what bringing good and enthusiastic minds together under the right conditions can lead to.