She Watched the Mayville Blast Furnaces in the 1920's

It's hard to find anyone in Mayville who can still give first hand stories about the iron works.   Dolores Ihde, of Mayville, age 95, told me today that as a child  she and her grandmother would sit out on the front porch at night and look  west from their German Street porch to watch  the tops of the two Mayville blast furnaces lighting up the sky.

Credit:  http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/2011/02/10/blast-furnace-spectacle-will-be-fire-and-steel-festival-highlight-84229-28144283/              No,  this is not Mayville in the 1920's, but I'm using my imagination.

Dolores was born in 1918, and the Mayville iron works shut down in 1928.   Dolores' fond memory reminds me of this story of Cleveland:

My father and I made other trips and best were the ones to the blast furnaces.  He explained how the iron ore from the boats was mixed with coal and carried in little cars to the top of the chimney above the furnace. It was dumped in, and as it fell down “a special kind of very hot air” was blown into it.  The coal and iron ore caught fire, and below they fell into great tubs as melting metal, a pinkish gold liquid, incandescent as the sun is when it is starting to set. The man and child were allowed to go rather near the vats, to feel the corching heat and to drown their gaze in the glowing boil. All the rest of the building was dark; the
silhouettes of the men who worked at the vats were black shadows. Wearing long leather aprons, they moved about the vats ladling off the slag. That was very skilled work, my father said; the men had to know
just how much of the worthless slag to remove. For years afterwards, when we could no longer spend Sunday afternoons on these expeditions, we used to go out of our house at night to see the pink reflections from the blast furnaces on the clouds over Cleveland. We could remember that we had watched the vatfuls
of heavily moving gold, and those events from the past were an unspoken bond between us.

“The Blast Furnace” from Home to the Wilderness by Sally Carrighar (1944  Houghton Mifflin Company).

Here you see the blast furnaces at Völklingen Ironworks, Völklinger Hütte (Germany), a  - UNESCO World Heritage site.  The plant closed in 1986.   Today, the Völklinger Hütte is a museum.  You can tour the production areas, or visit the  interactive science center which has ironmaking exhibits.   

Völklingen Ironworks  Credit and many thanks to: flickr.com member mbell1975, shown here
with permission.  This photo and others from the Völklingen photostream 
by mbell1975 are posted at this flickr.com site.

Mayville Hunter

Longtime Mayville resident, David Kern, died on December 31 after a long battle with cancer.  Dave's best friends knew him as "Cobby."  I have learned since I moved here that if you were born before 1960 and grew up in Mayville your boyhood  friends probably gave you a nickname, like Popeye, Brownie,  Strookie,  Lloydie, Stoney, Hub, Rags, Bumpy, Chickie, Melf, Steinie, Nubbie, Bootsie, Mouse, Fuzzy, Deke, Stick, or Cobby.   That's a nice tradition.  Better to grow up in a small town  where they took the time to give you a decent nickname than in a crowded city where you are little more than a number.   I don't know where Dave's nickname of Cobby came from, but you had to love it.  

Because I did  not know Dave as long or as well as many others, here I bring the perspective of someone who saw him around town and admired him greatly.  Dave figured out how to combine  work, recreation and community service into one life.   How did he do that?

My first experiences with Dave began  about 20 years ago,  on our local "muni"  golf course and  at St. Mary's basketball games.  Dave was an excellent golfer who would defeat me in Thursday night league matches, always a gentleman on the golf course and never too serious about it.  (Yes, we did enjoy a beer while out on the course.)  My  fondest memories were at the old St. Mary's gym where I first encountered Dave around 1995 as a referee for  the grade school games,  in which Jack Hurst and I coached.   Dave made the calls, but he also gave quick tips to the kids when he blew the whistle at them, showing them how to pivot to avoid a travel, or how to avoid a double dribble call.   Dave helped the young players avoid line violations on in-bounds passes, and that wasn't easy because the line along the length of our little court was about a foot from where the fans were sitting.  Other refs like Nubbie Dornfeld, and Melf  and Dale Gourlie (also a co-worker at MEC)  helped the kids in the same way, but Nubbie,  Melf and Dale would tell you that the kids really listened to  Dave.  Well, they had to look up to him.  He was tall and wiry, and I'm sure they saw him as a giant.    But for these children  his gift was that he was kind and gentle.

Dave Kern  Duck hunting with Maddy
Credit:  Koepsell Funeral Home obit 

Dave Kern saw a lot of Mayville history over his 60 years, and worked at Mayville Engineering Company (MEC) for 40 of them.   After he got sick he just kept working.  The word "disability" was not part of his vocabulary.   As the obit says, Dave was MEC's reloader division Sales/Customer Service Manager.  The origin of the MEC shotshell reloader product  is a huge manufacturing-hunting Mayville story, which I can't get into here.   

Dave represented MEC  at  outdoor trade events where he would present the MEC product around the country.  He met my brother Jim from Madison, who was selling sportsmen knives for some company, at one of those  events and Jim gets back and calls me asking, “Who was that great guy from Mayville that I met at the sports show in Vegas?”  Dave had gone out of his way to go up to Jim  and make conversation with him,   because he could tell (we look alike) that he was my brother, and of course Dave as always wanted to be friendly.   Dave was not for himself.  He was always reaching out,  as he did here with Jim whom he had never met.

I can't think of a better ambassador that a company could have than  Dave Kern.   With this job with the MEC reloader division  he could take his passion for hunting into the workplace.  Away from work he loved to hunt with his black lab, Maddy, whom you see here with Dave.  

The beautiful obituary talks about the outdoors organizations in which Dave was actively involved, and on top of that Dave helped out with our community organizations as well.  I was privileged to serve on the Mayville Area Chamber of Commerce board with Dave back in the 90's. 

One of the highlights of my Christmas season was at the Mayville Inn last month where I was able visit with Dave Kern at a get together there.    It's hard to find people like Dave, who figure out how to live "the good life"  which means that he mixed work with recreation, and he made time for unselfish community service, always with a smile and a handshake.  Dave's death is a huge loss to Mayville.   But it's a loss much worse for  Sheryl, their children,  Jason and Jaime and their families, mother and dad Hank and Jane,  Dave's  MEC co-workers, and his friends who now have to get along without this amazing Mayville guy they knew as  Cobby.