Jay Hensley Recollection

A brief review of last year's meeting will give you a pretty good idea of what goes on at one of these gatherings:

A cold rain and fierce April winds buffeted us that first day. Bundled up against the storm, heads down, we scuttled to and fro. This was quite different from the warm and breezy days of May we'd experienced in previous years!

Most of us arrived on Sunday April 16 in time for dinner and left after breakfast on Saturday. There were 22 in all, 20 voting members plus administrator Bev Marois and me. For an organization with 48 full members and seven associate members, that's a huge turnout. Those who traveled the farthest were Albie Barden from Maine, Jerry Frisch from Washington state, Norbert Senf from Quebec, and Ernst Kiesling from Nova Scotia. Other attendees included Pat Manley, Rod Zander, Dan Fisher (Pennsylvania), Gary Hart, Ben Hurd (Missouri), Ron Karson (Ontario), Peter Solac (Minnesota), Walter Kelly (Pennsylvania), Martin Pearson (Massachusetts), Ben Sotero (California), Rebecca and Dan Carnes (North Carolina), John LaGamba, Tony Cuoco (New York), and Tim Custer (Ohio). Tom Trout, long-time member who lives nearby, popped in and out as often as his work schedule allowed.

We met each day around the big table in the library in the building across from our guest lodge. Our bricks-and-mud sessions were held outside the old red barn a short way on down the mountain. Close attention to business matters was interspersed with a work session on designing a kachelofen for the space it will heat, building a pizza oven, laying up a generic masonry heater and then safety testing it for a worst-case scenario.