Elias told her. She said, "Make me two more." He made two more. He made them for her, and he made four for a market garden operation he had heard about near Ord, a woman named Selma Radka, who grew vegetables for restaurants in two counties, and who had complained publicly at the extension office meeting that her hand tools were the limiting factor in her operation.
Elias drove out to Radka's place in September with four hoes and two transplanting trowels and a weeding fork, all made from spring steel, all ground to the same hollow bevel. He priced them at $35 for the hoes and $18 for the smaller tools. Radka picked up a hoe and walked out to her garden with it and worked for 15 minutes and came back and paid him without negotiating.
Now the arithmetic was different. The hoes cost more in time than the knives, roughly 4 hours each, including forging, grinding, and handle fitting. But they sold for more, and the market was different. Farmers and market gardeners were not the same buyers as butchers and hunters.
They bought in sets. They bought replacements. Radka ordered six more hoes by the end of the year and told two other market gardeners. And those two told the extension agent, who was a man named Grant Oberly, and Oberly drove out to the shop in November and spent an hour looking at the tools and asking questions that were specific enough that Elias took him seriously.
Oberly said he had been looking for a supplier for a demonstration program he was running on intensive vegetable production, and that he had not been able to find domestic hand tools of adequate quality at a price the participants could afford. He asked Elias what it would take to supply tools for 12 participants. Elias went home and did the arithmetic and came back with a figure. Oberly said he would bring it to the program committee.
The committee approved it in January 1975. Elias was 17 years old. The contract was for 72 tools, a mix of hoes, trowels, and forks at a total price of $2,140 to be delivered by April 1st. He had never made more than four tools in a week.
He had 11 weeks. You need to see the shop in February of 1975 to understand what came after. Hyram was 69 years old, and his hands were still steady, but he tired earlier in the day than he had the year before, and he had given Elias the full run of the shop, which meant the forge was going 6 days a week from 7:00 in the morning until the coal ran low in the afternoon. Elias had bought a half ton of coal in October for $63, and he bought another quarter ton in January for $17.50.
He had sourced enough spring steel from Kesler's bin and two additional implement dealers in adjacent counties to cover the contract with material left over. He had a system now. Rough forge the blanks in batches of six. Normalize in batches.
Grind profiles on the belt grinder. Finish the bevels by hand on a flat platen. Heat treat in batches of four. Fit handles from ash stock he had gotten from a sawmill in Ainsworth for $11 for a bundle of shorts and offcuts.
Each tool was stamped with a small mark he had made himself. It was a letter B inside a simple rectangle, because Hyram had told him early on that a man who makes something and does not put his name on it does not believe in what he made. He finished the 72 tools on March 28th, 4 days ahead of the contract date. He loaded them into the truck and delivered them to Oberly's office.
Oberly counted them and inspected three at random and wrote a check for $2,140. Elias drove home and deposited the check and sat at the kitchen table and wrote the figures in the notebook. Revenue from the contract: $2,140. Materials, including coal, steel, handle stock, abrasives, and the stamp: $97.40.
Net on the contract: $2,042.60. He was 17 years old. He did not celebrate. He went back to the shop and started the next batch.
The story that traveled after the extension contract was different in kind from the two stories that had traveled before it. The first story was about a strange boy and cracked springs. The second story was about knives that held an edge. The third story was about a 17-year-old who had fulfilled an extension-program contract for precision agricultural tools on time and at the agreed price.
That story traveled differently. It went from Oberly's office to the extension district office in Grand Island and from there to a regional agricultural newsletter that ran a four-paragraph item in its March 1975 issue describing the program and noting that the tools had been made locally from salvaged spring steel by a high school student in Duffy County. The newsletter went to several hundred farms and agencies across the central plains. Elias did not read the newsletter.
He heard about it from Hyram, who had gotten a copy from a neighbor. Hyram handed it to him and said, "You should read this." Elias read it. He handed it back.
He said, "They spelled my name right." That was the whole of his reaction.
By the fall of 1975, he had received letters from four individuals and one vocational school asking about his tools or his methods. He answered three of the letters with brief factual replies. The vocational school letter he answered in more detail because the instructor who wrote it had asked specific questions about heat treatment of spring steel that were worth answering. The instructor's name was Wendell Joerger and he taught metalwork at a school in Hastings and he had been trying to get his students to work with salvaged high-carbon steel for 2 years with inconsistent results.
Elias wrote him four pages in the same careful hand he used in his notebook, covering quench media, tempering temperatures, and the color-reading method that Hyram had taught him. He mailed it without making a copy because he did not think of it as something that needed to be preserved. Joerger wrote back and said the information had been exactly what his program needed and that three of his students had successfully hardened their first spring steel blades using the method. He asked if Elias would be willing to visit the school.