KEEPSAKE CHRONICLES
Romancing the Past
Time
Zone
I was perusing my e-mail one Sunday night and was puzzled – I noticed that the e-mail I was looking at was dated the following Monday at 9:00 a.m. My website has been visited by inhabitants of over sixty countries, last time I looked, from Costa Rica to Iceland to Russia to Australia - but this was the first inquiry we received from such a place far away as Guam. It was a request to repair a very special artifact.
Basil F., an engineering consultant with a large international construction company had traveled the world and indulged his hobby of collecting a wide array of unusual artifacts of man and nature. On an assignment in Turan, just before the Shah's overthrow in the mid-1970s, he scoured local bazaars for items that appealed to his fancy.
One of his prized acquisitions was a very old 19th Century 20-inch high brass Russian Samovar. A small idiosyncrasy that added to its charm is the fact that its surface included Russian lettering which included the Old Russian version of the letter "T." Around 1920, Lenin had declared this letter's deep-throated guttural sound too vulgar to be allowed to remain in the Russian alphabet and had banished it. The Samovar had not only survived the misfortunes of this ancient letter which adorned its surface, but it had survived all of the travails of time and travel until it encountered a violent 8.5 offshore earthquake that shook the length and breadth of the Island of Guam in the mid-1990s.
Several photos of the damaged piece were included. It looked like it had been smacked around with a baseball bat.
Now, THIS was an exciting challenge. Brass, being an alloy of copper and zinc, is a malleable material, so we knew that, despite appearances, we could very likely get it back to its old self.
Basil mailed his unfortunate, badly beaten samovar to us. The only way to be able to reach all the dents was to unsolder each separate piece of the vessel. Once it was completely disassembled, our artisan hammered out each one of the plethora of dents. This skilled task alone took hours of painstaking effort. Once it had been reassembled, resoldered, repolished and lacquered, it looked like it had come out of a time capsule. Basil was happy to have his old friend back, memories intact.
