Tom, that was a fantastic post, very well written, and most evocative.  
Thank you! 
 
Pete
cloudy Port Ludlow
 
 
In a message dated 6/8/2011 10:04:16 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
oldtools-request@r... writes:

Message:  24
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2011 17:14:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: Thomas Conroy  
Subject: [OldTools] Re:  Max Alth and  the origins of Scary Sharp
To: oldtools@r...,  jem1098@p...
Message-ID:  <973050.44413.qm@w...>
Content-Type:  text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Oh Galoots:

Something about Joe's  description reminds me of one of my favorite 
sharpening books: "Scissors Sam  Says Be Sharp." Looking at objective points of 
comparison I'm not sure the  similarity is very deep, maybe just in the whiff 
of the 'seventies that came  to my nose, but Sam is worth talking about.

Scissors Sam was an  old-fashioned hobo, the kind that was common back 
before World War II. He was  born and raised on a Midwestern farm but couldn't 
settle down or be  controlled, took to the roads and kept moving for the rest 
of his life. This  seems to have been the 1940s through 1970s, a period 
when the old tramp  lifestyle (hobo jungles, riding the rails, bindles and the 
gooseberry lay  which, no matter what it sounds like,* meant stealing 
laundry that had been  spread out to dry on gooseberry bushes) was in rapid 
decline; when kids again  took to the roads in my generation it was based on 
hitchiking from city to  city, not on railroads and rural charity. I'd have 
thought that the old-style  hobo life had died in the forties, but Sam shows tha
t 
it was still hanging on  as late as the 1970s, still with occasional 
national conventions that would  elect a purely honorary "King." He was proud of
 
having once been elected King  of the Hobos.

Every old-style tramp would have an easily portable trade  he could use to 
barter for food or a little cash, and which might help  establish that he 
wasn't a vagrant when the police picked him up; mending  china, the 
old-fashioned way with copper rivets, for instance. Sam's trade was  sharpening;
 
sharpening any farm or shop or household tool you gave him, but he  had a 
particular affinity for scissors. He was proud of his skill and  integrity, he 
thought about what he was doing and the tools that were used for  it, he did the
 
best job he could whatever the pay or customer or other  circumstances, and 
he scorned the sharpeners who, through ignorance or lack of  care, did less 
than he himself could. A true craftsman, in his very narrow and  limited 
way. 

Around the early 1970s Sam walked into a little  publisher's office in 
Santa Barbara carrying a strange combination of personal  philosophy and 
practical sharpening advice and autobiography written out  longhand in a tattere
d 
blue exercise book. The publisher (I see the publisher  as someone just a bit 
too old and conventional to be real counterculture, sort  of like Santa 
Barbara itself, but way too young and quirky to be  establishment, probably 
working out of a one-room storefront that reverted to  being a real estate 
agent's when his mimeographs and offsets were moved out  and he got a real job);
 
The publisher, I say, had taste and imagination and  printed Sam's book exac
tly as it was written, without trying to edit out the  quirkiness. Its a 
short-run offset paperback, maybe seventy pages if I recall  correctly [turns 
out to be 52, according to Amazon], printed on halved 8.5 x  11 paper 
stapled at the spine (which means that it doesn't open well), with  crude
line drawings and a photo of Sam dressed for the road. The publisher  must 
have had a good distribution system and he apparently gave it a big print  
run, because it doesn't seem to be all that rare even though there was  
apparently just the one edition.

"Scissors Sam Says Be Sharp" is not a  book whose virtues are terribly 
obvious. To get to the sharpening advice you  have to wade through the 
"philosophy," and vice versa, and most of the  sharpening advice is pretty crude
---  
he talks about planes, for  instance, and the best you can say is that he 
probably could leave a farmer's  #5 a little sharper than he found it. 
Knives---  well, he tells you to  avoid the powered-grinder guys in supermarket 
parking lots who will eat up the  steel of your knives without really 
sharpening them, so that is the most  important essential. Maybe he talks about 
scythes, Michael, so I suppose I  ought to look at it again, but I don't remembe
r 
anything illuminating to the  non-user. Talks about the good and bad brands 
of stones and files, except that  the best he knew was a coarse Monkey Ward 
artificial stone. But Sam knew  scissors better than any other author I 
have found, and I learned more from  him about how to sharpen scissors
than from any other source. Learned about  the little nub between the 
handles that you file if the tips don't quite  close;
about dimpling the hinge with a center punch to tighten it up a bit;  about 
the good scissors that can be sharpened with a file and the bad ones  that 
need a stone (because they are too hard) or can't be sharpened at all  
(because they are too soft); about the housewives who have destroyed their  good
 
dressmaking shears by using them as secateurs and then cutting sandpaper  to 
"sharpen" them, and the difficulties of dealing with such customers. I  
found my copy in a library 25 cent book sale bin in the '80s, almost  
indistinguishable from the bad poetry and cookbooks, and I treasure it, even  th
ough 
I long ago internalized all that I will get out of it.

Or maybe  I haven't got everything I can out of it. I have always regarded 
Sam's  philosophy of life as pretty shallow and uninspiring; well, I did go 
to a  school where they force-fed Plato to us as if we were Strassbourg 
geese, and  I'm not that fond of philosophy at the best of times. But I few 
years ago I  was delighted to read a newspaper column by the San Francisco 
Chronicle's John  Carroll, one of my favorites, and he too treasured Sam--- for 
his homespun  philosophy, not for the parts about sharpening. 

And what happened to  Sam? Who knows? He gave his book to a publisher and 
that was it. Chances are  he went back on the road and died there. He seems, 
in his way, to have been a  happy man.

Tom  Conroy
Berkeley

------------------------------------------------------------------------