The sound of the mountains

Apr. 8—CATLETTSBURG "I've always been around sawdust piles and lumber piles, that was my playground," Bob Howard recalled about his childhood in Salyersville.

Howard grew up looking over a valley to his great-grandfather's saw mill in Magoffin County and developed a love for wood early.

That love of wood has stayed with Howard, from building his house to building dulcimers to restoring clocks and everything in between.

The sound of the mountains

"Music is all we had," Howard said about growing up in rural eastern Kentucky. "We had a basketball team and then a marching band. I'm telling you, band was just about more important to me than school was."

Howard started playing music as a child, taking after his family members. His father played trumpet, his mother percussion and his uncles played guitars.

"That's all we had," Howard said. "We didn't have cellphones, you'd be lucky to have channel 3, channel 8, channel 13. So, you had to have something."

In high school, he was solo trumpeter at Salyersville High School and played in the band as he attended Prestonsburg Community College (now Big Sandy Community and Technical College).

While in high school, he played guitar in rock and roll bands, The Camaros and the London Company.

"We rented a building, had dances every Friday and Saturday night," Howard said, adding he learned to play guitar around age 12.

He stopped playing music for two decades once he began working as a pharmacist in Ashland.

"It was off the chart," Howard said. "I was working and building and raising a family. and then the urge just hit me."

He went and got an old guitar and started playing again. Nowadays, he plays his Martin HD 28 guitar and is learning to play the banjo as well as the electrified dulcimers he built.

In 2018, he decided to build the state instrument of Kentucky, the Appalachian dulcimer. However, one wouldn't have been enough, so Howard decided to build 34 of them.

"Mountain dulcimers go way back," Howard said. "They were influenced from instruments in Europe. They made them out of tin cans and sticks and next thing you know there's dulcimers."

Howard was delivering a clock he restored for a client when they pulled out a dulcimer and told him they thought he could build one.

He researched how to build a dulcimer and began the process in his shop. He wanted each of his instruments to be unique. While each dulcimer he made has the classic hourglass shape, which Howard said got the instrument banned in some churches for resembling the curves of a woman, he used different types of woods as well as different shaped sound holes to create 34 different examples of dulcimers. In addition to the instruments, Howard made a portable stand for the instruments in his wood shop.

In an upstairs bedroom, with a dozen dulcimers laid out on a bed, Howard strummed different dulcimers, showcasing how different woods can warm up the sound of the instrument.

The former rock and roll guitar player then took customization one step further and electrified his acoustic dulcimers.

"I've never seen anyone do it," Howard said.

Howard placed a piezo pickup inside the instrument and then wired it for an output jack to plug into an amplifier. The piezo pickup senses vibrations in the wood, not the strings, and provides a sound closer to the natural sound of the dulcimer than microphones or other external pickups.

"That I play once a week," Howard said, pointing to his guitar.

"A couple three times a month," he continued as he shifted and pointed as his banjo.

"This I play everyday," he said, patting his dulcimer.

He said last fall he played for more than two hours at the Tri-State Optimist Club in Barboursville.

Time keeps ticking

Howard is not a man who does one or two of something, as shown by building almost three dozen dulcimers. But those numbers pale in comparison to the quantity of clocks he has built, restored or fixed.

"I have no idea," Howard said, when asked for a number. "I've probably got around 150 clocks now."

Throughout the house sit clocks of all shapes and sizes Howard has tinkered with.

"I did pharmacy as a profession," Howard said. "But my life's — if you want to call it skill or passion or love — is finding stuff even if I don't know about it and figuring it out and doing it. You know what I mean? Fix it. Play it. Work with it. Whatever it does. I want to know about it and fix it and make it."

In his entryway sits the first grandfather clock he made.

"I cut the cherry tree down that it's made of," Howard said. "It took me forever to decide on the finials."

It was several years later before he finalized a plan and turned the wood to complete the clock.

Behind the entryway is a sitting room with more and more clocks. One clock he took more than 18 hours to clean and restore the wood after he bought it at an estate sale. On a table sits a calendar clock from the 1800s, one of two he currently has, in front of a bookcase filled with more clocks. On the other wall hangs a clock he made.

"A customer gave me the movement from a grandmother clock instead of paying for me to fix a clock from him," Howard said. "I didn't need another grandfather clock sitting on the floor. So I said, 'OK, I'm going to make a wall clock out of it' and that's what I did."

In the formal living room, bookshelves are lined with mantel clocks, sometimes two deep.

"One that is broken that a customer really likes, that I'm able to fix, that's the one I love working on," Howard said. "When I would get clocks I didn't want them unless they were torn up. I can't learn to fix them if they are working."

In an upstairs bedroom, more than a dozen anniversary clocks fill the room.

"Those are like working on a spiderweb and having to not break it," Howard said.

Downstairs in his man cave sits a line of clocks he is finishing for a friend who passed.

"I want to make sure they are up to his standards," Howard said.

In addition to his collection of clocks, Howard has fixed and repaired countless clocks for customers over the years.

However, the 71-year-old retiree has decided it is time to slow down and is no longer fixing clocks for customers.

Hitchhiker to pharmacist

"I owe everything to those two papers," Howard said, pointing to two framed documents in his office. The first is his diploma from the University of Kentucky School of Pharmacy, and the second his certification from the state to work as a pharmacist.

After graduating from Salyersville High School, he attended Prestonsburg Community College to be an engineer.

"I didn't have the money to go to UK directly," Howard said. "I got (to PCC) anyway I could, hitchhiking and bumming rides."

While in his first semester at PCC, Howard was advised the job market for engineers was declining, but there was a great need for pharmacists.

"The greatest years of my life were high school and college," he said. He graduated in 1976.

He was doing an externship at Super X Pharmacy in Harrodsburg and was offered a job there. He and his then-wife bought a house in Harrodsburg, but the company asked him to help cover shortages in their Ashland store.

Within two weeks, the company offered Howard a position at the Ashland store.

"Sign me up. I said I want to get back to the hills. I don't like this flat land, get me back to the mountains," Howard said. "I called my wife and told her to put the house on the market. We never even unpacked."

They moved and rented a place while Howard looked for a piece of land to build a house on. Later that year, they found a piece of land just off Ky. 180, south of I-64.

"It's great here," Howard said. "You can be anywhere in 15 minutes and are still out in the country."

Over the next two years, Howard built the house and worked as a pharmacist.

"I didn't sleep," Howard said with a laugh, when asked how he did both.

Howard had not only learned music from his family, but his father, in addition to playing the trumpet, was a contractor and taught him how to build a house.

As a child Howard spent the winters, when his dad's work with area steel mills slowed down, building houses with his father.

When Howard moved into the house, only one bedroom, the kitchen and a bathroom were completed. It took him several years to finish the house.

'Don't you bust that up'

Something else Howard has built, and rebuilt, is his woodworking shop.

When he built his first grandfather clock, he used a radial arm saw and worked in his garage.

Now, there is a large shop built in his back yard.

The sides of the shop are lined with cabinets from the old Super X pharmacy where he worked.

"I told them, 'Don't you bust that up,'" Howard said.

Howard has used that phrase several times to make or complete projects.

In addition to the cabinets, in his house sits a peer mirror.

"This is one of my favorite things I've made," Howard said.

A peer mirror is a full-length decorative mirror.

"I'm peering at myself," Howard explained, leaning toward the mirror.

The glass for the mirror came from the cosmetic department at Super X during a remodel, to which Howard told the workers "don't you bust that up."

Howard had seen a similar setup in a friend's house and, when the store mirrors were being replaced, decided to build his own.

Sportsman

Down in his man cave, Howard reached for a leather gun case, from which he pulled a black powder flintlock he made.

The barrel was made by his friend Bill Large. The stock of the gun he made from a piece of tiger stripe maple. He browned, instead of blued, the metal parts of the gun.

"Once it's done you don't have to worry about (the browned parts)," Howard said.

A takedown bow hangs on the mount of one of the deer he'd taken.

"I remember each of those," Howard said, about the mounts that lined the wall.

He modified the bow to use as he aged.

"I became an old man," Howard said. "When I first made it, it was 76 pounds pull, so I took it up to the shop and redid it."

He was able to reduce the pull to mid-50 pounds.

Howard used his experience in archery during a big game hunt in South Africa several years ago.

"It was the greatest trip I ever took," he said.

In his foyer, under a desk he made, sits a zebra rug. On the wall hangs the mounts of some of the animals he took on his trip.

"The kudu is the one I'm most proud of," Howard said. "It's the top of the mountain for African plain game."

In addition, the mount of a blessed buck, an oryx, a warthog, a gemsbuck, a blue wildebeest and an impala adorn his walls.

In another corner of his man cave, big mouth bass are mounted.

Howard said fishing is his hobby right now. As spring arrives, he can be found on area lakes with a line in the water.

"Grayson Lake is going to be my eternal home," Howard said.

While Howard admits his age is something he thinks about now and he can't do as much as he once did, he ensures he works out and takes care of himself, which has allowed him to be in better shape than he was several decades ago.

"I think when you sit down, you die," Howard said.