Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Beneath the roar of shop fans as loud as Cessnas, you hear rhythmic bangs, periodic clangs, a high silvery sound so pure it tests your nerves…
But Lou Mueller’s office is quiet. A silver tray on his desk holds a bottle of rye and Manhattan glasses. Leaning against a technical binder is a book about the sculptor Giacometti. Below the shelves, flat files hold iron door handles, votive holders, and crosses, reproduced in precise period detail. There’s also a skull in the bottom desk drawer; we’ll leave its provenance unspoken.
The man surprises you.
A machinist, Mueller has developed a cheaper way to crimp Anheuser-Busch’s bottle caps; rebuilt fire trucks that now run in Frontenac and Saudi Arabia; worked on the Mercury and Apollo space capsules. He didn’t start his blacksmithing career until age 60, but in the 27 years since, he’s used his anvil to capture and re-create time, designing hinges for a replica of the original 1791 St. Charles Borromeo Church and pulleys for the windows at the Jarrot Mansion.
“See those pipe tongs on the wall?” his friend Kenny Valdejo asks. “That reproduction goes back to the 17th century.”
And what about that tribal-looking thing, the ram’s head on a snake’s body? “That’s just Whimsy,” Mueller says, giving the word category status. Both adventurer and perfectionist, he’s 87 and still not bored. He ran Strassenfest for its last 12 years. Joined an archaeological society. Piloted a plane.
“My father died when I was about 12,” he says, “and that was still Depression days yet.” His mother made ends meet—or at least came close—by running a rooming house at 5500 Clemens. “I never washed so many pillowcases in my life,” he groans. Desperate to get away from the laundry, he lied about his age and got a job polishing little brass screws all day long. He got fired soon after for lying about his age. At 15, he became an apprentice at a machine company.
That’s when he spent some time blacksmithing. “The fire just bites you,” he says. He loved it—but World War II interrupted the infatuation. “I was assigned to a bomb disposal unit. The first night we dug bombs out of the roads, I lay there looking up at the sky afterward. My eyes wouldn’t close.”
He got used to the fear—then got stabbed in a rice paddy. Back home, he worked on the “Bumble Bee,” a tiny fighter plane released from the belly of a McDonnell Douglas bomber. At General Electric, he rode the rails to test the first gas turbine engines. “We rode that damn screaming locomotive backwards and forwards,” he says. “You had to lie on your belly, and it was hot and sweaty and noisy.”
By then, he’d met his spirited future wife: “She asked for a ride and then left her earrings in the car,” he says, grinning, “and the girl I was going with found them.”
Mueller opened his own tool-and-die shop, and by the time of the big jumbo jets, Lockheed was buying his time for months, demanding precision forgings.
“Was that your patent?” Valdejo asks.
“Yeah. I have some patents on steel fabric, too, and some going now on a beer faucet.” He brings over a beer tap and twists a handle. “The beer faucet that has been out there since day one. Let’s just take this piece off. Here’s the valve. The beer has to come in, go around that rubber ring and around the shaft…” It’s too complicated. I tune out until he says, “There’s been a big thing in St. Louis—don’t ask me why, but St. Louisans drink their beer colder than anybody in the U.S. If you take this tapper head here, they circulate the refrigerant and frost this column, but they can’t cool the faucet. So now I’m developing one…”
“If you give him enough time he can figure out most anything,” Valdejo says.
Mueller’s toughest job ever wasn’t rebuilding a fire engine or making hardware for a space capsule. It was building a die for a little oil ring for a piston. “It was a new design, and the slot pattern was pretty intricate—and so small, I had to file all the contours and shapes wearing a four-power magnifying glass,” Mueller recalls. If most of us measure out our lives in coffee spoons, he’s calculating in ten-thousandths of an inch.
We go out to the tool room, where hot air blows and a big press bends metal to make dies. Slugs of metal sparkle on a mat, and a machine’s punching corners out of sheets of aluminum with quick crunches. “This is the microwelder,” Mueller says, pointing. “We can put two sewing machine needles together with it.”
“End to end?” Valdejo asks, testing.
“End to end.”
Mueller lifts some metal thing that I can’t parse. “We’re making tools for a pipeline in Canada,” he says. “This thing right here is going to dig. A wheel will have blades going across, and it will turn backward and dig as it goes.”
“Ditch Witch from hell,” Valdejo mutters.
“Yep. Nine feet deep in one pass.”
“Tell her about the space capsules.”
“I made some pieces for Mercury, but they were only little bitty things. Apollo, the main hinge that operated the door, I personally made that.”
“It’s in the Smithsonian,” Valdejo adds.
“I bet I can tell you where the cutter marks are bad, too,” Mueller says. “Sometimes, when you cut a little too deep, you put a nick in it.” He cocks his head. “That’s what’s called putting your initials on it.”
