Let us drift back in time to another era, another America, another place.. a far-off, small-town gray iron foundry somewhere in the Midwest. A local foundry employing local molders and sand casters - and with its own captive pattern shop whose artisans, mostly immigrant Germans and Swiss, make the beautiful mahogany and pine wood patterns for the molders. The process is simplicity itself and thousands of years old: if you want to cast an object in iron, you first carve, whittle and glue together a perfect wood duplicate of the object, complete to every detail. This pattern is then 'invested' in sand by the molders to make cavities which duplicate the pattern. These cavities (molds) are then poured full of molten iron. On cooling, the sand mold is shaken apart, and there is your iron duplicate! It is child-at-the-beach-play writ large...

    Years ago, before air conditioning I guess, and when windows and doors stood open day and night (nights back then were not filled with roaming bands of the possessions-challenged) to let the breezes in, in fact, back when I was a boy down South, most homes came equipped with doorstops. Those stops, no longer fixtures in our hermetically sealed domiciles today, kept the doors from slamming shut when those selfsame breezes cooled the inhabitants. The doorstops were an original form of art, and came in many shapes and sizes. I remember my mother favored elephants, and we had iron elephants which held every door in place in those days, and which stubbed many an errant toe in the dark, I might add.

    Another favorite was a bullfrog. A jolly iron bullfrog whose bulk assured no wind that blew could slam a door left to his keeping. George Rhine's job-foundry cast these bullfrog doorstops, among other products, and they were a profitable line indeed. The wood pattern for these frogs had been made by Old Fritz, the German pattern maker. Old Fritz was an artisan - and a stickler for details. His bullfrog was anatomically perfect and well proportioned, at least to his aging craftsman's eyes.

    But to the boys on the molding floor, the frog lacked some vital detail - something was missing - something, so to speak, they couldn't get their hands on. Day after day they poured a never-ending series of iron bullfrog doorstops but always there was this feeling that something was missing.

    Then one day it hit them: the bullfrog had no pecker! So, they decided to see to that! That morning as usual, they took Fritz's production wood pattern down- under his watchful eye - so they would not splinter or dent it with their rough handling. They pulled their "cope and drag molds" in "green" sand and set them to dry for the afternoon's "pour off". At noon - as all was well - and the old cupola in the casthouse was rumbling away cooking up its "heat" of molten iron for the afternoon's casting operations, Old Fritz went to lunch.

    The molding room gang went into action. One of their number, hardly less adept with pocketknife and pine than Old Fritz - had whittled a perfect little pecker-and-balls out of wood. A pattern of anatomically correct male parts! Quickly, the two-part frog molds were opened up, and into the rotund belly cavity of each, the pecker pattern was quickly inserted and withdrawn - assuring that to at least this day's generation of frog doorstops there might be more to Life than just hanging out (so to speak, that is!) and leaning on the bottoms of doors... Then the molds were quickly closed and all was as before.

    That afternoon the molds were poured, and then according to routine, when the molten iron had chilled to a glowing red, the sand molds were shaken apart and each red-hot glowing frog sat there cooling upon the sandy remains of the erstwhile mold from which he had hatched. Old Fritz was there as usual, seeing to the molds as they were shaken out.

    At this juncture, George usually was overcome with cigar chewing, laughing, wheezing, and gravel-rumbling as he told this tale... "And there was Old Fritz, bending over wide-eyed and examining the belly of each red-hot frog... 'Gott in Himmel! Gott in Himmel!' he said, over and over. He would look closely at the featureless, smooth belly of his wood pattern frog, his eyeglasses pushed up on his head. Then he would stare in puzzlement at the long row of just-cast bullfrogs - protruding from each one a tiny, perfect, red-hot pecker...". Fun and games in the gray iron foundries of yore.

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