WILTON, Conn. -- 'I collect tools like some people collect booze,' joked Kenneth Lynch Sr., a 79-year-old blacksmith and master metal worker explaining how he wound up accumulating a mind-boggling 500 tons of tools.
It's a long story and distractions are hard to avoid for a man who repaired the Statue of Liberty, counted the Rockerfellers as clients and worked on the Chrysler Building and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.
But Lynch likes to start at the beginning -- and the makings of his staggering assembly of tools began in 1917 outside a New Jersey smithy shop.
It seems a blacksmith lost two helpers to Army service in World War I.
'He was too old to get under a horse, so he asked my father if I could help him,' Lynch recalled. 'I took to horseshoeing like some kids take to oatmeal.'
Another blacksmith quit one day and left without his tools. Lynch was sent to chase after the fuming man.
'He said, 'Go ahead and keep them,'' Lynch recalled, 'and that's how the collection started.'
A powerful man hardly slowed by a stroke a few years ago, Lynch now has hundreds of thousands of tools of every size and description and values the collection at more than $2 million.
He travels the world in pursuit of his hobby and has hired a curator to catalog and display his private collection.
Lynch purchased a factory full of tools in France, a collection of hammers used to make horse-drawn carriages in England and 17th-century anvils used for suits of armor found in a dusty shop in Spain.
But silversmithing tools made by a Polish immigrant and his son, both master 'hammer men,' hold a place of honor in an exhibit room on the sprawling Kenneth Lynch & Sons complex.
The 500-piece collection came from Frank Trella, of Meriden, Conn., who worked for the International Silver Co. for 40 years like his father before him. He sold the 500-piece collection to Lynch for several thousand dollars.
'It was hard for him to part with his tools. He (Trella) loved his job so well he treated his tools like children, like I would. He knew the men wouldn't be born to make these tools again,' Lynch said.
Tools are history and much more to Lynch.
The third-generation blacksmith has two huge ferry lights tucked away in the incredible clutter of his company buildings. The ferry carried immigrants to Ellis Island and Lynch has had them restored with painstaking care.
To Lynch, tools are the ghosts of those who built a nation.
'These people like Trella know the tools are valuable because they put food on the table for so many years, but they don't have the reverence for them that I do,' Lynch said.
'I admire the older men and their tools. Tools are such a personal thing, you can almost tell a man's personality by his tools,' he said. ---
Not everyone shares Lynch's passion for hammers and such. In 1928, Lynch met a cavalry officer and the friendship eventually led to an Army contract to repair leaks in the Statue of Liberty.
Part of the deal was to leave the site 'broom clean.' Despite Lynch's repeated protests, the Army refused to pay the bill unless Lynch removed tools left by one of the French workers who originally helped assemble the statue.
Lynch tried to return the historical items for more than 50 years. Finally, in April 1982, they were accepted and placed in a museum at the site on 'Kenneth Lynch Day' at the Statue of Liberty.
He moved the Lynch company to Wilton in the 1930s and likes to boast, 'if it can be made, Ken Lynch & Sons can make it'- weathervanes and park benches to huge clocks and stone cast Greek statues.
'Hey, you never lay a hammer on an iron ruler,' Lynch suddenly scolded his curator, Ted Monnich, who left his own metal business in Charlotte, N.C., to tackle Lynch's tools.
He softened the blow by saying Monnich 'swings a pretty good hammer' -- high praise from a man who knows.
'Did you know St. Andrew was a blacksmith?' Lynch, a twinkle in his eye, asked his helper. 'One evening he nailed the devil's shoes to the floor...'
