Company Caters to Forutne Seekers : Golden Dreams Begin at Northridge Firm

Two Japanese men walked into the Northridge showroom of Keene Engineering Inc. recently and, producing an inch-thick wad of traveler’s checks, ordered $4,000 worth of gold-dredging machinery. Keene is the world’s largest manufacturer of such equipment.

Asked where they were going with the equipment--floating devices prospectors use to suck up underwater debris--they shook their heads and one said: “Secret.”

“It’s typical of the people who come in here to not want anybody to know what they’re doing,” said Mark Keene, son of the company’s owner. After the men had gone, he said they had told him to ship the equipment to the West African nation of Sierra Leone, where they planned an expedition.

The Keene family makes no secret of the fact that the number of people visiting their business is not what it was in 1980, the year that the volatile price of gold went over $800 an ounce. That year, the company had sales of about $10 million.

Newspaper clippings on the showroom walls recall those times with headlines: “Soaring Price of Gold Draws Prospectors” and “Gold Mining Gets Back Respect, Thanks to Prices.”

Boom Over

The clippings have faded. The boom has ended. Gold was recently down to $299. Keene sales last year were $6 million, owner Jerry Keene said. He explained, though, that the $10-million figure is extraordinary and that the company has managed to do a healthy business by controlling costs and advertising aggressively in mining publications.

A number of prospecting-related companies have gone out of business recently because they expanded too quickly when gold prices boomed and they could not handle the bust.

The Sylmar-based Treasure Emporium, for example, went out of business in December. “Certainly, the drop in the gold price had something to do with it,” said Bob Grant of Van Nuys, who had an interest in the firm. He said the company had once sold enough dredges and other types of mining items to be known as one of the world’s largest suppliers of such equipment.

“A lot of people got into mining and into the equipment part of it when gold went up so high,” said Kenneth Harn, editor of the California Mining Journal, a Santa Cruz-based prospecting publication with subscribers around the world. “A lot of them got shaken out as the gold price went down, and dropped along the way side.”

Keene Inc. was founded by Jerry Keene’s father, Ernest, who had a building maintenance company in Los Angeles but began making his hobby of mining into a business around 1957 when he opened a small plant and showroom in North Hollywood. Products of the company, which moved to Northridge in 1974, are handled by 300 dealers nationwide.

All Kinds of Equipment

The company sells everything from $1.50 prospecting pans and hand-held shovels to large custom-built, diesel-driven dredging barges that are built in a 25,000-square-foot factory in Chatsworth and sold for up to $90,000. The biggest dredges are 16 feet long.

The basic barge consists of plastic pontoons that carry motorized pumps and long suction tubes whose ends are usually dragged along the river bottom by a gold hunter in scuba gear. The tubes draw in the water and debris, which is pushed out through ridged sluice boxes. The ridges prevent the matter that might contain gold from running out with the water.

The big barges go all over the world, and members of the Keene family go with them. Pat Keene, 21, and Mark Keene, 23, who work with their father, have traveled paths through South American jungles and the African bush and braved nasty insects and tropical diseases to accompany the Keene dredges to their destinations.

Honduras Trip

Pat Keene has albums of photographs from a trip he took several weeks ago to help a group of retired newspapermen from Orange County who are dredging in the Guayape River near the Honduran-Nicaraguan boarder.

The miners had transported a dredging barge and other Keene equipment worth about $150,000 down the Pan American Highway. Keene flew to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and then was driven eight hours through the bush to where the miners were assembling the equipment.

He won’t give any details about the men, saying they want to keep their venture as quiet as possible.

“I went to teach them about the equipment and to help them with the geology,” said Pat Keene, who is studying geology at California State University, Northridge. “I had all kinds of shots before going. They said there were guerrilla (soldiers) in the jungle, but I didn’t see any. It was very close to Nicaragua.”

Many Full-Time Professionals

Many of those who stop in at Keene Inc., or who telex their orders to the company, are full-time professionals in the mining field. And they come from virtually every country and state.

On one recent Saturday there was a tall, elegant, white-haired man with unusually large green eyes who produced a business card that gave his name as Francois M. J. Lampietti. The card carried an address on New York’s upper East Side and another in Purcellville, Va., and it listed no profession.

Lampietti, who spoke in an accent that sounded British one minute and French the next, called himself European and said he was a free-lance consultant on precious mineral development. He said he has spent 25 years pursuing his profession in Africa and South America.

“A few years ago, I was on tributaries of the Amazon looking for diamonds,” he said. “We found what we were after.”

The 50-year-old Lampietti said he was at Keene on assignment for a foreign company that was sending him on another prospecting trip. “It is in a country in central Africa. Let us just leave it at that,” he said, as he spoke about an order that seemed to involve several thousand dollars.

Most Sales Smaller

The majority of the business’ sales range between $400 and $2,000, Jerry Keene said. During the summer, many customers are local miners who frequent foothills and creeks in the northeastern San Fernando Valley.

And not everyone comes to Keene Inc. just to buy. “When we get real busy in the warmer months, we get a real problem with kibitzers,” Jerry Keene said. “They stand here all day and talk.”

The company has become an informal gathering place for many local prospectors including members of the Southern California chapter of the Western Mining Council, a national organization of recreational miners with 30 chapters around the country.

The local group holds formal meetings on the fourth Friday of every month at the First Presbyterian Church in Van Nuys, according to chapter President Tom Payne. Payne, a Woodland Hills resident and an executive with a local electronics firm, said about 60 people show up for the meetings.

Dredges and hydrology are big topics for the chapter’s members, Payne said. “You’re talking about how the gravel flows, the bends in the rivers, the pressure of the river streams, what the rivers do with the gold, high water versus low water,” he said.

Conversation in Generalities

He said the conversation sticks to the generalities of mining technology and does not get into the specifics about where members are prospecting. The reason for the secrecy, he said, is a concern about competition from fellow prospectors, and, in some cases, scrutiny from the Internal Revenue Service.

He said many chapter members go to Keene Inc. to browse but don’t have the money to buy the big equipment.