Dulcimer Artisan Would Rather Go Fishing But Customers Line Up
Mind you, James Fyhrie isn’t complaining that he’s back-ordered for three months, but all things being equal, he’d rather go fishing.
The bearded Fyhrie makes dulcimers, sweet-sounding stringed instruments first introduced in early times in the Appalachian Mountains. “For the life of me,” he says, “I really don’t know why they’re so popular now.”
As a matter of fact, added the one-time teacher and rock ‘n’ roll electric guitar player, “I don’t even know why I’m making them. Some times I think I should go out and get a job.”
Despite his casual fretting, Fyhrie, 40, seems content in his cluttered Laguna Beach garage workshop that’s hemmed in by two pygmy goats in a wired enclosure, his fishing boat and a 1953 Kaiser automobile he’s trying to get running.
Even with those distractions, he finishes off a dulcimer about every three days at charges of $150 and up. “My brother says I’m on a perpetual vacation,” said Fyhrie, sole owner of Pectrum Dulcimer Co.
He once had three others help him make the wooden instruments, “but I wanted to have quality control and low overhead so I decided to make them all myself,” he said. “Besides, you have to watch costs when you run a small business.”
Because of his concern for quality and workmanship, Fyhrie is recognized nationally as a dulcimer artisan. He is also noted for his self-taught playing, becoming dulcimer champion at the 1981 National Flat Picking Championship in Kansas. Now he acts only as a judge. In trying to explain the growing craze, Fyhrie said that “it may be another cycle or it may be that people on the fast track may find it doesn’t take long to learn how to play it so they get instant rewards.” But then he added: “Actually, I really don’t know.”
He did say that while it takes three months to get delivery from him, dulcimer makers in Korea and Japan have announced plans to mass produce the instruments, and at a third of his price.
Fyhrie said that if his fortunes turn down, he could go back to teaching. Or go fishing. Or finish the car.
Registered Nurse Marjorie Pyle of Costa Mesa, a certified childbirth educator at Los Alamitos Medical Center, said she held a childbirth class reunion recently so about 20 new mothers could show off their children to each other--”but I held it partly for me to get a chance to see the babies.”
Besides the babies, Pyle said, she also gets to see what the mothers looked like in their original state.
It’s possible, say Raymond H. Harris, 67, of Anaheim, and Johnny Miller, 67, of Riverside, shipmates on the destroyer USS Dale in Pearl Harbor during the 1941 Japanese attack, that the Dec. 7, 1986, reunion of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn. in Pearl Harbor may be its last.
“It will be our 45th reunion, and everyone is getting old,” Miller said. “The youngest will be in his 60s, and many will be in their 70s.” He said that may be why the 1986 gathering will possibly be one of the biggest. “We hope to have 5,000 attend,” he said.
While Harris agrees that the association is a dwindling organization, he feels that if there’s anyone around after next year’s reunion, “they’ll probably get together again like we do to sit around and tell family stories and show pictures of our kids and grandchildren.”
There isn’t much talk at the reunion about the war or the Pearl Harbor attack, Harris noted. “We just kinda forget it and just want to drink some beer and talk about the good times, not the bad. We just want to see our old buddies . . . those of us that are still left.”
When trout fishermen in Orange County talk about heaven this time of the year, many of them are refering to Irvine Lake, Santa Ana Lakes and Corona Lake, which just got stuffed with large-sized rainbow trout. “We’re seeing an awful lot of happy fishermen these days,” said concessionaire Doug Elliot of Anaheim.
Acknowledgments--Brian Quinn, Irvine resident and athletic director at Loyola Marymount College in Los Angeles, selected to newly created Athletic Hall of Fame at Junipero Serra High school in Gardena, where he starred in baseball and football before graduating in 1959 . . . Placentia sociologist Sharon Phelps, 43, mother of two, named director of North Orange County Retired Senior Volunteer Program in Fullerton.
