The Old Man and the Sea

When I think about Allan Adler, I think of him standing at the bow of his 76-foot ketch, squinting into the sun, sprays of silver foam splashing up on either side of him.

Bronzed and shirtless, he seems painted into the foreground, a man still vigorous at 75, his face lined and weathered, his thin, blonde hair turning gray, his eyes as blue as the sea.

I think about him now because Adler represents those traits I admire in a man and because his stance at the bow of the Shawnee, showered by silver spray and wearing silver in his hair, creates its own metaphor.

The man, you see, is a silversmith, an artist whose hands have caressed God knows how many bars of shiny metal over the last 60 years and transformed them into things of exquisite beauty.

He designs and forges flatware of simple elegance and jewelry of puzzling intricacy, in a shop tucked away in a corner of Pacoima that gleams with the silver dust of infinite scrappings.

He takes what nature gives and gives it back, retooled by an artist’s vision to fit the emotional needs of those who seek his creations.

Adler is the last of a breed. There aren’t any more individual silversmiths in America, and only a few in the world. It’s quicker and cheaper to mass produce spoons on a machine than to shape them one at a time by hand.

Demand grinds down individualism. Art and commercial expediency have never been compatible.

I met Adler for the first time when I boarded the Shawnee, anchored off Santa Catalina Island. My first impression was that of a sailor, not a silversmith.

All he wanted to talk about was his creaky old sailing ship, but that was OK, because it too represents the last of a line, with its polished brass and varnished teak gleaming in the long rays of a fading day.

The Shawnee was built in 1916 for Mark Fontana, one of the founders of the Bank of America, and was dying in the water 38 years later in San Francisco when Adler bought it.

He can’t even guess at how much time and money he and his wife have put into restoring the ship, but it shows. Like Adler’s masterpieces of silver, the Shawnee today represents an artist’s dream.

A single night aboard at anchor in Moonstone Cove refines one’s own vision of what untroubled sleep ought to be.

The Shawnee rocks in the easy swells like a ghost ship, its old bones creaking history, the thump of waves at its hull articulating the rhythms of an ocean night song.

I go into kind of a daze when I’m on water, more inclined to glory in the sea than to do a journalist’s work. The feeling persisted the next day, when we headed for home 26 miles east, with me at the helm most of the way, playing iron man on a wooden ship.

But my purpose for the trip was Adler, not the Shawnee, although, as I said, their separate lives seem intricately entwined.

Adler was a building contractor when he gave it up to learn silversmithing from a master, his father-in-law, Porter Blanchard. After that, like a sailor emerging from a storm, he never looked back.

He has fashioned buckles, earrings, cups, goblets, trays, rings, bracelets and necklaces over the last six decades for everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to Michael Jackson.

An Adler pin went into space with the nation’s first seven astronauts and its design continues to serve as a cosmic logo in front of NASA headquarters in Florida.

His stuff isn’t cheap. The man’s flatware sells for $1,200 a place setting, and a tea set inspired by Paul Revere, America’s first silversmith, sold at auction recently for $1 million.

Fame, in this case, goes along with wealth. The Smithsonian has honored him for his unique contribution to design, and has documented his techniques on videotape for future generations to know how a master silversmith worked.

So now at 75, he ought to be taking it easy but, like the Shawnee, he continues to sail into the wind, wearing his own patina of time as handsomely as aging silver.

Days after our trip from Catalina, I visited Adler in his shop and watched him pound a spoon into shape from a thin piece of silver, each blow leaving the kind of imprint a painter makes with a brush.

“Machines pound out a hundred of these in an hour,” he said. “It takes me 12 hours to make 8 of them. Once I had 24 craftsmen working for me. Now I have 7. I do not exaggerate when I say silversmithing is a lost art. It died in my lifetime.”

That may be true. I have no way of verifying it. But I do know that machine-produced kitchenware will never replace an Adler spoon, anymore than a fiberglass boat will replace the Shawnee.

They both have a special place in art and on the sea.