Resurrecting the Sphinx

By: photos and text by dk higgins

Deck: The painstaking refurbishment of a machine age artifact

In the spring of 2002, my wife and I attended a massive flea market in Kutztown, Pa. We weren’t looking for anything in particular, but we had recently become enamored with items that could be classified as “industrial modern,” which was, by our definition, anything mass-produced between VJ Day and the Kennedy Inauguration. We had already augmented our 70-year-old home with several fans and lamps from this era—sturdy, machine-made appliances that were usually painted green—and we adopted a nostalgic, post-war decorating style that our friends found either baffling or “cool.” Unfortunately, the flea market was a bust. The things that we found even remotely interesting were overpriced and, in many cases, non-functioning. After several hours of perusing the selection provided by at least a hundred vendors, we were ready to return home empty-handed. It was mid-afternoon and the vendors were beginning to pack up their unsold merchandise when we came upon an old salon hair dryer (also non-functioning) that was manufactured by the Charles Arnao Co. over a half-century ago. The model was called “Double Action Sphinx,” and its owner, who was nearly finished loading his truck, noticed that we had taken an interest in this battered but beautiful (and green) relic, priced at $100. “I’ll take $60 for it,” he said. My wife glanced at me. “We could maybe turn it into a lamp,” she said. “That’s what I was thinking,” I replied, reaching for my wallet.
The future lamp (aka “The Sphinx”) was then relegated to our basement which, because of our regular weekend excursions to swap meets, antique stores and estate sales, was beginning to look like a salvage dump. It remained there for the rest of the year, although we occasionally brought guests down to look at it. (“What the hell is that?” was the typical query.) However, Christian Johansen, an old friend who was a dinner guest that Christmas, was impressed by the Machine Age magnificence of The Sphinx.  A Penn State IT manager who had once been an electrician, Johansen offered to convert the hair dryer into a lamp, although he wasn’t sure when he’d be able to do it. I told him to take his time and he did as instructed, finally returning The Sphinx a year and a half later. Johansen had gutted the unit by removing the heating components, installed a mount for a light bulb, and replaced the heavy-duty cord. He also replaced the choose-a-temperature dial with a simple, one-way switch. His price for the conversion was dinner at a Chinese restaurant.   
We kept The Sphinx in our guest room for a couple of years, sitting it beside a drawing table. Then it was moved to the living room, to be used as a reading lamp next to the couch, where it remained for another year. However, displaying it in a more spacious, better-lit environ only turned it into an interesting eyesore. It dominated the room, and detracted from the other, less “aesthetically stressed” items such as a post-Roswell flying saucer table lamp, an art deco floor lamp, and a huge 1961 schoolhouse map of the United States. The living room, with the addition of The Sphinx, was beginning to look as if the basement salvage depot had finally migrated upstairs. We explained to visitors that we were eventually going to have The Sphinx restored, and one of them, a journalist/poet named Marel Trout, offered a suggestion: “Take it to Eric Dash.”
Dash, she explained, was the owner of Black Walnut Body Works, an automotive repair shop in Bellefonte, and his work was exemplary, if not legendary. “And Eric doesn’t shy away from weird stuff,” Trout assured me. A few weeks later I loaded The Sphinx into the car and took it out to Black Walnut. Entering the facility, I was taken aback by how clean it was. Of course, the shop had been built at the Zion Road location only five years before, but still…I’ve seen ICUs that weren’t this clean. The lobby featured white walls with framed Warhol prints, high ceilings, a customer lounge and a foosball table. Even the work bays were pristine. I met Eric Dash, a friendly fellow with an infectious laugh, and told him about The Sphinx. Intrigued, he asked me to bring it in. Moments later, I watched his face as I wheeled the unit before him, and knew immediately that he was the right guy for the job. He smiled, as if pleasantly surprised, and his eyes widened slightly as he scanned the lamp, top to bottom. When he ran his hand along the surface of The Sphinx, I was reminded of Howard Hughes in The Aviator checking the aerodynamic rivets on his H-1 Racer. “Yeah, I can do something with this,” he said as he stepped back. “What’d you have in mind?”
My instructions were simple. Keep the switch plate, the top part of the stand, and the inside of the (former) hair drying unit as is, and paint and/or restore everything else. Plus, I wanted to stay as close to the original shade of “industrial green” as possible. Dash said he’d call me with an estimate and wheeled The Sphinx into his office, setting it next to a vintage John Deere pedal tractor—a restoration he’d just completed, with remarkable results. “I like to do a side project every once in awhile,” he said with a shrug.
Dash, who was born in Oakland, Calif., in 1961, learned about bodywork and vehicle restoration while growing up in the Bay Area. “I might have been in the fifth grade or something like that,” he recalled. “My stepdad would take us to the flea market and we used to buy bikes for like five bucks and then we’d tear them apart. He’d ‘true’ up the wheels and then we’d put on new tires and we’d spray-can ‘em, get ‘em all dolled up and we’d sell them for 25 bucks. It was just his way of showing us how to do it.” When Dash was in the seventh grade, his family relocated to Centre County, settling in Penns Valley. His stepfather, Tony Broskley, was a mechanic who hired out at several garages, working on both cars and tractors before eventually starting The Black Walnut Farm and Garage in Coburn. Dash began to work with Broskley when he was about 15 but by the time he graduated from Centre County Vo-Tech in 1979, he was contemplating a career in body repair. “I didn’t want to be a mechanic, since the diagnostic side was not my forte, so I chose sculpture over theory,” he said with a laugh. In 1983 Dash decided to strike out on his own, taking—with Broskley’s blessing—the Black Walnut moniker. (The business was so named because of a black walnut tree on the Coburn property.) He moved the shop to Axemann, where a garage became available for $500 a month. “I managed to scrape up fifteen hundred bucks,” he recalled. “I went to the bank with a business plan written on old computer paper. Then I proceeded to open the doors and nearly tanked I don’t know how many times, but by the grace of God I managed to pull it off.” The building was sold out from under him in 1988, but he was able to lease a garage on Water Street in Bellefonte where he “plugged away forever.” Black Walnut Body Works became successful enough for Dash to secure a loan to buy the Zion Road property, on which  he broke ground for the new building in 2001. It was completed a year later and by then Black Walnut was regarded as a paragon in automotive repair circles. This was, truth be told, mainly due to the skill and old-school work ethic of its owner and his ability to surround himself with a like-minded, technically proficient staff. In addition to “delivering consistently at a high level for our boilerplate collision work,” Dash and company maintained the ability to indulge in extracurricular restorations ranging from a 1923 Rolls Royce to a fiberglass canoe. “It’s a chance to utilize the skills that we don’t necessarily have to use on a daily basis,” he said. This meant, theoretically, that they were prepared for anything—even a lunatic walking into the shop with a 1940s hair dryer lamp.
Dash called me on the day after my visit to say that the price of a full-blown restoration might be a little more expensive than what I had in mind, but if he were allowed to work on it in his spare time, the labor costs could be reduced dramatically. “At this point, I’m not all that concerned with the cost,” I told him. “But I don’t mind waiting either. Hell, it took a year and a half just to get it rewired for a light bulb.” He sounded relieved, even grateful as he assured me that, since deadlines and billable hours weren’t going to be a consideration, he could give this project the attention it deserved while taking a more leisurely, affordable approach.
The Sphinx was finished last December, 16 months after I dropped it off at Black Walnut, and my wife and I were astounded by the results. Dash had matched the original shade of “industrial green” and the dents were removed so thoroughly that it was hard to believe they were there in the first place. One concern was the rear of the unit, where a ring of vent holes had been badly damaged by some sort of blunt instrument. However, after the restoration, there was absolutely no evidence of the atrocity which, I believed, had been committed with a ball-peen hammer. “Exactly,” Dash said. “And that’s what I did, too. I took a ball-peen hammer and reversed the majority of those dents. Then I put on a few coats of primer. I didn’t want to remove that fancy little nameplate because it had those antique rivets in it, so that was kind of painstakingly worked around.”
I then asked Dash to elaborate further and give me a step-by-step rundown of the restoration process. “We dismantled the unit and took all the components apart, piece by piece,” he explained. “We proceeded to sand the cast iron pieces in preparation of the paint and then just refinished those. For the ‘head’ of the unit, if you will, we hammered the little dents and dings to try and smooth out the aluminum prior to applying just a very thin coat of plastic filler to kind of straighten it up. We sanded it all back down again, re-taped it, sealed it with a thinner version of primer, and put our paint down. Then I took a clear coat and used a flattening agent which cut the gloss level down, so we had a medium gloss which duplicated the ‘industrial’ finish. After that, it was just a matter of re-assembling it.”
Dash is an outspoken proponent of recycling and, to use The Sphinx as an example, finds it particularly rewarding to be able to refurbish an item that’s been re-tooled for something other than its original function, and to do so in a cost-effective manner. (The final tab for his services, incidentally, was 20 percent less than the estimate.) Consequently he’s distressed by the current trend of discarding or “totaling” cars that are worth saving. “Cars are now being totaled left and right, which means they go away. Some are bad wrecks, but most are financial total losses. A totally repairable, completely drivable and safe car is deemed ‘financially unfeasible’ to fix. There is an inherent problem with doing that because you’re wasting all those resources, but even more disturbing is the increasing practice, by insurance companies, of  ‘totaling’ older vehicles that were well-maintained by people on fixed incomes. The valuation of these vehicles usually doesn’t afford the claimant enough settlement dollars to replace their vehicle in kind. So repairing a car correctly to bring it back to pre-accident condition, in my opinion, should be an option for the customer.”
Dash admitted that his views on restoration border on the holistic. “But maybe that’s an artsy, granola-head approach to the terminology,” he said, suddenly nostalgic. “Cars had a lot more personality back in the ’70s when I first started doing this. People used to be attached to their cars but now they’re attached to newness, so they’re more prone to want a vehicle replaced after an accident. I just think our consumerism has hit such an all-time high that people get their yah-yahs out by getting something fresh. But there is merit in actually restoring something and keeping it on the road or, as far as your lamp is concerned, keeping it in the living room.”   • SCM