SNYDER: Yeah, I took my apron.
ALEX.: Yeah, so you got . . .
SNYDER: Machine through
that. I had to work on it and tighten the belts. Got that stuff all
over me.
ALEX.: Your name's Keith
SNYDER. Is that right?
SNYDER: No, not quite. It's K-E-R.
ALEX.: K-E-R.
SNYDER: K-E-R-T-H instead of K-E-I-T-H. A lot of
people mispronounce it or misspell it or misread it
or something.
ALEX.: Yes, it's Kerth. Do you pronounce it Kerth?
SNYDER: Uh huh.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: It's kind of an odd name it seems because so
many people seem to have never heard of it before.
ALEX.: Now you operate here as a taxidermist.
SNYDER: Yeah. We do more in the tanning than we do
in taxidermist. Of course, we have a lot of
taxidermist work to do.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: But we do it mostly by machinery. It's hot.
Like putting your nose right on the grindstone all the
time-- day in and day out like taxidermy.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: We could make more money . . . actually
could. I don't know if anybody could make any money now, but
we could at one time make more money in a week tanning
that we could in six months doing taxidermy.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: It's all done by machine.
ALEX.: Yeah, now for my information and so on, help
me a little bit. How long have you been in this business?
SNYDER: Well, that would
depend on how you considered it. I started working at it when I was fifteen years
old and I'm 63 now.
ALEX.: You were born in what year? What year were
you born?
SNYDER: Nineteen thirteen.
ALEX.: You were born in
nineteen thirteen. Month? Day?
SNYDER: June, next Saturday will be my birthday.
ALEX.: Happy birthday.
SNYDER: Nineteenth.
ALEX.: June 19th.
Happy birthday. Is that Father's Day next Saturday? I believe it is.
SNYDER: I don't know. They come close together.
ALEX.: Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe . . . next Sunday.
SNYDER: Some of my grandchildren will be sending me
cards of some kind. I never pay any attention if they're
Father's Day cards or both.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: One card can serve both purposes.
ALEX.: Now you've largely dealt with deerhides, is
that right? What kind of hides?
SNYDER: Yeah. Deer
hides, deer skin products, clothes, bags, coats.
ALEX.: Uh huh. Tan the hides. You get them most
from . . .
SNYDER: We do the whole thing right from the rawhide
to the finished garment.
ALEX.: Uh huh. What's your market? Where you sell?
SNYDER: Where?
ALEX.: Yes.
SNYDER: Locally mostly. To tourists and people who
come into the store.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: Oh, we sell some to other craftsmen. Well, I
call them hippie clothes that they make.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: We don't make that kind.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: But we sell quite
a bit of leather to some others that make something out of them. I don't really
know what.
ALEX.: Yeah. How many hides a year do you process?
SNYDER: Oh, it varies from year to year, but on an
average about a thousand. Equivalent to a thousand
deerskin.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: On the same
figures we tan everything. I can't see so well through my glasses where I have my head
back. From a distance I can't see through that bifocal.
Everything seems to look like an elephant almost.
ALEX.: Yeah.
Uh huh. You use every kind of skin you can get that you can . . .
SNYDER: Well, most of it's deerskin and some cowhide.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: We tan several cowhides. Of course, we don't
make up very much of anything out of cowhide. We tan it
for somebody else or sell it to somebody else. We don't
make anything out of cowhide. Unless it's something special
somebody wants out of cowhide.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: We've been selling leather to a fellow in
Maryland for the last two or three years and he doesn't want
anything but cowhide.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: But you know the market now, I mean any
garments on the market is split cowhide. It's about the only kind of leather coat you can find on the market.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: It used to be sheepskin.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: It used to be all sheepskin then. I don't
know.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER:
Split cowhide is based on all the other leathers on the market.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: Not on ours. We don't manufacture anything
from cowhide. Deer hide. Everybody wants deer hide.
ALEX.: Yeah. Deerskin is a nice skin, isn't it?
SNYDER: Well, in a sense,
yeah. It's softer and has a better feel, but they're hard contemptible things to tan.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: The enamel in the grain is so easily damaged
it's hard to tan them and get a glaze on the finished
product.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: Much more so than cow. But there's no leather
that can be made to feel like deerskin. That had that
soft suppleness that deerskin has.
ALEX.: Yeah. You say you started this when you were
15 so . . .
SNYDER: Well, I started practicing taxidermy then. Of
course, I wasn't in any position to do any tanning at
that time.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: And I just worked up my for a long time by
trial and error which was mostly error at that time until
after I got up oh, 25 years old and I begun to get some
results.
ALEX.: Yeah. Are you able, I noticed a lot of few
places I've seen help wanted signs in the windows in
Pocahontas County. Didn't I see "Help Wanted" down
there?
SNYDER: Yeah, you sure
do. It's hard to find any help around here.
ALEX.: Yeah. That's the problem--labor. Finding
labor, huh?
SNYDER: Well, labor. Especially skilled labor.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: That can do the kind of work we have to do.
Now we've got one girl that is a good seamstress. She comes
in mighty handy on coats. Gloves. That's about all.
She's worked in some kind of garment factory before. That is
where she learned.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: But otherwise, that's about the only thing she
can do.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: And you can't find very few people who can do
that.
ALEX.: I guess
that's about right. How many people do you generally employ? About three? Three
including yourself? Four?
SNYDER: Well, if I was able to work, wife does, sews a
lot ____.
ALEX.: Wife does a lot of the sewing.
SNYDER: And then we hire our tanning done. I don't do
anything.
ALEX.: Yeah. Tanned on location though? You tan
here?
SNYDER: Oh yes.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: Yes. We have several thousand square feet of
floor space. Four-story building.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: See that building
over there. And some more buildings down there.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: Six or eight, ten thousand square feet of
floor space.
ALEX.: Oh, yeah.
SNYDER: Enough for a big operation. Had the help and
the sale for the leather. And was advertised. The little
man hasn't much chance now. He can't operate with the
big man.
ALEX.: No.
SNYDER: No use to try. Getting worse every day.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: The big companies are all merging to the point
where there is no competition.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: The little man. They're going to push him
out. We bought dyes from DuPont for 35 years. Until two
years ago ____. We called them in Philadelphia
and they wouldn't sell us a thing. The materials we get are very
inferior to the materials we used to get. The tanning
materials of some sort. The oil especially.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: And about four
times as high. It was about 14 cents a pound for leather oil, good leather oil, now
it's 47 cents a pound and it's not near as satisfactory as
the oil we used to get.
ALEX.: Most of your work is hand, done by hand
craft. I mean the tanning is pretty much a hand process. Not a
machine process.
SNYDER: Oh, no. No, our tanning is just as modern
practically as any tannery anywhere.
ALEX.: Is that right?
SNYDER: Except it's not as big. We have a fleshing
machine and we have power drums. The hides are seldom ever
touched by hands.
ALEX.: Is that right?
SNYDER: The paddle wheel,
all that's necessary to . . . The broiler, hot water. There's very little
handwork to it. Splitting machines that split them to a
uniform thickness after they're tanned.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: This day and time, handwork don't count. In
this kind of work. There's too much to be done. We just,
I used to flesh them by hand, used to air 'em by hand.
I used to do everything by hand. But if a person . . . What wages normally are now. If I counted my time at
normal wages, I'd have to have two or three hundred dollars
per hide to come out and make wages.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: Now. If I did it by hand. I used to flesh
cowhides by hand with a sharp knife about two feet long.
Handles on each end. Sharpen it up just sharp as a razor and actually shave that flesh, fat and membrane
from the hide . . . hide after hide I shaved that way.
Now we can put them through the flesh machine that takes
about 30 seconds to clean one up and do a better job
than I can do it.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: By hand.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: It doesn't dip in and cut ditch deep places in
them. High places.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: It does a smooth uniform job. It just cleans
the flesh off. That's all. The splitting machine is
the same way. One time we didn't have a splitting machine.
And now, it was impossible to make the type of leather we
make now without a splitting machine. The old, the way
we did it, was by the old method . . . did split. Just
made heavy leather. With cowhide, made harness with it.
And we had a market for harness leather.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: And now there is no market for harness leather
much.
**: But harness is expensive to buy if you can
ever find it.
**: And so is harness leather.
ALEX.: Oh, yeah.
SNYDER: Harness leather is $2.65 a pound, retail at
the lowest I know of.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: The average side
weighs 20 pounds which means a hide weighs 40 pounds. That's right around a
dollar or better or a hundred dollars a hide on the average.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: For a side.
Raw hides are cheaper now than any time I remember of since 1930.
ALEX.: Since 1930.
SNYDER: Especially dollar wise.
ALEX.: Yeah. What does rawhide sell for today?
You're talking about horsehide. Or are you talking about
deer? You talking about cow?
SNYDER: Horsehide is the only thing I know of.
ALEX.: Yes.
SNYDER: There's
horsehides on the market, of course, but not around here like there used to be. We used to
handle a lot of horse and mule hides, but I haven't
heard of one for a long time.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: We tanned for a woman that butchered horses
and mules for a mink ranch at one . . . she butchered them
herself. A woman.
ALEX.: Where was this? Lowly?
SNYDER: No, she lives at Tuppersville.
ALEX.: Huh.
SNYDER: We tanned 40, 40 new mule and horse hides at a
time.
ALEX.: Huh.
SNYDER: I don't know. She's probably dead now.
ALEX.: Yeah.
I had a friend who was originally from Monroe County that raised minks over there by the
name of Neel. He raised minks for a long time. Neel.
N-E-E-L. N-double "e"-L.
**: ____. Most of ours are MC.
**: Yeah, Mac Mills. Yes. **: Is that Irish?
**: Probably, yes.
SNYDER: It was kind of odd to see a woman butchering
horses. Or ever cattle for that matter. As far as I
understand, she did it all herself. She didn't have any
husband.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: He had left her. She had a small daughter.
She had the spunk, though.
ALEX.: Well, you've been operating here for a good
many years.
SNYDER: We've been right at this place right here for
about 20 some years.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: But we was at another place before we moved
here on the road. Before we built this building. Oh, quite a
long while before the war. Actually, since about
1936.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: 'Til after the war. After the war we moved
into here.
ALEX.: Yeah.
Well, I've caught you at the end of the day. I know you've had a hard day.
SNYDER: Oh, I'm all right now.
ALEX.: Well, okay.
SNYDER: It's just when I
stand on my legs. I can't work on concrete, it hurts my legs and my back.
ALEX.: You say you
sell a lot of this to tourists, but do you sell any to any buyers from New York,
that kind of production? Mostly sold locally?
SNYDER: Yeah.
ALEX.: Do you do any special work made to the order
for people?
SNYDER: Oh, yes. Most of my work is custom work.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: Made to order. Except for gloves. You always
have gloves in stock. But the coats. You just would have
to have too much money involved.
ALEX.: Yeah.
SNYDER: To carry coats in stock, you would have to
have . . . it would take 20 styles of coats in both ladies
and men's. Multiply that by as much as five or six for
each style.
ALEX.: It would be impossible to carry.
SNYDER: Yeah, for the little man. I don't think you
could even find that much variety of sizes in a
department store.
ALEX.: No, I don't think you could.
SNYDER: There's four inches difference in people's arm
lengths. There's a lot of difference in their shoulder
widths. People of the same size you might make them
one way.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: Then of course,
there's waist measurements, they vary anywhere from 30 to 48, 56.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
SNYDER: They make men's coats 56 inches waist to the
chest.
ALEX.: That's big. Well, we'll call it a day here.
I've enjoyed talking to you. I'll be coming back. I want
to come back and stop at the shop, but I'll probably be
back around the first of July.