EAC Friday Feature: Harv Gorton
Kelly Armor has been a folklorist for over 20 years. She says, “I am familiar with all kinds of traditional art forms. But last fall I spent a couple hours in Warren County learning about a tradition I had no idea existed. I met Harv Gorton, “rod crafter”, one who makes custom-made fishing rods. He fashions a grip to fit the customer’s hand and makes its length to the scale of the customer. His artistry is expressed in the grip where he sometimes glues and sands hundreds of pieces of foam together and in the tiny weavings he creates to hold the eyelets and guides that hold the line onto the pole.Harv is a well-respected practitioner in his field.
Born and raised in Warren County and a fan of the outdoors, he worked at the original Allegany Outfitters, a sporting goods store in Clarendon as a teen. The owner also had a pultrusion molding factory in North Warren called Kinzua Plastics, where he also worked. They made backyard batting machines, and the fiberglass orange bicycle flags common in the 1970’s and 80’s. They also created fiberglass fishing rods. In 1972 he saw a catalog by Dale Clemens that featured customized thread art on the rods. He said, “I had never seen anything like it. By 1976 I joined an outfit called Rod Crafters. The concept was learning by sharing, and it grew. By about ‘79, I got to know Dale very well, so eventually I got to go to seminars and present my own stuff. Yeah, I just went nuts on some of the stuff…” Harv is extremely humble.
It is clear he has spent thousands of hours experimenting and pushing himself with new ideas. It takes him about two weeks to complete a custom rod. He has lost count of the number of rods he’s created. He joked, “Well, I figure just about everyone in Sheffield Township has one of my rods.” There is a small, passionate group of several hundred rod crafters across the nation. Harv suspects that the nearest master to him lives in Ohio. He loves making the threading match the interests and background of his customer. “I tell them, hang on, there’s gonna be a million questions.” He’ll create the cross wrap pattern to match school or favorite sports team colors or even to match the palette of a favorite Beanie Baby. He has also figured out how to do tiny images with the wrapped thread. He says, “If you can draw it on graph paper, you can weave it…” He prefers to meet face to face but he did take orders over the internet, although he is not eager to take on new customers right now. He admits that a cheap, mass produced rod will still catch fish, but a custom rod is going to make for a better experience. “Because it's gonna be for you and it's gonna be your rod, you're gonna have confidence in it.”