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Old 30th April 2020, 06:09 AM   #137
Cthulhu
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Join Date: Feb 2014
Location: Central Valley, California
Posts: 46
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I keep thinking how old everyone seems, till I realize I'm right up there with them at 50. How did I get so old?


I was always interested in knives as a boy, and would drool over those horrible catalogs of goofy survival gear and production knives. I ended up, with great difficulty, finding a copy of Stone's guide, which fascinated me. When I was 17 I was vacationing in the UK with my family, we saw various swords and blades, including a nice kukri on display in the basement of someone's family castle. Later that trip we saw a sign for a Gurkha army museum, and my mom said "Maybe they'll sell you a kukri." Being a teenger I rolled my eyes and said "Right, Mom, they'll have a sign saying kukri knife, 20 pounds." It turned out it was actually 15 pounds, and my parents were nice enough to buy it for me. Back home I started haunting the local pawn shop and buying any bladed junk that caught my eye. After several years of that I found out there were knife shows, and at the BAKCA show in South San Francisco met Dave and Lonna Schmiedt, which started me on keris, Indian, and Philippine weapons, and after a bit I started buying Indonesian blades from Alan Maisey.

That all ended when I got married and got the look of death for spending money on things that were not my wife. So there was a very long pause in collecting, but eventually I ended up with a different wife who encouraged me to mount the swords I already had on the walls of our living room, and maybe get a few more to fill out the display. (I still get the look of death, just for other reasons)

Since then, I've decided Indian weapons are by far my favorite, and with the internet and easily accessible auctions I've been collecting a lot more. I'm trying to avoid just collecting to collect; I want each piece in my collection to be something I didn't have before, or to be an upgrade, and I'll get rid of the old piece. At least so I tell myself.
Anyway that's my history. I did have the pleasure of talking to a friend's son recently who had made his own replica panabas, and we talked blades for an hour. I recommended to his parents that he get a copy of Stone's. Hopefully he'll become part of the next generation of caretakers of these pieces of history.
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