Forty-two participants from 15 states and all four coasts gathered in
Buffalo in mid-October for a state-of-the-art instruction course in
the inspection, care and repair of classical lighthouse lenses. Hosted by
the Buffalo Lighthouse Association, the three-day course brought together
most of the nation’s top lighthouse lens and lantern room experts and
students from the National Park Service, Coast Guard, Bureau of Land
Management, and non-government lighthouse sites and lighthouse organizations.
The course included two days of classroom instruction and a training day
that included work with a fourth-order bivalve Barbier, Beard et Turenne
lens in the historic 1833 Buffalo Light, emergency repairs to ameliorate
litharge failure in the bulls-eyes of a third order Chance Brothers lens at
the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, and inspections of a
fourth-order fixed lens at Buffalo’s Coast Guard base and a fifth-order
fixed lens at the historical society museum. Museum curators also made
their extremely rare, early 19th century Argand-Lewis lens, one of only two
in America and the only one in a public collection, available for inspection.
Instructors for the Lenses and Lanterns II training course, co-organized by
the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center (HPTC)
and the American Lighthouse Coordinating Committee (ALCC), included
nationally-respected lampists Jim Woodward, CWO Joe Cocking and Jim Dunlap,
as well as metalwork experts Gary Knappenberger and Alex Klahm, lens
historian Thomas Tag, U.S. Coast Guard Curator Gail Fuller, International
Chimney Corp. lighthouse project manager Joe Jakubik, and lighthouse site
leaders Lee Radzak (Split Rock), Don Hampton (Ponce de Leon). Sessions also
were led by ALCC president Mike Vogel, who distributed an updated version
of the ALCC’s national lens inventory, and NPS HPTC director Tom McGrath,
who organized the instruction program with early assistance of Cullen
Chambers of Tybee Island Lighthouse, who had hosted the first such lens
session in Florida nine years ago.
Participants took home several print and electronic tools from the
conference. Lens restoration specialist Dan Spinella, who participated as
an instructor long-distance from Florida, debuted and distributed a new
40-minute “Lighthouse Illumination Technical Edition” video that drew rave
reviews, and will be marketed soon. Dan also produced an 18-minute video on
replacement optics especially for the conference. In addition to the ALCC
National Lighthouse Lens Survey in print form, students and instructors
alike also received a CD-ROM with speaker-provided course materials and
reprints of items ranging from the ALCC lens position paper to the entire
Historic Lighthouse Preservation Handbook, and a new Coast Guard CD-ROM
debuted by Gail Fuller that includes, among other things, the Coast Guard’s
historic lighthouse records in searchable form. Not only that, they got to
sample true Buffalo-style chicken wings at the Anchor Bar, where they were
invented.