ALCC National Park Service Run Frensel Lens Conference 8/18/02

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.

 

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