Joe White - Wireman

Published 3-30-06 The Advocate Weekley

A dinosaur guards Joe White’s front door, and 11 rats inhabit his living room. He has piloted a UFO, he rides a 6-foot tall bicycle; and he never leaves home without a pair of pliers and a roll of wire – especially if he’s going to an airport or a doctor’s office.

Clearly, Joe White is not your average Joe.

Or is he? White has lived in Berkshire County since he was born in Pittsfield 46 years ago, and he has worked at Crane & Company for the past 19 years. He owns a home, lives with his girlfriend, Karen, and supports a daughter, Natalie, whom he has raised to be a well-adjusted, productive college student.

White, who describes himself as typically atypical, has over the years, made people laugh, made them think and, on occasion, made them call the police. But he is not a comedian, a teacher or a criminal. He is part artist, part inventor and part practical joker, depending on the day and the perspective of his audience.

White, whose artwork includes life-size mechanical robots that have sold for as much as $1,200, is perhaps best known for his small signature pieces – his “wireman creations.” With 11 feet of copper, steel or bronze wire, a pair of pliers and 23 minutes of spare time, “The Wireman,” can create curiously lifelike 3-inch-tall wire sculptures that resemble human beings.

White said he got his inspiration while waiting to be laid off when the factory he had worked at was getting ready to close more than 20 years ago. With no work to do, and never able to sit quietly, he used a pair of pliers to bend, twist and connect a handful of garbage twist ties into a miniature piece of art that has since evolved into his wiremen – as well as his artistic “calling card.”

“I’m kind of a wire junkie,” he said during a recent interview. “I always have it around in case I get bored. I have pliers at home, at work, in my truck – everywhere I might have to kill time.”

Waiting, something most people find exasperating, has the opposite effect on White. Rather than causing impatience or tension, it provides him with windows of creative opportunities and a way to make a positive connection with people. He has made and given away thousands of wiremen over the years to people from all over the United States as well as Sweden, China, Japan, Ireland, England, Germany and Ukraine. Whether or not he can speak a person’s language, the gift of a wireman has opened the door to friendship.

His passion for wire has, on occasion, though, produced some tense moments. Twisting a wireman together at an airport a few years ago, on his way to Florida, a fellow passenger pointed him out to airport security as a potential terrorist threat.

“They searched me and started going through my briefcase,” he recalled. “I showed them what I was doing and said, ‘Look, man: this kills 20 minutes and I’ll have four wiremen when we land – this is how I spend my time.’ They were cool about it and realized I wasn’t a terrorist.”

He especially likes to leave his wiremen holding his tip at restaurants (if the service has been particularly good), and he will often give them to the parents of children who are particularly well behaved in public.

“If I see kids keeping themselves occupied while mom or dad is busy, I think they should be rewarded for that,” he said.

His childlike enthusiasm still intact, tempered by wry cynicism, White, wiry and loose limbed and somewhat resembling his wiremen creations, recalled his own childhood, noting that while money might have been in short supply, encouragement from his parents and stepfather was always plentiful.

His mother, Jeannette Lampro, a surgical technician who died in 2000, taught him about the natural world and helped him learn to sew when he was 8. His father, Russel White, a 36-year employee of Crane and Company, who died in 1999, taught him the value of hard work and gave him his own space in the backyard to experiment.

“It was my burn zone,” White said. “No matter what I did in my zone, it was OK, and that took the pressure off – I didn’t have to sneak or hide.”

His father did get a little upset, however, when White’s attempt to make a still for moonshine literally blew up, rattling all the windows in the neighborhood.

“I wanted to know how it worked, and no one would tell me,” White said. “My dad just said, ‘Joe, you can’t be blowing up the backyard.’”

He said his stepfather, Ken Lampro, taught him how to think.

“My stepfather never gave me an answer – he always made me figure it out. He said, ‘I could just give you all the answers, but then you’d be a dumbass. The things you learn and the mistakes you make will help you in figuring other stuff out, and eventually, whenever you have a situation, you’ll have a solution down, somewhere.’”

White’s older brother, Kenny, was another story.

“Basically, everything I did was because he told me I couldn’t do it,” White said. “If I wanted a boat, I’d build a boat. If I wanted a five-man bike, I’d build one. Whatever I wanted – if I could figure out how it worked – I could have it.”

He said his younger brother, Ed, was his most willing accomplice – always the first to try out anything he made, no matter how imperfect (or dangerous) it might be.

Once he had mastered land and water vehicles, of course, and like most kids, White wanted to fly.

“We used to jump off the roof with those big picnic table umbrellas, and we found that if you ripped the stitching out of the top and let air flow through, it didn’t rock so bad on the way down.”

All of his experiments with flight were not so successful. As an adult, White built a hang glider and flew it from the high school track at Taconic to the parking lot, where he left it, along with his longing to fly.

“I understood the concept, but I used the wrong kind of cable, so when I yanked the controls, I actually got play in it and nothing happened – I was either diving or stalling, and it kept taking me up higher, and I kept thinking, ‘ I just want to go down like a paper airplane.’”

“Flight,” he admitted, “scares me, but I think maybe I’m going to do it again when I’m 50.”

His next experiment after the hang glider also involved flight, but, lessening the danger to himself, he made his own UFO and flew it while standing on Earth. With black helium balloons and battery-powered flashing lights attached to fishing line, he floated his UFO out into the night sky and reeled it back in. He said even a slight breeze would make it bounce around, simulating the erratic flight of a typical UFO.

Laughing, he said, he listened to his neighbors exclaim, “Look, there it is; here it comes again!” When someone called the police to report the sighting, White said, “The Dalton cops knew who I was and where I lived and to look the other way.”

Admitting to an irrepressible prankster side, White recalled another time the police were called. His daughter, Natalie, helped him create a plaster of Paris model of his head. He covered it in a latex rubber face and set it atop a mannequin, placing it into a kayak (which he also made) that he anchored in the Housatonic River in Dalton. It looked so lifelike that people were not only speaking to it but also believing that it spoke to them. When it wouldn’t answer or move, they became concerned and called the police, who (by now familiar with his work) contacted White.

When he placed the same mannequin and kayak in a pond off the Aushuwillticook bike trail in Cheshire, though, it spoke to people in a different way. Biking on the trail one day with his daughter, White stopped to check on it and was engaged in conversation by a woman jogging by. The jogger, who didn’t realize she was speaking to the creator, asked him what he thought of it. White, interest in the woman’s opinions, told her he thought it was just a guy in a kayak. She explained to him that it wasn’t just a guy in a kayak but water sculpture – and argued its artistic merits to him. With a straight face, he continued to disagree and never did introduce himself.

His favorite art critic, though, was a 3-year-old neighbor, Steven.

“He would come over and check out my work and tell me, ‘I like this one’ or ‘This one is happy’ or, once he asked me, ‘Joe why is your art so dark?’ I could ask him what he thought, and he would never hold back his opinion or worry that I’d get upset. That was the coolest thing.”

Not everyone understands or appreciates White’s artwork.

“Some people call what I do vigilante art, but there’s no right, and no wrong,” he said. “Your art is freedom. You can do it, and if somebody doesn’t like it, they can’t say it’s wrong. You put stuff out just to make people laugh or think. It expands people’s minds. I’ve been told I shouldn’t do that – that it’s not my job. But whose job is it?”

Some of White’s artwork, including his mechanical dinosaur, may be viewed in front of his home on Onota Street in Pittsfield. White himself is easily recognizable by the height of his bicycle, the rat riding on his shoulder or the number of soap bubbles streaming from the exhaust pipe of his pick up truck. He may be contacted at wiremanmaker@aol.com.