Larry Roush began pipe collecting in the 1980s, particularly enjoying vintage Charatans, Castellos, and Barlings. He was also a jeweler and a machinist, and at some point he had an epiphany and decided he could combine his skills by fitting his favorite pipes with silver and gold bands, some with complex and sophisticated interwoven patterns, some leaf patterns, some with the elegant simplicity of smooth rings. Soon his collection was adorned with spectacular, precious-metal accents. "I didn't realize at the time," he says, chuckling, "that I was decreasing the value and collectibility of those vintage pipes. I just thought they looked cool."

He's a natural craftsman, so it wasn't long before he decided to try making pipes himself. He saw an ad in The Pipe Collector magazine from a guy in Texas who was selling briar and called him to place an order.

"We negotiated a little," says Larry, "and I said, 'So, what do you do with this briar, do you ever make pipes?' And he kind of says, 'Yeah, I make pipes,' and I said, 'Well, what do you do with them, do you smoke them or sell them?' He chuckled and said, 'Yeah, I sell them,' and so on. I told another pipe smoking friend about it and he says, 'You're talking to who?' and I said, 'Mike Butera, did you ever hear of him?' and he said, 'Oh my gosh, he's like the godfather of American pipe making!' I felt like an idiot. Here I am talking to the one and only Mike Butera and I didn't even know that he made pipes. I thought he was just some guy selling briar."

Roush and Butera

Mike and Larry spoke often after that as Larry asked questions about making pipes. Mike would gently push him in directions to investigate, knowing that the way to learn is to experiment and discover one's own solutions. At some point Larry mentioned that he was putting sterling and gold accents on his pipes and Mike was interested in that, so there was a lot of discussion about the intricacies of banding. Mike had been looking for someone to band his pipes but had not found a craftsman who could meet his level of perfectionism. Larry sent him some photos, then sent some pipes he had added accents to for Mike to examine.

Larry started banding a few Butera pipes for Mike. His work had to have been awfully impressive for that to happen; Mike Butera does not accept anything less than the best, not for his pipe making, not for his tobacco blends, and not for his cigar brand. However, he likes to do things himself and very quickly wanted Larry to teach him the craft.

"He came here," says Larry, "and then I went there and spent some time with him, and we had a great time together. We had a lot in common. I taught him what I know about doing bands on pipes, how to actually take strips and wire and make the band, solder it, and apply that to the pipe rather than use tubing."

Larry's methods differ from those of many pipe makers. "It's very popular to buy silver tubing or rings, and then just make your pipe to fit the silver, but what I do, and what I taught Mike, is to make the pipe first and then custom make the band; you take the measurements for that individual pipe and bend the silver, then solder and polish it and all that kind of stuff. You're making the silver fit the pipe rather than the pipe fit the existing silver. The silver bands that you see a lot today are probably half-inch silver tubing; it looks pretty but I just had a different philosophy. Even with pipe making, I wanted that old-fashioned craftsmanship; I envisioned some old man sitting in an old-school style shop with a file, crafting a pipe in solitude, every step by hand."

You're making the silver fit the pipe rather than the pipe fit the existing silver"

Mike reciprocated by helping Larry's pipe making. Larry likes to learn from trial and error, and Mike's method of teaching was just right for him, nudging him in the right direction without too much detail so that Larry would learn from his mistakes.

Those first pipes were imperfect, of course. In Larry's words,"They were crap, bigtime crap, embarrassingly amateurish." He was making them only for himself but was dissatisfied.

A Pipe Maker's Experimentation

"Mike was a great help, but I wanted to learn what every step meant, which means trial and error. I made a pipe and the shank wasn't even close to being round, and I used a pre-made stem, and didn't even think about curing the briar, I just figured you drilled a block of wood and smoked it and it's going to smoke great. So I made this pipe and thought it was pretty darn good and I was all excited about smoking it, and I lit it up and smoked it a couple of times and then I called Mike. 'Mike,' I said, 'this pipe tastes like garbage.' And he just laughed and said, 'Yeah, that's what they do, Larry. You can't just drill a piece of wood and smoke it.' I said, 'Oh, come on, Mike.'

'Mike,' I said, 'this pipe tastes like garbage.'"

"'No,' said Mike, 'you just can't. I mean, it depends on what you think is a good smoke.' I was pretty particular and it was very important that the pipe smoked right. I mean, what's the point of smoking a pipe that doesn't smoke right? So I said, 'Mike, what do you mean you can't just drill a block of wood and smoke it?' 'No," he says, 'there's a lot to it, Larry,' and I said, 'Ah, geez.' So that opened up a whole other dozen can of worms, and he wasn't going to tell me what to do. That would have been way too easy and I wouldn't have learned anything, so I just had to start experimenting with all this stuff. Mike told me, 'Larry, you need to find out what makes them smoke bad and then get rid of it.'"

So that opened up a whole other dozen can of worms"

Larry would call and Mike would ask if he'd tried this method or that, and Mike would help Larry find the right avenues to explore.

His first dozen or so pipes abandoned, Larry started learning to make his shanks round. "I don't use a lathe for anything except a tenon, and I don't turn any of my pipes; the shanks are hand shaped. I don't shape on a lathe, I don't drill on a lathe, I don't turn my shank on a lathe, and you have to be able to make a round shank. And there are tricks to make it round, and I can usually get them within a few thousandths of an inch of being round from top to bottom and side to side."

Larry filled notebooks with his experiments for making a pipe smoke great. "The whole point for me was getting a good smoke from the beginning. I mean, nobody wants to wait six months for a pipe to smoke right, so you have to develop ways for them to smoke right from the first light, and that was my goal, get them to smoke good from the start, and I've kept improving. I've had a lot of guys tell me that the first bowl is excellent, the first bowl tastes better than many of my old pipes that have been smoked for years, so that's quite a compliment. I just want them to provide a good smoke right from the beginning, or at least very quickly."

The long experimentation continued with every aspect of Larry's pipe making, from stems and shanks to bowl dimensions and coatings to mortise-and-tenon engineering to aging and curing briar to finishing techniques and everything in between. He painstakingly experimented with every permutation of combined elements. The notebooks multiplied. Larry became a mad scientist in a quest to bring his creations to life.

He painstakingly experimented with every permutation of combined elements

"I know there's a huge debate over bowl coatings. My first coating was a sticky coating, and I thought it was a great idea: you've got a nice little sticky tackiness to it and then you put some tobacco in there and all your ash is going to adhere and build cake. And Mike said, 'Nobody wants to put their finger in a pipe and find stickiness in it,' and I said, 'Okay, all right then.' I had to regroup on that, like with everything else."

Larry developed a proprietary curing process over time that contributed to the excellent smoking properties of his pipes. "Aging wood, in my opinion, is not curing wood, it's just aging it, and that's a good start, but that's not the end of it."

Hardwired for perfection, Larry kept improving until his pipes were good enough to give away to select friends. Barry Levin of Levin Pipes International saw some of his pipes and encouraged him, and Mike Butera saw the improvement and likewise urged him to start selling them. They were ready.

He sold them at pipe shows, because the internet did not yet exist in a form practical for pipe sales. He was on the radar of reputable collectors and his pipes were finally reaching popularity, building a reputation for bold stylings, precision finishing, and the signature silverwork whose quality had been unheard of in the pipe world before Roush.

And then suddenly, Larry Roush was gone. In 1995, after 394 pipes, he stopped making them.

Rising From the Ashes

"I couldn't price my pipes at a level where I could earn a living," he says. He was a new pipe maker and couldn't ask for the prices of established artisans. It was important to get those pipes into the hands of smokers, and to do that he was pricing them at around $95. That price structure provided an income of around $1 an hour after material costs. He returned to being a machinist and jewelry maker so he could pay his bills and eat.

I discovered his pipes in 1997, purchasing an estate pipe at a pipe show. It had an elegant, rope-twisted silver band, a gnarly and pleasing rustication, and a sophisticated appeal that I could not resist. I prefer sandblasts to rustication and am very particular. The Castello Sea Rock was about the only rustication I liked at the time, but Larry's was every bit as good, with its own individual character, and a well-defined and craggy disposition. And then I smoked it. I was an instant convert; that pipe smoked brilliantly. I began looking for more Roush pipes, but there were only 394 of them in the world and they were tough to find.

While Larry was pursuing a more profitable career outside of pipe making, his pipes continued to increase in value on the used market. Everyone recognized their quality. If there were one or two at a pipe show, collectors elbowed each other out of the way to grab them up. I had the bruises to prove it.

...collectors elbowed each other out of the way to grab them up

By 2001, Larry had a high-paying sales job and was able to afford the finer trappings of life at last: a fancy watch, a nice wardrobe, a cool car. Then he was abruptly fired. "I had never been fired in my life," says Larry. "It was devastating, but I guess I really fired myself. My heart wasn't in it." He didn't enjoy that job; it didn't require the creativity that Larry's personality needed, and he found that the fancy accessories that money could buy didn't mean much to him. It was the life-reset that he didn't know he needed until after it happened. He took off his Rolex and never wore it again. He didn't care what time it was. Life was more important than the measurement of time.

Coincidentally, at about that time I was fed up with trying to find Roush pipes and decided to contact him. I worked for Pipes and tobaccos magazine and I tracked down his address in Ohio and sent him some copies of the magazine, wrote to him about the state of the hobby, and urged him to return to pipe making. I did that because, like many others, I desperately wanted more Roush pipes. It was pure selfishness on my part.

Friends were also talking to him about his pipe making. "My buddy was talking to me and he said, 'Larry, do you know what your pipes are going for on eBay?' I didn't even know what eBay was, but I started looking, and he says, 'They're going for like $700,' which in 2001 was quite a bit of money for a pipe. And I said, 'I never got $700 in my life for a pipe,' and he says, 'Larry, you ought to think about getting back into this.' And then the package of magazines arrived, and some other things in my life seemed to point me in that direction. I just said, 'Okay, God, I guess you want me to start making pipes again.'"

He started back with pipe number 395. All Roush pipes are numbered and he's continued to follow his original nomenclature. "I'm up to 2560-something now. I don't know how I ever stumbled across the idea of numbering all the pipes, but I think it's a cool idea; it helps me track the pipes. And I think lots of guys like it, but some people think it's a shape number or something. There's always the date, and now the pipe number is four digits. But yeah, I started at 395 back in '01, so I've made about 2100 pipes, roughly, in the 20 years since I restarted."

The Learning Curve Continues

Larry used acrylic, pre-formed stems for his pipes in the early years, though heavily modified, but switched to Ebonite shortly after returning to pipe making. "They were nice quality acrylic blanks. And these were truly blanks, I mean, they were drilled, but you had to modify the drilling, of course, and the tenon and the lip button. And then after I got reentered into pipe making, I decided, 'Well, these guys deserve a hand-cut mouthpiece as well.'"

He didn't really want to go through yet another long learning curve to learn Ebonite. "But pipe guys spending this much money on a pipe deserve a hand-cut stem, so I did it. And again, I was totally on my own and didn't know where to go as far as how to make a mouthpiece from a chunk of Ebonite, but I started, and again, it's training all over again. And I hated it, I mean, working with acrylic is nice, it's clean, it's got this sweet smell and the sawdust just brushes right off, and Ebonite is terrible stuff, it's like nasal snuff, it gets all over your hands and you can't just wipe it off because it's smears. But now I love Ebonite and I think it's a very, very cool material and I won't go back to acrylic. But it was tough to learn." He has also made a few pipes with Bakelite mouthpieces, though almost everything since 2001 has been with Ebonite.

His first pipe show in 2001 was a great success that let him know he was on the right path. "I went to a marvelous little show in Columbus, and I had my case and I had maybe six or eight pipes and I didn't tell anybody I was going, I just showed up, and I didn't have a table and didn't really know anyone because I was out of the pipe world for quite a while. So I just showed up and found a corner and opened my case up, and guys found out that I had Larry Roush pipes and they just stormed me, they were all around me."

One attendee asked Larry, "Where in the world did you get so many Roush pipes?" Larry looked at him and said, "I made them." He was back.

"Where in the world did you get so many Roush pipes?"

On Finishes and Silverwork

For finishes, Roush pipes are smooth, rusticated, sandblasted, or a combination of rusticated and sandblasted. His sandblasting is excellent, with the growth rings very defined. "My sandblasting is hopefully evolving a little bit better and better every time. My combination finish can be done in different ways. Sometimes I'll do a full rustication and then sandblast it, other times I'll use different carving chisels and then sandblast it, so there's not a real set standard. I really don't have a set standard that says, 'Okay, this is my combo finish, I do this, this and this, and then that's it.' Sometimes I'll do a few different things, like little faceted carvings on pipes."

Silverwork on Roush pipes has no limitations except for time and expense. Larry has to think about how much time and precious metal he can invest and still make a pipe that isn't priced beyond a justifiable level. "I could do silver caps and all that neat stuff, but when it comes down to time, it's not really worth it. I admire Peterson, I think they do some awesome stuff, but again, they've got dedicated silversmiths, I'm assuming, and that's all they do, is silverwork on the pipes. Peterson's silverwork is really, really neat and it's an inspiration to me."

However, Larry has to budget his time on silverwork to keep his prices reasonable. "I just do the standard, it looks like wedding band stuff. I buy all my silver stock by the foot, and then just calculate it and cut it. It's all made from stock silver, like my rope finish, or some of the other styles are done with file work. But it's just some of my standard stuff that I think the guys like; the rope finish is very popular, and the flat silver is very popular, and the hammered is popular. I make all the cuts for the rope finish; I start out with a piece of silver that's smooth and I cut those grooves in it myself and then polish it. There are always different ideas and different things to do. But any silver design you see on my pipes, I do that myself."

Larry's pipes possess unique and identifiable styling, often featuring a long taper through the shank and seamlessly continuing into a tapered mouthpiece. He does more traditional shapes as well, and generally carves pipes with sturdy, muscular bowls. He tends to make pipes that he would like to smoke, and therefore he smokes his own pipes.

"I don't smoke my pipes as advertising. It's because I'm just an old fashioned guy who likes a good smoking pipe, and I don't want to spend any money on pipes anymore so I just smoke what I have. And I smoke only a handful of pipes; I don't have 500 Roush pipes. I'll smoke the same pipe back-to-back, day after day. I don't believe in that rotation thing, but that's just me personally. I'll smoke the same pipe all day when I'm out in the shop, empty it, fill it back up and smoke it again, lay it down in the ashtray and pick it up again. I don't notice any reduction in quality by smoking them over and over. My philosophy is if it tastes good, smoke it. Luckily, I stumbled across something that seems to work, that I know it tastes good, and I'm grateful that other people think they smoke well too."

Roush pipes are in no danger of disappearing. Larry has been somewhat semi-retired, making only a few pipes, but is reinvesting himself in fulltime carving. "I've been out in the pipe shop a lot more than I have been." It's nice to know he isn't planning on retirement soon and that his fans won't be clamoring for him to get back to work and make more pipes. "I'll be out in the pipe shop more, so the future for Roush pipes is probably going to be more pipes than you've seen appearing in the last 10 years."