FORT MADISON — It wouldn’t be a great surprise if any day now,  Fort Madison’s Rick Huff were to hang out a shingle declaring himself an attorney, or perhaps he might begin seeing patients for tooth extractions. 

That’s because there seem to be few things Huff cannot — or will not try  — to do.

Since his retirement eight years ago, Huff has embarked on an almost frenetic search for new skills to master. While many retirees are content to deal with managed decline, Huff aggressively seeks out new challenges to keep his grey cells pliable.

That willingness to test himself and take on challenging tasks began long began before he gave up the work-a-day world. Huff was a manager at a pipeline terminal for a major gas line company, where he was charged with keeping gas flowing to customers throughout the region 

It was a job awash with responsibility and challenges Huff welcomed during a 30-year career with the company. But when he decided to step away from the workplace, the idea of sitting out his “golden years” in a rocking chair was unthinkable.

“If you think you’re old,” he explained, “then you are going to be old. I’ve just got too much energy for that, and there are still a lot of things that I want to do.”

Huff is a native of Farmington, while his very understanding wife, Sharon, has Donnellson roots. Twenty years ago, they moved into their comfortable home, tucked into the bluffs on Fort Madison’s far west end. Huff built much of sprawling rancher himself and added a large — but cluttered — workshop where he can pursue his many varied interests. 

Huff and Sharon married while he was still in the Army and stationed in Germany. Their family has grown over the years and now numbers two sons, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. But all now live out of town, which provides an excuse for Huff and his wife to travel.  

But it is the local swap meets, auctions and town festivals where Huff is a familiar face. There, he displays his latest handiwork or trolls for new project ideas. And the ideas he comes up often blur the line between a “crafts” projects and folk art.

He is a consummate woodworker, carpenter, metal worker, car mechanic, furniture refinisher and tinkerer. He is among the very few who can brag they have the largest collection of millstones in the area. He also is trying new landscaping ideas to limit the amount of grass trimming he abhors.

The stone millstone grinders, which now are landscape features and re-purposed yard furniture, are an ongoing result from an accidental detour into collecting. He ran across them at the antique auctions he attends and, on an impulse, bought one. The collection has grown from there, but he now hopes he has reached the saturation point for stones.

But it is the lamps filling his workshop that are Huff's present calling. They are everywhere, in all sorts of shapes and configurations. They are wonderfully impractical, whimsical and an example of what can be produced by an unfettered imagination from the simplest of parts and an abundance of skill.

There are lamps that started out as a barn light but got caught up with parts from a cream separator. Explosion-proof lamps, found in a St. Louis parts shop, now glow in company with cast iron cartwheels. Brass pressure gages and gas valves are repurposed as accent points for some of the lamps.

“I really like the brass gages because they shine up so well,” Huff offered in the way of an explanation for the weird combining of parts.

There are lamps featuring the spotlight of an old fire truck, a brass boat prop, the planter plate from a one-time corn planter, and wrenches now affixed to the gathering plate on a combine. Parts from a graveyard yard of mechanical parts, selected for their unusual shapes and angles, now find new life.

The lamps and accent pieces call out to be housed in a modish trendy home or the showroom of an upscale shop specializing in contemporary furnishings. But Huff’s creations presently are confined to his workshop shelves.

“I used to go to shows and sell some of my things and there was a lot of interest in them," Huff said. "But now, with the virus, everything is shut down. But you can’t just shut down your mind. Sometimes I lie in bed and draw myself a mental picture of a lamp or something and I just have to get up and work on it."

Huff explained Sharon accepts his compulsive calling for his varied hobbies. She creates colorful quilts in a dedicated sewing room at one end of the house, while his workshop is on the opposite end of the building. But it is in the center of the house where Huff’s hobbies threaten to take over.

There are posters from the Lee County Speedway, where Huff worked for 18 years, his collection of old keys and the restored antique furniture. It is all evidence of a questing mind that refuses to be slowed down by retirement.