MADE BY HAND

Country singer Mike Reid is on the radio singing, "A man with a hammer...is a mighty fine thing to be." Inside the barn at Black Forest Villages, voluble 45-year-old Richard Henson is telling six people gathered round how he was this close to getting a Ph.D when he decided to devote himself instead to the very act he is performing: making brooms.

At various times throughout the year, the 1,100-acre tract north of Cape Girardeau known as the Black Forest and its replicated German villages of New Hanover and Arnsberg are home to many craftspeople and artisans who come to sell their wares and demonstrate making them.

All have at least one thing in common: Pride in working with their hands.

That pride was passed down to Henson from his grandfather, a man nicknamed Bootsy who started the family broom-making business in 1930.

Henson's father was a broom-maker as well, but Henson himself rejected the idea until he was almost 40 years old.

People seem to have trouble with the idea of broom-making as an occupation, he says. "It's just that word -- `broom.'"

He graduated from Murray State University during Kentucky's basketball-crazy Adolph Rupp years, coaching the sport at various high schools in the state.

Henson was an assistant principal and boys basketball coach at Scott City High School from 1985-86.

But in 1988 he decided to chuck basketball and his career in education to take over the Henson Broom Shop in Cayce, Ky.

The impetus was a traffic accident years earlier that had taken his grandfather's life. Before dying in the hospital, grandfather reminded grandson that broom-making had gotten the family through the Depression.

Today, the shop looks like an old country store, Henson says. "His presence is all over it."

Every third Saturday a working craftsperson comes in and they serve RC Cola and Moon Pies.

Some of the brooms he makes are the plain, sturdy variety. That's a $7 broom. The handles on the fancier brooms are made from the grooved vines found growing on sassafras trees.

The business end is made of broomcorn, a crop grown commercially in the United States until the 1950s but now is imported from Mexico.

But Henson is as interested in telling people about broom-making as in making them.

PBS has done a story about the Henson Broom Shop, and his one-man historical play called "Bootsy, Brooms and Me" is available to schools.

Henson also has written a broom-themed teleplay he hopes to sell to the producers of "Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman."

Henson's daughters are as resistant to broom-making as he once was. Two want to be veterinarians and one an archaeologist, leaving only his 3-year-old son to carry on the family's trade.

"Maybe my son will be the fourth one," Henson said. "He has his own broom-making equipment."

The weekend before he was here for the Black Forest Villages' recent Octoberfest, Henson sold $1,200 worth of brooms at a fair in Tennessee.

"People say there's no way you can do this and make a living at it," he says. "We're doing it."

That's something else the artisans share -- a belief that what they do can sustain them.

Five years ago, Anita Hayden quit her job as a cook to become a full-time weaver.

Hayden has a shop in Makanda, Ill., south of Carbondale, where she weaves six days a week, 10 hours a day when she isn't on one of her thrice-yearly trips to the Black Forest.

As she says, "I'm manager, bookkeeper, everything."

Her family doesn't understand.

"They think I should go out and get a `real' job," she says. "They don't accept that I'm making a living doing this."

Hayden's career as a weaver began when she and her sister took a class in 1973. By now, each owns five looms.

Weaving is a solitary discipline that requires an experienced weaver an hour to set up the loom and 1 1/2 hours to weave a 2-by-3-foot rug.

And, it doesn't bother her that many of her creations will be walked on.

"I want to make affordable things for people to buy," she said.

The prices for her products, which include place mats, pillows and rugs, run from $10 to $400.

Many of her weavings are made from scraps salvaged from sock factories or colorful sweaters bought from thrift shops and cut into pieces.

Recycling scrap wood is only part of what makes Suzanne and Ron Scherer's two-dimensional figures unique. What they do is called Intarsia, an ancient Chinese art they learned about from a book.

It's somewhat similar to stained glassmaking, but the effects are achieved through the grain and color of the wood, which is never stained.

What they make isn't very esoteric -- tigers, eagles, jumping bass, even Corvettes.

"We're trying to guess what people would like," Ron said.

The Jackson couple's work won the best-of-show ribbon for woodworking at the SEMO District Fair, and best of show at the Benton Neighborhood Day.

The Scherers both have so-called real jobs, she at Food Giant, he at Acorn Millworks, which explains his handiness with a scroll saw. They've only been doing intarsia for a brief time and still view what they do as a hobby.

But it's a hobby that requires 20 to 80 hours to complete each work, some of which contain more than 100 pieces.

"It kind of blossomed," Suzanne said.