PESHASTIN – Ask Larry Stoltz about all those animal cutouts in front of his roadside business near the junction of U.S. 2 and U.S. 97 and you’re likely to get a longer answer than you bargained for.
And what about the big silver ball sitting among the rusted dogs, elk, bears and cowboys? Is it an alien pod producing all those critters?
One story leads to another when you sit down with Stoltz, a 62-year-old fabricator of more than the metal that fills his meandering shop, L&L Engineering. And, no, he’s not about to make up stories about space travel or things so far-fetched. He has too many real stories to tell about his adventures in work and play.
Like the one about that curious 9-foot-tall globe in front of his shop. It’s a smaller version of a 45-foot-diameter sphere he built for a futuristic housing demonstration at a school in Southern California.
Stoltz built the smaller sphere in 2002, shortly after he moved his engineering business from California to Peshastin. Friends told him he’d need a project to keep him busy so he began machining and welding together hundreds of ribbon-thin pieces of metal as an art project.
“I sold it once, but it rolled off my truck when I went to deliver it,” he said. “That was something to see. A 100-inch metal ball rolling down Interstate 90 with me running after it.” The ball was damaged, so Stoltz called off the sale.
Stoltz’s office and fabrication room are a messy museum of past, present and future projects, each guaranteed to trigger a yarn.
The American flags caught midwave in a curl of aluminum, titanium, copper and other metals have been used on the traveling Veterans Memorial wall. Stainless steel boxes and cabinets are used for medical and electronic components, including a liposuction device. Other metal gadgets are made on contract for school buses, trucks and boats. He has a line of storage shelving, tack racks, trivets, fire pits and barbecue equipment.
Stoltz runs the operation with his two sons, Lester, 24, and Lars, 20, and proudly shows off their precise welding.
Stoltz whips out the animal silhouettes whenever he has free time and leftover sheet metal. He uses a pantograph, a device that makes copies to scale, to create dogs, horses and a menagerie of wildlife. He plants the creatures in front of his shop, and the zoo grows each week. The silhouettes are popular sellers as yard art, he said.
The varied products are the result of a rich and varied life. Stoltz was brought up on an Illinois farm, where he learned to fix and fabricate things at an early age. When he was 17, he traveled to South America, where he got into photography and whitewater rafting. He moved to Alaska right out of high school and worked as a game warden. He built a home for a well-known landscape-and-wildlife photographer and traveled the state taking his own photographs.
That acquaintance and experience led Stoltz to move to California to attend the Brooks Institute of Photography, where he graduated and then was employed as a teacher.
Stoltz also worked as a test diver and a metal fabricator. When an opportunity came up to own his own fabrication company 15 years ago, he took it.
L&L Engineering was making more than 14,000 parts a day for automotive, medical and cleaning equipment contractors before running into financial problems a few years ago, he said. Several small manufacturing businesses that contracted with Stoltz went bankrupt after the Sept. 11 attacks and the Enron crisis in 2001 and 2002, he said. He was left with thousands of dollars worth of parts and unpaid billings and lost his lease on his commercial property near Santa Barbara.
Stoltz went looking for a new location and a more relaxed lifestyle. When he found the property skirting a major highway and close to the Wenatchee River’s whitewater, he jumped at the chance to move north. In 2002, he came up with six semi loads carrying more than 250,000 pounds of machine equipment.
He said he’s still unpacking.
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