The Spoon Man of Springfield: Inside the Shop Where Washboards Outsell Guitars

The first thing you notice inside Kessler's Music & Repair on Springfield's east side isn't the smell of machine oil or the wall of ukulele strings. It's the sound. Somewhere in the back of the shop, a washboard is being tested — thmp, thmp, thmp — with the seriousness of a surgeon tapping a chest.

"That's Dale," the man behind the counter says without looking up. "Checking a No. 5 for a guy in Columbus. He's picky about the thump."

Welcome to what may be Ohio's last hardware store for obscure instruments — a place where spoons are sold in graduated pairs, where jaw harps hang on pegboard like fishing lures, and where the owner, Ray Kessler, 71, has spent four decades refusing to stock anything with a battery in it.

The Inventory Nobody Else Wants

Ray's father opened the shop in 1958 as a general hardware store. The washboards were originally for laundry. But when a jug band from Dayton wandered in during the folk revival and bought three, the elder Kessler noticed something: the margins on musical washboards beat the margins on laundry ones, and nobody came back to complain the board didn't sing.

By 1979, the inventory had tilted for good. Today the store carries:

• Washboard percussion boards, from basic galvanized steel to a brass-ribbed monster Ray calls "the Cadillac"
• Musical spoons, sold in pairs, sorted by tone the way drumsticks are sorted by weight
• Jaw harps (Ray insists on the old name; call it a "jew's harp" and he'll gently correct you)
• Kazoos, slide whistles, and a small crate of harmonicas in keys most people didn't know existed
• One upright bass, not for sale, "just so people know we're serious"

There are no electric guitars. There is no drum machine aisle. When a customer once asked if they stocked auto-tune, Ray says he "walked him to the door politely and locked it behind him."

Who Actually Buys This Stuff

You'd think the customer base would be dwindling toward zero. You'd be wrong — it's just changed shape.

On the morning I visited, the shop hosted, in order: a retired schoolteacher from Urbana buying rhythm sticks and hand drums for her granddaughter's co-op music class; a member of a Columbus jug band revival outfit who needed a thimble for his guitar-socket playing; and a touring percussionist from a nationally touring Americana act who called ahead from a tour bus outside Toledo to reserve a specific washboard "with the big throat plates."

That last one — the touring pro — is a bigger part of the business than you'd guess. Ray estimates he ships washboards and spoons to stage musicians two or three times a month. "Every folk festival in America has a washboard player now," he says. "They just can't find one that doesn't rattle apart. Mine don't rattle apart."

School music teachers, meanwhile, are the quiet backbone. As budgets gutted band programs, general music teachers went hunting for instruments that cost five dollars instead of five hundred. A class set of spoons, Ray points out, is cheaper than a single student violin rental.

The Repair Bench

The back room is where the real obsession lives. Ray repairs what other shops won't touch: cracked washboards re-welded at the rib, jaw harps re-tuned with a jeweler's file, a 1930s National tri-cone resonator guitar that a customer left "for the winter" in 2011 and never reclaimed.

Dale, the shop's part-time repairman, spent my entire visit working on a washboard with a replaced wooden frame — oak, hand-fit, from a board a bluegrass band's percussionist snapped clean in half during a festival encore. "You break 'em, we fix 'em," Dale shrugs. "It's a washboard. It deserves dignity."

Keeping Strange Traditions Playable

There's a theory buried in this shop, though Ray would never phrase it so grandly. Instruments survive when somebody keeps them playable — not in a museum case, but in a kid's hands at a kitchen table. The jaw harp didn't survive four centuries because anyone wrote a symphony for it. It survived because it fit in a pocket and made people laugh.

Ray's daughter takes orders and runs the online shop now, shipping spoon pairs to buyers in Oregon and Vermont he'll never meet. But the counter traffic — the teachers, the revivalists, the curious — is what he counts on.

"People ask me when I'll retire," he says, ringing up a kazoo and a thimble with the same flat patience his father must have had. "I tell 'em the day nobody walks in here needing a washboard."

He looks over at Dale's bench.

"So — not soon."

Kessler's Music & Repair is open Thursday through Saturday in Springfield. Bring cash, and don't ask about auto-tune.