COMPULSION UNDERSTOOD

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“THE COOL THING WITH FIXED BLADE KNIVES IS WE NEVER MAKE A MISTAKE, WE JUST MAKE A SMALLER KNIFE.” —LES GEORGE

When I finally met him in person, Les George had been making knives for 30 years. I had never made a knife in my life. I had spent most of the years preceding our meeting in the Marine Corps. Les spent a decade as a Marine himself and, though we just missed overlapping in Iraq, we came to know one another through mutual connections in the Corps.

After a few years of exchanging texts featuring the kind of sarcastic insults and self-deprecating jokes in which we both seem to specialize, we found ourselves driving south from Memphis and discussing designs for the blade I intended to make in his shop. His approach is to “try and reimagine what the guys who designed the classics were trying to do, and then do it with the advantage of 100 years of technology.”

That seemed perfect for the knife I wanted to make, one my potential grand-kids