BELLEVILLE – For Mike Lanham, the dream to become a blacksmith started with “Sesame Street.”
He remembers a “Sesame Street” short in which a blacksmith uses a silo ring to make carriage bolts for a sled. At age 5, Lanham was fascinated. It wasn’t until he was in college at SIUE that he was finally able to take a summer blacksmithing class, and that interest he developed at age 5 turned into a passion. Today, Lanham is the owner of Giant Dwarf Forge, and his 13-year-old daughter Caroline is following in his footsteps.
“The idea that you could take something thrown away and make something brand new out of it just sparked something in my imagination, and it never let go,” he said.
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Like a lot of young boys, Lanham said, his first blacksmith mission was to make himself a knife. He joined the Illinois Valley Blacksmith Association and the Blacksmiths Association of Missouri, then …