The work changed Walter's view of himself. After losing his farm, he had spoken as though his useful years had ended with the auction. Now buyers from other states called the workshop asking for material Walter had inspected and prepared. When Earl told him one day that a cabinetmaker had specifically praised his grading, Walter stood still a moment before returning to work.
"Funny," Walter said. "I thought I was finished when they sold my equipment." Earl looked at the tagged stacks. "Funny what people think is finished." Neither man said more, because both understood the thought carried more weight than it sounded.
Ray found his own place in the operation. He was patient with records, careful with measurements, and increasingly interested in reducing waste without lowering standards. He set up a system to track which pieces were too short for furniture but suitable for small decorative components. Earl approved experiments using offcuts for sample boards and simple non-food decorative items, provided the work did not distract from promised orders.
Their first sample display used a series of small panels polished to different levels. One showed raw exterior gray beside cleaned grain. Another preserved a narrow line of char, and a third demonstrated what happened when sanding removed too much of the surface character. Buyers who visited the farm could see, touch, and compare the material instead of trying to understand a complicated explanation over the telephone.
In 1988, the bank faced a new problem that looked familiar only from a distance. A regional company connected to liquor storage and barrel distribution had defaulted on financing, leaving the bank in possession of thousands of used wooden barrels. Larkin remembered Earl's success before the inventory staff finished counting the lot. This time he told the bank's officers that disposing of the barrels would be a mistake.
The board asked whether the bank intended to become a barrel merchant. Larkin explained that selected whiskey-oak material could command hundreds of dollars per prepared equivalent, citing the newspaper and the market information he had collected. The bank had warehouses, access to financing, and employees it could assign to the task. If a farmer near Chillicothe could create value from discarded barrels, Larkin reasoned, a bank with professional managers ought to do at least as well.
The proposal sounded sensible in the meeting room. The officers approved limited spending to store and market the material rather than surrender it to a disposal contractor. Larkin called it an opportunity to recover value from a distressed asset. Nobody in the room asked who would inspect each barrel or how long the usable oak might require to become stable.
At first, the bank simply left the new lot in an open storage area while employees sought buyers. The barrels stood on damp ground through repeated rain, and several collected water where their heads had loosened. Old iron hoops began slipping as the wood swelled and dried in irregular cycles. A few employees warned that the stock was deteriorating, but the reports arrived alongside many other liquidation documents and received little attention.