Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 12, 1995 TAG: 9503110018
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: STAFFORDSVILLE LENGTH: Long
It all started with Halley's Comet, Lynn says.
Talk to the Cosells long enough - oh, five minutes or so - and you'll hear a lot of tales like that.
Like the time they took a vacation to New Zealand and almost didn't come back home, they loved the place so much.
Or how when Bernie took up bowling and billiards, he studied old French treatises on the physics of spinning spheres to try to improve his aim. (Must have worked; he's twice rolled a 300 game.)
Or how Bernie's e-mail letters to his friends back in Massachusetts about the travails of two urban Yankee homesteaders trying to figure out how to raise sheep in the mountains of Virginia evolved into a delightful journal of mistakes and missteps that's now generated its own mailing list and become a cult fave on the Internet.
"This is Bernie," says former computer co-worker Dave Walden knowingly. "He does everything to the fullest." And Lynn? Well, she does, too.
So maybe we should just come straight to the point:
Why did the Cosells chuck their high-tech careers to become sheep farmers and industrial wool-spinners - provided they can ever figure out how to get their Depression-era machinery to work?
"It's a typical midlife crisis, and we just acted on it," Lynn says. "Most of our friends think we're totally nuts."
Interesting people doing interesting things
Bernie and Lynn Cosell boast resumes that put them in the fast lane on Route 128, Boston's equivalent of Silicon Valley. Both Massachusetts Institute of Technology grads. Both computer pioneers at BBN, a prestigious Cambridge high-tech firm.
Lynn worked on voice compression, the technique of sending digitized sound via computers, much like telephone conversations.
Bernie was a hotshot software programmer who in the late 1960s was one of a dozen or so technicians who designed and built the world's first computer network, the ARPAnet, which later evolved into the Internet, the global network of networks that's now all the rage. If you want to call Bernie a co-founder of the Internet, you wouldn't be far off.
But within BBN, Bernie and Lynn also had a reputation for being, well, interesting people who were always doing interesting things. She was the straightforward, matter-of-fact one; he's the garrulous sort with a penchant for telling long stories and a child-like fascination for figuring out how things work.
"Bernie a guy who's enormously bright and dives deeply into what interests him," Walden says. "He pursues an avocation to the limits." So when the Cosells got interested in astronomy, Bernie went off to take some classes in celestial mechanics. And then there was his research into bowling balls. "Bernie's definitely an individual, when he gets interested in something, he tries to figure out the mechanics of it," Walden says.
There was a phase where he was playing chess by mail, another when the Cosells were regulars on the car rally circuit, still a third where they mastered role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons.
So when Lynn took up weaving as a way to relax after work, it only seemed a natural extension of the couple's eclectic interests.
And when the Cosells' interest in star-gazing led them to comet-chasing in the Southern Hemisphere, well, that, too, seemed perfectly in character.
That's where the part about Halley's Comet comes in.
"It's her fault," Bernie says good-naturedly.
"It was an act of God," Lynn counters. "I'd read about Halley's Comet all my life, and now it was visible only in the Southern Hemisphere. I looked up one day and said, `Hey, let's go see Halley's Comet.'''
The Cosells wound up on an extended vacation in 1986 to Australia and New Zealand, from which they almost didn't return. "Everything there was sheep," Lynn marvels. ``You get off the plane and it's sheep everywhere."
The Cosells fell in love. "When all the other people on the tour went to gift shops, we'd go to real estate agents," Bernie says. "We talked to the immigration authorities about what was involved in immigrating." Those plans fell through, "but the basic seed had been planted. We came back thinking rural is good, peaceful is good."
And sheep are just great.
The Mercedes of the sheep world
Sheep became the Cosells' life.
She learned how to spin by hand, the intricate art of turning wool "top" - what wool is called after it's been cleaned, carded and combed - into yarn. They both frequented sheep shows. "It's like watching paint dry," Lynn says. But then, she likes watching paint dry.
Lynn touched her first merino fleece at a county fair. Merinos are the Mercedes of the sheep world, and the wool they produce is unlike any other - as soft and fine as little puffs of clouds that floated down to Earth. "I thought `this is not wool, this is something else,''' Lynn says.
Not content with ordinary spinning, Lynn became fascinated with the most complicated type of wool "top." There's "woolen," which is so fuzzy it's bristling with character, and "worsted," which has been combed and brushed until it's silky smooth.
Lynn wanted to spin with worsted. "I hate yarn with character," she explains.
And not just any worsted wool, either. She wanted merino worsted, a doubly exotic blend.
In time, the Cosells began dreaming of the next logical step - a farm.
"It ate away at us and ate away at us," Bernie says. He and Lynn talked so much about their "fantasy farm" that in time they decided that's what to name it when they finally had one: Fantasy Farm.
But they did more than talk. They started buying sheep, even if they didn't have a farm to put them on.
"Before we owned the farm, we already owned seven sheep," Bernie says. "We had sheep boarded at friends' farms while we were looking for a farm. We knew the die was cast."
Sheep wasn't all they were buying.
Lynn saw a way to turn her hobby into a business. There were few companies around that took the time to produce small lots of worsted merino wool for hand-spinners. The market was just too small for the big textile companies. But it seemed plenty big for Lynn. "I decided this was a niche I thought I'd identified," she says. She decided to trade the computer industry for a cottage industry.
But first, she'd need the equipment.
And the equipment really was a factory.
She started dialing up New England's creaky old textile mills, asking what they might have to sell. "All the guys in the mill started laughing at me," she says. "They'd say, 'Lady, do you have any idea what you're doing?' I'd say, `No, why don't you tell me?,' and they'd wind up showing me their factory."
Many of them were closing down, or had old equipment sitting around, headed for the scrap heap. Lynn bid against the junk dealers.
"I wound up with about 8 tons of mill equipment, give or take a couple tons," she says.
She bought a "card" machine, a behemoth about the size of a printing press that runs the raw wool through big, spiked rollers and presses it into a wide sheet of fleece. She picked up a "pin drafter" that straightens the fiber and a "comb" that combs out the dirt.
In all, about $10,500 worth of dusty old machinery that had been gathering cobwebs on the factory floor.
Just like that, the Cosells found themselves owning sheep, but no farm; factory equipment, but no factory to put it in.
Oh, and one other thing: Would any of this machinery still operate?
"We think computer programs are complicated," Lynn says, "but I don't see how in the world they got these things to work."
"A Yankee's best attempt at finding a farm''
Bernie hates cold winters. Lynn despises hot summers. So their search for a farm became a quest for the ideal climate: not too hot, not too cold. Also, they needed to be close to a high-tech city, because the plan was for Bernie to keep working with computers while Lynn raised her sheep and ran her wool through her one-woman assembly line of contraptions.
They looked first at Portland, Ore.
But the misty Pacific Northwest turned out to be too misty. Merinos, the Cosells learned, would mold - yes, mold - in such wet weather. The Cosells despaired of ever finding the perfect place.
Then, flying home from a business trip to Paris, Bernie's boss shared a piece of advice. "He said move south until the winters are warm, then move up in altitude until the summers are cooler. After he planted that seed, it was all over."
The Cosells opened a map and stuck their fingers on the Appalachians. They looked first at Winchester, figuring that was within commuting distance of Washington. It was. It was also too expensive.
So they ran their fingers south until they hit Roanoke.
"This is a Yankee's best attempt at finding a farm in Roanoke - we wound up in Giles County," Bernie says.
Actually, it's a little more complicated than that, but then, most things with the Cosells are.
When they found Roanoke on the map, they noticed Blacksburg - and Virginia Tech - next door. "We figured Tech was like MIT and spawned lots of high-tech jobs," Lynn says. So they called up the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce one Sunday afternoon and asked for a list of local Realtors. List in hand, they telephoned one and said they were looking for a farm. They ended up with 82 pristine acres tucked back at the end of a dirt road in a Giles County hollow between Buckeye Mountain and Guinea Mountain.
Even better, it had two houses on the place, one where the Cosells could live, a second they could stuff full of all the books they owned.
That was in February 1992.
Novice farmer, UNIX wizard
And that's where the Cosells' adventure really started.
For the past three years, the Cosells have learned the hard way about tending sheep (ever try bottle-feeding a lamb at 3 in the morning?), haggled with contractors in getting the shell building for their factory erected, and tinkered off and on with their fitful equipment.
There have been a few other complications along the way, too. For one thing, Bernie couldn't find a job. "One of the few surprises was how few technical jobs there were here," Lynn says.
In frustration, Bernie says, "I decided, `The hell with it, I'll just retire.' We weren't desperate enough to take an awful job, and thank goodness, because there were an infinite number of things to do to set up the farm."
The e-mail letters Bernie started sending to his former colleagues touched on some of the finer points of the Cosells' rustic new lifestyle:
Try Sept. 2, 1992:
"This shepherding stuff is too hard and emotionally taxing. We're in the midst of a new round of mishaps in the almost constant one-thing-or-another trial by fire we seem to be condemned to endure. ... We've had scours a few times already, so mostly we thought we knew how to deal with it, but scours during the summer are special: the wet, warm, fecal-matted fleece becomes the ideal breeding ground for flies. Yes ... our 'education' is continuing at rapid-fire pace with today's lesson being a nice round of fly-strike."
Or Oct. 28, 1992:
"I mentioned that I was busy doing something else while some of the trenching was being done. Well, the [Ditch Witch] was running out of gas, so I jumped into the truck and went to get the gas can. Now the truck has a bit of a problem: its transfer case occasionally slips out of 4WD into the neutral position between the two 4WD ranges. I didn't bother to set the parking brake: I just left it in gear and jumped out to get the gas. Well, the #$%#$ thing slipped out and as I came back with the gas can I noticed that the truck was missing ... :-(. I saw it about 20 feet away, rolling into the perimeter fence on the pasture we were trenching. For about 10 seconds it sat there, and then it ripped out all seven strands of high-tensile fence and continued down the hill, across the pasture, and through the fence on the OTHER side of the pasture. It went in between posts up top, but at the bottom it hit one of the wooden posts, and that dented in the driver's side of the cab, so the #%#$% door doesn't open ...
"Thank heaven the truck didn't hit one of the sheep or I'd be a dead man."
Bernie's friends were enthralled with these narratives. "People all around the company waited for Bernie's next installment," Walden says. "I'm not kidding. ... We're all envious of someone who drops work and does what they want to do." Soon, the high-tech types started circulating Bernie's letters around the Internet, where they picked up additional fans - who began e-mailing Bernie to see if they could be added to his mailing list. He's now got about 50 people he mails his letters to directly, most of them complete strangers, while countless others pluck them off the misc.rural newsgroup's bulletin board in cyberspace.
"I usually get four or five random messages from people around the world after each one," Bernie says. "It's strange having people around the globe know about lambs that wandered through our farm."
Trouble is, the Cosells discovered, farming may be fun, but it's not always profitable. So far, Bernie figures he and Lynn have spent upwards of $100,000 trying to get their factory set up. So when he learned that Advance Auto in Roanoke was setting up a new computer system and "in desperate need of a UNIX wizard" - the computer operating system that is one of his specialities - he saw no choice but to, as he puts it, "unretire to make the cash flow look better."
The commute from the far reaches of Giles County was a killer, though. That's why Bernie now rents a spartan apartment in Roanoke, and makes it back to the farm only on weekends. It is, he admits, "a little strange," but then, Bernie's never been one to worry about appearances. The point is, he says, "I mail checks back to the homeplace."
That's a good thing because, three years after the Cosells moved to Virginia, they still haven't gotten their fleece factory up and running.
True, a year ago they found a retired textile mill mechanic in North Carolina who offered to come up and nurse the cranky equipment that the Cosells found so baffling. "They were really Wilbur's machines," Bernie marvels. "He really jury-rigged them back to life."
Last August, Wilbur even got the machines working long enough for Lynn to make a test run of wool to show show off at the conventions where hand-spinners, and the wholesalers who supply them with wool, gather. But then the gearbox on the card gave out, fell apart really, and Wilbur the wonder mechanic took it home to fix. When he died unexpectedly before Christmas, the Cosells were at a loss what to do.
Now, at long last, the Cosells have found someone else to fix the gearbox, and Lynn thinks she's finally ready to start production sometime this spring.
She's up to 56 sheep, although she figures she'll eventually need 400 to supply all the 3,000 pounds of wool each year she needs to run her business. But she's got 5,000 pounds of fleece already scrubbed and stored, waiting to be run through the machinery. The wool from last summer's test run has been a big hit. She's already lined up four wool stores - in New York, Maine and Tennessee - to sell her wool and more are calling as word gets around the wool world.
"It's absolutely terrific," gushes Susan Vasquez, who runs The Wool Room in Brewster, N.Y. "I can't keep it in stock. I know everybody is going to want it." Why? "It was like spinning butter, except not so greasy. It's the most wonderful sensation."
Lynn admits she doesn't have a clue how big, or how small, the market for merino worsted for hand-spinners is, but Vasquez thinks she does.
"I think she's courageous doing something like this," Vasquez says. "I think it will be bigger than she can possibly imagine."
That's what Bernie and Lynn are afraid of. They're committed to keeping this wool business small enough that Lynn can run the factory on her own. "I had designs to retire to a farm," Bernie says, "and spending all day in a mill is not my idea of retirement."
Ah, but it is Lynn's.
"I think it's fun," she says, patting one of the dusty old machines as if it were a favorite pet. "I'm amazed we've gotten this far. It's mind-boggling."
by CNB