Loving the lights

There’s something about a fine piece of lighting that makes the heart sing. Whether it’s the way a lamp brings light to a dark corner of a room or the artistry of an art deco piece that still gives off light more than 80 years after it was built, Dean and Diane Pinkston know how to make the history of lighting something that you can live with every day.

The couple, who ran an antique lamp restoration business called “Lights Your Way” in Springfield, Missouri, for 15 years before retiring in North Sea four years ago, are two of the few people you’ll meet who seem to actually love their work.

In their garage on Barkers Island Road, they store scores of small pieces for antique lamps in an old library card catalogue file, and that’s part of their secret weapon. Even lamps that may be irreparable become part of the new lamps that they create.

They’re very clear about what they do: while some antiques dealers try to pass off their works as originals, Diane, who is a professional painter, paints patterns on the glass globes of the lamps that match the originals, helping the couple keep lamps that would otherwise have been bound for the back shelves full of useless junk at antiques shops. She signs all of her work so that collectors will know that it’s her re-creation, not an original piece.

On a recent Monday, the couple had just returned from a visit to Missouri and were mulling their choices for what to do with two lamps they’d found at a roadside barn billed as “The World’s Biggest Antique Store” in Ohio.

One was a carved wooden base in an ornate 1930s style, whose wiring had totally rusted and that was missing a lampshade or globe. The other was a 1920s-era metal base, painted in the orange, red, ruby and purple style that was all the rage in that era. They can tell when the piece was created by the wiring and the paint jobs.

“It cost five dollars,” said Diane, who was planning what type of globe to use along with the base of the 1920s lamp. “We’ll sell it on the internet for $50 to $60.”

Neither Dean nor Diane has made much money for the time that they’ve put into their craft. Diane had been a professional china painter and Dean had worked as a splicing foreman and an engineer for the Bell Telephone Company before they both retired and began going stir-crazy.

Diane had kept a broken floor lamp

that her mother had given her for 20 years, during which time she and her husband moved several times, in the process renovating as many as eight or ten homes, without taking the time to repair the lamp. It had been a wedding present to Diane’s mother and she remembered spinning around on its marble base as a child.

Dean fixed the lamp the moment he had some spare time after leaving the telephone company, and they’ve both been working almost exclusively with antique lighting ever since.

“I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” she said of the moment she first saw the revitalized lamp.

Their work hasn’t been without travails. Diane said that when she initially began painting globes she would melt as many as half of the ones she’d worked on because her kiln wasn’t firing just right. She’s since bought a digital kiln to take much of the guesswork out of globe painting.

Diane likes to tell the story of when, 12 years ago, a woman came in with a pre-Civil War-era “Gone With The Wind” lamp that she could date because of the ruby, yellow and brown paint that was commonly used on lighting at that time.

Dean got to work cleaning out the lamp’s base to rewire it, but amongst the junk and gunk of over a century, he found an old pink ribbon tied in a knot around a wedding band.

Diane said that the lamp’s owner’s mother, who had lived in Mississippi when she owned the lamp, had likely put it inside the shaft for safekeeping when she thought the Yankees were going to come to steal it.

Though the market for antique lamps is still strong in other parts of the United States and in Manhattan, amongst the modern architecture and throwaway lifestyle of Eastern Long Island, there’s not much of a market for the lamps. The couple still does all the restoration work for lamps at the Southampton Historical Museum.

“So far I’m about a penny up,” said Dean. “We live in a throwaway society. At Kmart you can get a lamp for $15, but there’s something about them,” he said, looking around at his lamp collection.