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Whirligig maker knows which way the wind blows
Kathleen Kearns
There's a Tom Paxton song that goes:
It went "zip" when it moved
And "pop" when it stopped
And "whirr" when it stood still.
I never knew just what it was
And I guess I never will.
"The Marvelous Toy" comes readily to mind as you watch Vollis Simpson's brightly colored whirligigs turn in the wind. Bike wheels, highway signs, old saucepans and scrap metal cutouts of farm animals have all become clacking, chiming, turning parts of the giant moving sculptures he's built by the side of the road near Lucama in Wilson County.
In his brimmed cap, plaid shirt and work-grimed jeans, Simpson looks every inch the son of a Wilson County tobacco farmer, which is what he is. He has the big-knuckled hands of a man who has worked hard every day of his life -- and that's also the truth. He has served in the Navy, farmed, moved houses and run a repair shop for trucks and farm machinery.
But at 85, he still turns out whimsical moving sculptures that look like they came straight from the mind of a particularly inventive child.
A strong and technically skilled child, that is. These whirligigs are really big. The biggest on his property is at least 20-feet high, and he made one for the Museum of Visionary Art in Baltimore that is two stories tall.
The moving parts are balanced precisely, and the structures are strong enough to have weathered four hurricanes so far. The base of his Giant Blue Whirligig, the biggest at his home, is sunk 16 feet in the ground, he said, and he put it up himself. Well, he did have two boys hold the guy wires.
The front yard of Simpson's shop -- formerly the repair shop he ran for 30 years with two partners -- is littered with old tires, rusty debris and dozens of blue iced tea cans. Coils of wire, fan blades, piles of greasy auto parts and four drill presses surround him as he sits on a black office chair and chats while an oldies station belts out the Beach Boys and Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
"I had open-heart surgery about six weeks ago," he said. "So I'm just piddling. I can't do heavy work."
What he was piddling on that day is a large fan to which he's welded six silhouettes of cats.
"Could you believe this woman wanted six cats on that? Well, her husband did. It's for her birthday. She's crazy over cats. I have to paint the cats all different and put reflector eyes on them.
"I've got to sand it and sleek it. It came out balanced. That surprised me."
When Simpson plans a new piece, he sometimes draws it out first. Some pieces he's made several times and has developed patterns for.
He knew how to weld, but he didn't make windmills until he was in Saipan with the Navy in the late 1940s and came up with a wind-driven washing machine. Around 1985 he began making whirligigs. Within a couple years he had four of them in the Atlanta Georgia Pacific Museum. One now stands at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.
Fans began making pilgrimages to his home.
"A lot of people see the one in Baltimore and want to see where the horse's mouth is," he says. "I meet a lot of people."
He welcomes them, talks to them, and shows them around. Besides his pasture of large-scale whirligigs, he has a shop chock full of smaller ones shaped like angels, horses, almost anything you can think of.
Most of them are made from scrap metal, highway reflectors, the odd crucifix. "You used to be able to find lots of things," he says. "Now everything's plastic."
"The pitifullest thing I've seen since I've been here -- and there are a lot of pitiful things today -- was a church group brought children out in three little buses. Thirty minutes later the teacher brought a girl up. She was blind and wanted to touch everything. Her hands went all over everything. Her hands were her eyes.
"I'm kind of tenderhearted when it comes to a thing like that. I went home and got a little windmill and gave it to her. That really did touch me," he said.
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If You Go
You could take Interstate 40, but the back roads offer a more relaxed and scenic ride. From Chapel Hill, take N.C. 54 east about 10 miles and turn right on N.C. 55 south, which will take you through Apex, Holly Springs and Fuquay-Varina. From there, take N.C. 42 east about 32 miles to N.C. 581, where there is a flashing light.
Turn right onto N.C. 581, go 1.2 miles, and turn left onto Springfield School Road. (The road sign at the corner is missing, but you'll see a sign at that intersection pointing you toward Moore's Cross Road.) Go about 3 miles to a stop sign and turn right onto Willing Worker Road. You'll soon see Simpson's whirligigs straight ahead.
Simpson welcomes visitors when he's at his shop but locks things up when he leaves because, he says, "rotten eggs" get in and vandalize. Even if the gates to his pasture are closed, many of his whirligigs can be seen from the road.
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