Adventures of 'Soap Box Willy'

Apr. 7—HALDEMAN — Just a few miles past the Carter County line — just a short drive west of Soldier — there's a little town off U.S. 60 called Haldeman.

In that unincorporated community in Rowan County lie the ruins of an old brick factory. Next to those ruins are a few prefab buildings, done up like general stores from the olden days. Outside the buildings are three dogs — Shorty, Joe and Cepheus. They sit around all day in search of hands to pet them.

And parked in the gravel lot is a golf cart, with antlers tied to the top of it.

The man who drives that golf cart is Craig Riggsby, but he insists on being called Soap Box Willy. He traded a 1949 Chrysler for that golf cart and he doesn't regret it a lick — he drove that car only three times, but he drives the cart every single day.

"I put it (the car) up for sale, but I couldn't get nobody to buy it," he said. "Then I said, I would trade it for a golf cart if you have one. Then a guy showed up with a golf cart, but it was all in pieces, but I told him, 'You're going to have to fix it before I'll take it.'"

Soap Box Willy got his name because he likes to make soap.

Not just any soap — world-class soap, according to him. But Soap Box Willy isn't just a soap maker. He's a clock fixer, a local historian, a fishing lure maker, an event planner and more.

His wife, Susan, likes to make art, mainly out of gourds. The more soft-spoken of the two, she appears to be the one who keeps the couple grounded, so to speak.

"She works the register here; she keeps the business side of it," he said.

Standing at about 6-foot-3 and donning a brimmed hat with bottle caps affixed to it and a pair of overalls with a semi-automatic pistol secured with a bungee cord and a little Derringer, to boot, Willy is what some would call "a character."

Eccentric is another fitting word.

Rising of the Suds

Speaking with Willy, it becomes quickly evident he's not from around these parts. His voice lacks the twang of Appalachia — the propensity to throw R's into words like wash and window.

"My dad was from here, on the other side, he was in Morgan County," he said. "My dad was Army for 23 years, I was Air Force for six, I married her (Susan) and she did a full 20 years. and her 20 years started towards the end of my six years, so I've spent my entire life in the military.

"There's not a continent I haven't set foot in," he added. "I've been everywhere ... the only two places I ever liked in my entire life was Norway and here. Norway was too damn expensive, so we moved here."

Wind the clock back to 2008. Susan had retired from service and working for the state of Pennsylvania in veterans' employment. The Great Recession hit and Craig Riggsby — long before donning the hat and making soap — was working as a webmaster for a multi-billion-dollar company. In 2010, he found himself without a job.

"That was after working for them for 15 years," Willy said. "On a Friday, my boss said, 'Hey, I tell you what, don't worry about nothing. You'll be the last guy here. When they turn off the lights, you'll be the one to turn them.' On a Monday, they called me and said, 'Nah, we don't need you anymore.'"

Susan said that's when her husband "started getting itchy feet." Those feet soon found a spot to get scratched when they visited his Uncle Joe in July 2011 to celebrate the man's birthday.

"On the way home, I was like, if you to move, I'm OK with it," she said. "He's pretty much followed me my entire career. I've dragged him all over the place from Indiana to Mexico."

"Stranded me in Connecticut when you went to Korea," Willy added.

"... To Florida to Alaska to Pennsylvania so it was my turn to follow him," Susan said.

The move happened quick. They sold their home the following month. Susan quit her job, he cashed out his retirement and they took off to Rowan County, where they bought a place off Bear Skin "just a little off the main road enough you're in the woods," Willy said.

Sitting up on the hill, they soon became bored "watching the paint change colors," as Willy said.

A lady his uncle used to work for died and left a mess of ceramics making material. Willy said his uncle didn't have use for it, so he gave it to them since "we like to play with stuff like that." But running a kiln to make pottery was much too costly, so the couple took some molds and tried to make soap with them — another little hobby they'd fooled with in the past.

"It had been years since we thought about it, but we were like, well, let's give it a shot," he said.

The first experiment didn't work out well. The soap fused with the mold, making it impossible to pull apart. After a few more tries, Willy said they donated the ceramics materials — a couple kilns and 1,000 molds — and he got serious about soap.

"I went out and found every recipe I could find, anything I could find on soap making, I looked it up and read it," he said. "Then I decided to have my own recipe. I shared it with relatives, they went nuts for it. They said, 'You need to sell this.'"

Thus, MKM Soaps was born.

According to Willy, that soap — with names like Monkey Farts (because it's "fruitier than a monkey's fart") — is so good, it's made longtime soap makers hang up their hats.

"I've had soap makers quit because they've been making soap for 40 years and they said, 'I tried your soap, and I quit. I couldn't do it anymore; I'll just sell yours.' That's because they couldn't match the recipe and they couldn't match the price," Willy said. "So they went ahead and quit."

Haldeman Historian

By the time the Riggsbys moved to Haldeman in the early 2010s, the brickyard had been shuttered for more than 50 years.

That brickyard is the whole reason Haldeman is Haldeman, according to Willy. Way back in 1917, an affluent man named L.P. Haldeman inherited a brickyard down the road. Traveling from Columbus, he came to the area and fell in love with it.

So he built his own brickyard — because it's much easier to build new than to modify an existing one — and he built a company town to go with it.

"What he did was he took capitalism and he took ethics together — which is the way it's supposed to be, because it doesn't work without ethics. He put those two together because he realized a happy worker is a productive worker."

Yes, Haldeman — affectionately called "LP" by Willy — paid the workers in scrip, but he would let them get paid in cash, too. and he accepted scrip from the brickyard over in Olive Hill. The housing, the medical care and any other bills came straight out of the check, Willy said.

"They took care of it all for you. All you had to do was work," Willy said.

Those bricks went everywhere — to iron furnaces in Indiana and along the Ohio River, even all the way across the ocean. An elderly gentleman in the community was serving in France shortly after World War II walking along a cobblestone street when he looked down and saw a Haldeman brick in the road, Willy said.

"They went all over the world," he said.

But like every industry, the wood-fired kilns in Haldeman couldn't keep up. Pictures from the time show the hills raped of timber, because trees were cut down in mass to feed the fires. Then new brickyards shifted to gas kilns.

While Haldeman could push out 50,000 bricks a day, the gas-fired kilns were pushing out triple that amount.

In 1958, the brickyard shut its doors. Kingsford Charcoal took it over, but the EPA shut them down in the 1970s due to pollution of a nearby stream.

But by the mid-2010s, what was left of the brickyard had been consumed by brush. At a community meeting, the old-timers — some of them whose fathers worked at the old brickyard — lamented the sad state of the property.

"They were saying, 'I wish somebody would buy it and do something with it.' and I said, 'Why don't you do it? Half of you here have twice as much money as I have. Do it.' They were like, 'Why don't you do it?' and I said. 'OK.'"

It took them a year to clear the brush and the trash off the property. Willy said it was a five-story bonfire of brush and it took a 30-yard and 20-yard dumpster to clear out the trash. What they revealed was four buildings on the property. Most folks only thought there were two, maybe three, still standing.

What's left is some rail used to transport the bricks out, parts of an old water tower on the hill (rumor has it when the yard closed, a local went up there and pilfered the wooden barrel to make furniture with it), remnants of the shaker building (where clay was sorted out), utility shed, the wash room for the workers and a laboratory where bricks were tested for hardness.

The brick lab, according to Willy, was in a bad bit of disrepair. Apparently, someone had used it as an attic of sorts, storing clothing and whatnot inside. The problem with that, Willy said, is the roof had rotted away, so all that junk was rained on and essentially turned to dirt in the elements.

Building the museum has been a community affair, Willy said. Folks all around have contributed their stories, their father's or grandfather's journals from working there, and artifacts from the company days such as pieces of scrip or old Haldeman bricks.

One neat piece of history on display is an old Mine Check a fellow found decades ago. During the brickyard's heyday, folks from all around would mine clay on their lands and fill up buggies and bring them to the yard for sale.

In order to keep up with who got what, they would attach these metal coins to their carts. About 40 years ago, a fellow was doing work near an old clay mine and while taking a lunch break came across one, Willy said.

He took it to the house and hung it on a nail.

"Then word got out we were looking for stuff and he brought it to us thinking it was scrip," Willy said. "No, that's a mine check. That is damn near as expensive as that (scrip) because a used one is unheard of. Everybody has the ones that were found in desk drawers and were never used, never had the numbers on them. But that one was used.

"As long as I break even, I'm happy."

Today, Soap Box Willy and Susan welcome children and visitors to the museum, where they can watch Willy make his soap (behind protective glass, on account of the lye), learn about their roots and look at the art all around the gift shop.

"Basically, if kids come, they learn history, they learn science, they learn entrepreneurship and they learn art all in one place," he said.

But it's more than that. Every year, they host a Christmas Tree lighting with hot chocolate, and they have a trunk-or-treat at Halloween. During the summer, there's a car show called "Hoodlums in the Holler" and they throw a movie night on the weekends where anywhere between six and 60 people might show up.

Standing out front of the flag pole — its base laid by a 75-year-old mason who only needed a string and a nail to do it — Willy circles his hands real small, as if holding a little ball.

"It's only this much business," he said, then he opened his arms wide. "And it's only this much community."

"My philosophy is, 'Try to do better tomorrow than what you were today,'" he said. "I want to show kids that it can be done and I want to show adults that it can be done. But you're not going to make money here."

While Willy is quite whimsical in some ways. After telling an anecdote, he belts a hearty laugh. But he can be dead serious in other matters.

He said he's there for anyone who needs help.

"I run this is a safe place. If a lady comes here and says, 'my husband's beating on me,' he's got to get past me. If a kid comes here and says there's a problem, they got to get past me. I don't care who they are, I protect whoever the hell comes here, end of story. I don't tolerate it," Willy said.

And he said past depictions of him by other media haven't been nice. Once, a photographer did a write-up on him and characterized him "as this gun-toting murderer," he said.

"No, you're going to change that or I'm going to come and shoot you," Willy said, with a laugh.

Inside the gift shop, there are clocks along the walls. Willy said his father was a clock repairman, so he learned how to ticker with time from him. The local fire chief brings him clocks to fix. In exchange, Willy said the chief does electrical work for him.

Susan's gourds are display — intricate and painstakingly painted and carved with detail. She loves turtles. It's a motif that frequently comes up in her work. One gourd is painted like a cow; Willy rigged up a moo can inside to make it moo.

Along the back wall with his soaps, Willy has lures made from Ale-8 and Nehi bottle caps dangling on a shelf, with one in the mouth of a stuffed smallmouth bass. Willy said folks have caught fish on those lures, but they have to really work that fish into the net. They're not the strongest lure around.

Up at the case, there are straight razors from Georgia, made from old Damascus steel, the same used to craft antique shotguns.

They come in two varieties — the shaving and the fighting kind.

Willy said the real loose ones are great for shaving, but the stiff ones are what you want in a fight.

"If it's loose in a fight, it'll come undone and cut your fingers," he said. "It needs to be stiff."

What's new for Willy?

Well, he hopes to get the picnic tables out this spring so visitors can sit down and eat their lunch. and he's fixing on building a band stand he's going to call "The Kiln," right out in some space between the brickyard ruins and the soap shop.

That band stand, he said, is so acts can come through and play shows — it wouldn't be the first time music was in the works for Haldeman.

"I almost had Alabama come out here, believe it or not," Willy said.

But other than that, Willy said he's pretty happy with how things have landed.

"I'm having fun. I don't want the customers to fall off. All I care about is paying the bills. As long as I break even, I'm happy," he said. "The rest of it is retirement; it's just me having fun."

MKM Soap is at 4500 Open Fork Road in beautiful downtown Haldeman and is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Soap and other products can also be purchased online at mkmsoap.com.