This column originally ran December 4, 2000.
Louis “Cas” Casaletto reached over a pile of boxes and retrieved a galette from the eight arranged in a semi-circle on his garage wall.
“Here’s the original,” he said. “The one my grandmother, Henrietta Rons, brought with her when she immigrated from Belgium around 1889 with her father, husband, and infant son.”
He handed it over to me — a rectangular cast iron press made by joining two four by six inch plates with side hinges. Each plate had a ringed, fourteen-inch handle attached to the bottom. I took it. Felt its weight. Looked it over. There was a large heart cast on the front plate.
“And here’s one of the round plates they used to set into the top of the old coal stoves with a slot to hold the iron so it could be turned,” Casaletto said.
He took the galette and set it in the groove to show me how it worked, then smiled and continued his story about how, in the late 1950s, he decided to use his grandmother’s iron as a prototype to make and sell French cookie irons out of the old Inter-Urban Lumberyard founded by his father in Arma.
The rest of the irons on the wall were cast with the words “Belgi Galette Iron, Belgi Mfg. Co., Arma, Kans.” — some in script, some in standard block letters. Some had the numbers 1, 2 or 3 cast on the face. Some the letters MP.
“We had three sizes. The No. 1 made a thin crisp cookie. The No. 2 (our biggest seller) a little thicker one. And the No. 3,” he showed me as he opened the plates and displayed the grid of large raised protrusions, “was almost like a waffle.”
Most all of the irons but his grandmother’s were ones he retrieved from auctions and garage sales over the years. Irons that had likely been used countless times to make cookies for southeast Kansas holiday gatherings. Personal irons with the touch of mothers and grandmothers deep in their grids.
The man responsible for copying the original was Karl Wicker, a pattern maker from Arma who learned his trade in Chicago but settled in southeast Kansas after he married one of the Dalton girls he met while visiting family down here.
“Lot’s of people who’d moved to Detroit or Chicago from this area would buy them when they came back,” Karl said when I phoned him. “I believe McNally’s in Pittsburg (which explains the letters MP on some of the irons) was the first to cast them. Later they were cast by other foundries.”
One thing’s for sure. They were popular. A little too popular, it seems, for some of the McNally Pittsburg foundry workers to resist. “I think maybe the reason McNally’s stopped casting them after a while,” Cas said with a chuckle, “was that the castings were disappearing before they could get them to us. The men were carrying them out of the foundry in their lunch boxes.”
After the plates were cast, master welder Primo Guerrieri, owner of Primo’s Welding in Arma, fashioned the handles and assembled the final product. I called and had a talk with Primo and his wife Marguerite (in classic, married couple stereo, complete with contradictions). Primo, who at 86 is still vigorous, is something of a local legend. Since 1939, he has designed and repaired iron and steel devices in Arma with eye of an artist and the skill of a master craftsman. (Fittingly, Primo means No. 1 in Italian.) The day I called, Marguerite informed me proudly that he was currently working on a merry-go-round for Toby’s Amusement.
“Yep. I put on the handles and hinges,” Primo said of the galettes. “I made a jig for the hinges and a rolling contraption to put the round end on the 5/16 inch steel rods that became the handles. Made it go really fast,” he said proudly. Primo later sold his creation to Casaletto who, after a couple of years, hired out other workers to use Primo’s jig and “contraption” to assemble the irons.
“We advertised a little,” Casaletto said, “and shipped them all over the country.” Which might explain why, a couple of weeks ago, Bill Sollner of Arma received an e-mail from a woman in New Jersey named Linda Mueller who’d recently acquired an “Belgi Galette Iron” for her collection as the high bidder on eBay and discovered Sollner when she did an Internet search for Arma, Kansas.
Turns out her story was similar to Casaletto’s; her great grandmother brought a galette over from France around 1900. And that’s not the only similarity. “Your community sounds very interesting,” Mueller wrote to Sollner. “The small town in which I grew up in Illinois was settled due to farming and coal mining too.”
I observed to Casaletto that those cast iron and steel cookie irons must have been represented something pretty important to those immigrant women to pack their weight all the way over here from France and Belgium.
“Yeah,” he said after a reflective pause, the pride in his voice hanging in the air like the sweet aroma of a French cookie hot off a cast iron galette. “I remember that they were very important to them. They represented tradition ... family.”
J.T. Knoll is a writer, speaker and prevention and wellness coordinator at Pittsburg State University. He also operates Knoll Training, Consulting & Counseling Services in Pittsburg. He can be reached at 231-0499 or jtknoll@swbell.net
