NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, BUT JOHN LORENZEN comes pretty close. His 100-acre Iowa farm is almost totally energy self-sufficient. Windmills have produced all his electricity since 1926. Solar panels—many of them used printing plates—capture rays from the sun for heat and hot water. And hydrogen that he electrically separates from ordinary well water helps fuel his two pickup trucks. His only energy concessions to the outside world are a bit of gasoline for his trucks and $200 a year for propane for his family's refrigerator and stove. Perhaps he is most proud that, at age 82, he has never paid an electric bill. "You'd be surprised," he says, "how much use you can make out of scrap."
In these conservation-minded times, Lorenzen's ingenuity has made this sixth-grade dropout something of a folk hero in Woodward, Iowa (pop. 1,197), and beyond. College students regularly stop by his gadget-filled machine shop for demonstrations, and there have been some notables as well: Jane Fonda and the late Henry Ford II both visited in the late '70s. ("I suppose he was looking for some new inventions," says Lorenzen.) Jimmy Carter even called during his Presidency, urging his fellow farmer to "keep up the good work."
Oddly enough, the green that motivates Lorenzen is not the environment. It is money. He doesn't like to spend it. Having struggled through the Depression with his wife, Elva, 75, and two kids (daughter Vivian, 58, and son Jerry, 56, who live nearby), Lorenzen says, "I probably wouldn't be living here on this farm if I had bought everything as I went."
The seat of Lorenzen's empire is his machine shop, piled floor to ceiling with sockets, wire brushes, screws, bolts, chains and rubber tubing—the fruits of his frequent trips to the junkyard. According to Elva, Lorenzen's machine shop is good for their marriage since it keeps John from getting underfoot in the house. "If he's out in the shop, I don't have trouble with him," she says. "That's why we've been married so long [59 years]."
Among Lorenzen's inventions from recycled parts: a magnet-powered flashlight and a battery recharger that keeps it running for an extra 10 days. "And you can do that 30 times before you have to throw the battery away," he says. Not everything Lorenzen works on is energy-related, however. Over the years he has used scraps to build a posthole digger, a hay baler, a barbed-wire winder and two tractors. "He's got friends in every junkyard in these parts," says son-in-law Keith Hunt, 56. "It's nothing for him to get in his [truck] and drive all the way to Omaha [about 160 miles] for a piece of junk."
Lorenzen got his start when he inherited his family's farm at age 15. Within two years he was producing his own electricity, making a virtue of necessity since there was no other electrical source at the time. (He stores his electricity in 170 ancient batteries, the newest of which is 65 years old.) In 1940, he remembers, a salesman from the Iowa Power & Light Co. stopped by, peddling an electrical hookup for $3 a month. "He was begging me," says Lorenzen. "But I had all I needed."
His natural parsimony had been reinforced during the Depression, when he owed a local bank $340 and narrowly avoided bankruptcy by cutting wood. "That taught us not to be in debt again, so they can't foreclose on you," he says. Today, he adds, he and Elva are financially secure. "I'm not broke like we were in the Hoover days. We're all right."
Which is not to say they are living in luxury. Their furnishings are modest, their TV is a black-and-white Motorola, and Elva would love to have a freezer, something her husband's limited electrical system cannot handle. Lorenzen also refuses to buy a hearing aid to remedy an eardrum injury caused by chain-saw noise. That annoys his wife no end. "He says hearing aids are too much money, but I think he should buy himself a pair," Elva says. "He could understand more." Lorenzen has his own solution: "I'll probably build them myself." Another item that he refuses to spring for is that most basic of inventor's needs: the patent. "Patents cost money," he says. "You only need 'em if you have a factory and have to get ahead of the other fellow."
Son Jerry followed in his father's footsteps to the extent that he was an auto mechanic for 22 years. But now that he has his own farm, he prefers to get his energy the old-fashioned way—by paying for it. "I've never had any interest in [self-sufficiency]," he says. But he admires his father's obsessive thrift. "He just made do with the cheapest way to do things. That was his way. There's nothing wrong with it."
Aside from building things and making the rounds of the junkyards, Lorenzen amuses himself by watching the news on TV and playing cards. Recently he got to ride in a 1989 white Mustang convertible as grand marshal of the Sauerkraut Days parade in nearby Bouton. Such accolades are more than appropriate, says Ed Woolsey of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources: "Lorenzen has been a hero to me for a long time because of his self-reliance and ingenuity. He is a natural resource."
—J.T.; GRANT PICK in Woodward, Iowa
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