‘Garage lizard’ finds peace creating art in Elkader

By Willis Patenaude | Times-Register

In the never-ending search for feature stories with a local feel, it started with a picture of a grill attached to a modified John Deere lawn mower. That was the first introduction to Coy Arbogast, a well-known “garage lizard” in the desert states of Arizona and Nevada, who arrived in Elkader a little over a year ago in an unusual way. 

But before that, he was just a kid growing up in Madison, Ohio, on the beautiful shores of Lake Erie.  

Coy was a self-described “industrious little kid,” who loved taking things apart. He learned to weld, fabricate and read prints, and after graduating in the early 1970s, found his way to the “artistic stuff,” like metalworking and driftwood sculptures. He made signs for local businesses like the drug store and barber shops, and did odd jobs his mother found for him along the beach when she had a house cleaning business. 

Coy had an inherent “flare” for doing artistic things and found motivation in the words of an art teacher who said, “don’t always work in the box. Work outside the box,” or as Coy likes to say, “if you can dream it, you can design it, you can build it.”

Perhaps that’s one reason Coy was busy drawing people flying on Swiss cheese surfboards, a decidedly outside the box abstraction, while everyone else was forming kittens and puppies, which are about as safely in the box as you could get. It was about taking a different path with a vivid imagination, which those same art teachers told him to “harness” and “use it.” No matter what anyone said, the advice continued: “If it makes you happy, and it’s not hurting anybody, then do it!”

It was life advice Coy ran with, right to the “circus,” his wife likes to joke. He traveled from coast to coast as a welder, fitter and general contractor throughout the 1980s, working on any number of artistic projects—from fencing and gates to spiral staircases, and then somewhere. In the 1990s, Coy arrived in Las Vegas and started working on stage shows and props, blowing up vehicles and doing stage shows at the MGM Grand. 

But that’s just the beginning of the name-dropping resume, which includes working on shows for Ozzy Osborne, Cher, Celine Dion, Britney Spears and Coyote Ugly. Coy also worked on Con Air and did props for Robert De Niro on the movie Casino. 

Aside from show work, Coy worked on exhibits, magic shows and clothing shows and did display booths for Cisco and Eminem and even turned authentic New York City cabs into T-shirt booths. 

It’s an impressive and eclectic mix of projects, but those were all done for someone else or the company Coy worked for. Back in his own garage, he built custom go-karts and put motors on bicycles, leading his children to joke that “if it’s in the garage and dad sees it, he’ll have a motor on it tonight.” 

One of the most fascinating projects is the John Deere grill, which not only served Coy’s artistic side, but was built for practical reasons. As the kids guessed, a motor would be involved. 

“You ever had a barbecue grill and you tried to move it from one location to another? I mean, you’ve got two little plastic wheels on the back, and you’re pulling that thing through the yard, and the parts are falling off. I’m going, ‘No!’ I got two acres, and I like to take my grill out back and to car shows,” he explained. 

It is the quintessential “modern problems require modern solutions” moment that started with using a wheelbarrow, before Coy concluded that putting it on a tractor was the better solution. 

“I’m going, ‘holy cow, put the grill on it.’ Then I said, ‘well, if you’re standing or cooking, it’s hot,’ so I made an umbrella stand. Then I said, ‘well, why not make a lift off seat so you can put a cooler in there with ice?’ And I go, ‘well, since it’s got wheels, man, you can load that sucker up and drag it to heck and back,’” Coy said. 

Along with a grill on wheels, which he has made and sold about 20 of, Coy has made metal horses, pigs and other animals for farmers in Nevada. He crafted a time machine with a flux capacitor made out of washing machine parts, and some of his more recent creations include a gas can lamp and a shark light with an anchor. 

A few years ago, an illness put Coy’s artistic creations on hold, but life keeps going, even if you’re hobbies don’t, and life is sometimes unpredictable. That unpredictability is how a “desert fab rat” ended up in northeast Iowa and regained his passion for creating outside the box. 

“My daughter said, ‘dad, I’ve been born and raised in the desert my whole life.’ I said ‘no, you were born in Springfield, Mo.,’” Coy laughed. “She says, ‘I just want to change base.’”

That change of base was initially Maine, with the bonus features of fishing and being next to the ocean, making the state “perfect.” The rest of the day, Coy pondered what he would do in Maine and where he would live, only to arrive home and find his daughter had bought a house in Garnavillo. 

“How’d that happen? How close is that?” was Coy’s initial response.

According to the story, his daughter wanted to go someplace animal friendly, with green grass and rivers. After talking to a friend in Florida, who is originally from Iowa, less than a week later, she was here. 

Coy decided to leave Las Vegas and follow, and what transpired after is a series of events that landed Coy in Elkader. 

At first, they planned to move to Monona. After selling all they had in Las Vegas, they hit the road, but somewhere around Albuquerque, everything fell through and the hunt began for another house. That’s when Coy’s daughter contacted Joe Sylvester and they negotiated on a house on Pine Street. 

“My daughter walked the house, and this is where I learned wording very carefully. I asked my daughter, ‘What’s the house look like?’ She says, ‘dad, you’ve had worse and you’ve fixed them up. OK?’ She said this house has potential. She didn’t say it needed a plethora of potential, but it had  potential,” Coy joked.

Despite that, Elkader provided something familiar for Coy, with its river, trees and hills. He told his wife, “I feel like I’m home.” 

“I feel really at ease,” he said. 

It’s that ease and relaxation, along with the art around town he’s found at the Turkey River Mall and Archive, and the scrap yard in Manchester, that rekindled his passion for artistic creations. 

“I’m going back through and I’m starting to see things. And there’s old farm equipment out here, which I can take and do things with. And I’m going, you know what, I need to get on this horse and ride it for a little bit. It helps me,” Coy said. 

The new lease on life has motivated several new projects, including restoring a Model A, creating a bench out of a metal bed frame, turning old tractor seats into stools, building old planters out of fenders, restoring pedal tractors, and making the shark light with the boat anchor, horseshoes and railroad spikes, which was “thieved” by his daughter. 

“It looks like it’s underway. I took an old headlight, turned it back and drilled holes in it, and made it a shark face. When you turned it on, its mouth glowed and its eyes. I come home, and I go, ‘where’s my shark?’ My wife says, ‘Natalie took it.’ Man? What? Well, she said you weren’t using it,” Coy laughed while recounting the story. “My daughter is my biggest thief.” 

For everyone else, simply reach out to Coy via Facebook. He is currently working toward creating a few more items and getting his little shop, Tinmans Artistic Creations, established. 

When Coy is not putting elbow grease to the potential of the new house, he’s busy organizing, creating and coming up with ideas in the shop, motivated by those art teachers and surroundings that have created a therapeutic environment. 

“I just have fun with it. I mean, that’s what I want to do. The reason I came here was for my daughter. I got sick and then I got upset. But this place affords me clarity of mind, because it’s not the hustle bustle. It’s not the dynamic you must push through each day. It’s go at your own pace, accept what you’re given and make the best of it. I can’t believe the peace and the ability that it’s given me to think,” Coy said.