PROVO — In an enfranchised America where business is more and more about being the same, Ken Stika is — and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't object to this description — different.
Ken owns and runs the Great Salt Lake Guitar Co. on Provo's Center Street, a one-of-a-kind operation in a 91-year-old building that used to be a hardware store until Ken bought it and turned it into a place that makes one-of-a-kind guitars.
If you've got three months — or so — and $2,400 — or so — he'll custom-make for you the prettiest high-quality guitar you've ever laid eyes on — and you get to pick the wood.
Or you can save time and money by purchasing an off-the-rack guitar in the spacious showroom beneath the loft where Ken produces his custom-made guitars.
Ken knows more or less everything there is to know about guitars if you don't count knowing how to play one.
"I'm not really a guitar player," he says. "If push comes to shove I can stumble through a tune, but my skills are on the other side of the workbench."
It probably won't come as a shock when I tell you that Ken grew up in the '60s, that he comes to work in a T-shirt and that his long hair, now quite silvery, is tied into a ponytail.
"But," he says smiling, "I'm actually more conservative than I look."
Conservative, maybe; conventional, hardly.
Ken's rags-to-relative riches story is one of those road less traveled tales that anyone who wants to avoid the mainstream needs to sit down, cross their legs on the floor and listen to.
He came to Provo in 1979 with his wife, Pat, when he'd just turned 30 and needed a place to mend from ribs he'd broken in an accident while crab fishing off the Alaskan coast in the Bering Sea.
Ken, who grew up mostly in Alaska, had relatives in Utah and Provo seemed like a good place to convalesce. By 30 he'd already gotten a few things out of his system, including dredging for gold in California, driving race cars, the aforementioned crab fishing and a tour in the Navy.
His life took a decided turn when he was walking the streets of Provo "trying to decide what I wanted to do" and chanced upon the Provo Public Library.
There he checked out a book, "Constructing the Mountain Dulcimer," which gave detailed instructions on how to build a four-string lap instrument called a dulcimer that is favored by folk bands.
So Ken built one, and then another, and before long he'd branched into guitars.
Between regular fishing excursions to the Provo River and many selfless shifts pulled at the JB's restaurant on University Avenue by Pat, an artisan was born.
"The really fortunate thing about my guitar-building," says Ken in hindsight, "was that people bought them."
The rest is 27 years of history. He first opened a small store on the old Springville Road and then, in 1988, bought the Bee Hardware building on west Center Street, where he's been his own landlord ever since. Along the way he's sold hundreds of custom-made guitars and thousands of assembly-line Martins, Taylors and his latest big-seller, Godins, a Canadian guitar line.
He attributes his staying-in-business power to a rather unorthodox, unswerving commitment to never talking anyone into buying anything.
"My philosophy to selling is to make buying a great, pleasurable experience," he says. "If you take care of the customer, the cash register will take care of itself."
In an aside, he adds, "I wonder why car dealers don't take the same approach. Why make buying something one of the most painful things you can do?"
A sensible rhetorical question asked by a man who has secured a refreshing independent niche in a cookie-cutter world.
A man who has patiently — and quite literally — built his business out of a block of wood.
"You don't force them," says Ken as he holds a half-finished guitar between his practiced hands, "you caress them into existence."
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.