By Nadine Kam
Assistant Features Editor
Star-BulletinIt was a year before Bob Barr could slow down or even show his face to the public after opening Smoking Bob's Barr-B-Q restaurant.
"How come your husband looks so grouchy all the time?" diners asked Barr's wife Dahlia.
"I wasn't grouchy," Barr answers, now that he's cut his hours from 93 a week to a mere 80.
"I was walking dead. I thought, well, if I'm gonna scare customers, I'm gonna hide out in my shop."
The shop is his muffler repair and replacement business, which is also home to his welding and fabricating business, and soon-to-be art gallery. It's also his sanctuary, where he can retreat to his sculptures wrought from old mufflers, sheet metal, metal tubing and various consumer rejects.
At times, visiting Barr's shop is like hitting a jackpot. One might walk away with cut-rate muffler service, a free lunch or a bag of bones for the family dog. He also makes it his responsibility to feed the homeless in the area.
"He's so horrible looking," said Dahlia, "but his heart is good. People think we have lots of money because of all the businesses, but I shop at Salvation Army.""A lot of people are hurting now," Barr said. "It doesn't hurt me to try to put out a good deed at least once a day. It's part of Hawaii's style, aloha spirit, kokua and -- what's that word? -- pono."
While other small-business people have closed up shop and left Hawaii for more profitable locales, Barr has opted to work harder.
At 64, Barr said, "I should be retiring, and here I am starting new businesses."
The future had looked so much brighter when he arrived in Hawaii 29 years ago. He was already enjoying dual careers as a hot rod mechanic and gallery owner in Hollywood.
After high school, he said, he started hanging around an auto shop. "I begged them to teach me to weld. I would work for nothing for the chance to learn. Four years after that, I opened my own shop."
Metal tube work on cars was just the beginning. "I started making furniture and weird stuff. It just took off. At first I didn't know what to make. Then after a year you have a lifetime of things you want to make. Now I've got more metal and more ideas than lifetime."
As the weird stuff piled up, he opened a gallery to get rid of it all, and was discovered by Hollywood's set designers. He eventually designed pieces for movie sets and such TV series as "Mission: Impossible," as well as worked on cars for "The Munsters," "The Monkees" and for actor Steve McQueen.
With success came more opportunity for vacations in Hawaii, where he discovered a new market for his art work.
"The money I got by selling wholesale here was equal to my retail prices on the mainland. After traveling back and forth for a year, I decided I could probably make it here."
So he loaded up a container full of "old rusty stuff" and shipped it on over. "I've carried this metal with me for years. Next time I think I'll go into the feather pillow business, or diamonds -- they're easy to carry and profitable."
He opened Metal Masters in Kailua, in the old post office building that now houses the Windward Federal Credit Union and Brent's, and for a while, survived by selling sculptures, furniture, metal flowers for ikebana arrangements and making metal medallions for the Sunshine music festivals.But it became clear, he said, that "People needed mufflers here more than they needed art."
As Barr built his reputation on the Windward side, people had no trouble equating the muffler Barr with the welder Barr. But customers had doubts about his abilities as a restaurateur.
"People asked what does a muffler man know about food. Well, everybody eats, man, and I've cooked all my life. I thought I could put out a good side of beef."
He got help from Steve Ozark, who made his reputation as Caterer to the Stars. He had met Ozark by chance in a hologram art gallery in California, and was surprised when Ozark strolled onto his Kaneohe property to inquire about his restaurant-in-progress. According to Barr, the exchange between the two men went something like this:
Ozark: "What are you doing?"
Barr: "I don't know."
Ozark: What's the problem?"
Barr: "I don't know what I'm doing."
Ozark was the perfect person to help out. And he did.
"I watch him do business and he's a really nice guy, so I was glad I could help him out," Ozark said. "He takes advice really well and wasn't afraid to buy the best meat, the best equipment.
"He told me, 'God just sent you over here.' "
"It always seems when I need something it's there, and I get a deal," Barr said. "I've never been hungry, I've always had a roof over my head, I've always done what I've wanted to do. I haven't wanted lavish things. Right now, I just want to finish my muffler man."
The muffler man is a sculpture -- built from exhaust-system headers -- that towers nearly 20 feet in the back of Barr's two-building Kaneohe complex.
The old face was too flat, he said. The new head looks like a "Termi-nator"-style cyborg in 3D, with a 35mm Nikon camera lens for an eye.
Barr's mind leaps to the future as he works on his cyborg, but he's not thinking spaceships or interplanetary exploration. He's thinking mailboxes. Mailboxes with steel posts.
"You know, everyone has one. It stands out, just a stick with a box on it. I'm thinking of putting designs on the post so the neighbors will look over and say, 'That's nice.' Then maybe they'll get one too, upgrade the neighborhood."
Bob Barr. Muffler man. Welding guy. Rib connoisseur. Artiste. Gallery impresario. Builder of mailboxes.
"I just keep moving," he said. "A moving target's hard to hit."
