Love of Planes Leads to Airport Gift

CLINTON — When Keith Van Zuiden isn’t working on cars at Mike’s Body Shop in Low Moor, he’s in his workshop, creating.

Sometimes his imagination leads him to build elaborate bird houses — more like bird condos — complete with solar lights. Other days he builds lighthouses.

And sometimes, Van Zuiden’s love of airplanes guides his hands.

“I always loved airplanes,” Van Zuiden said Thursday. He likes to drive out to the airport to watch the planes that stop for fuel or bring passengers for temporary stays.

One day Van Zuiden decided that the grassy area at the fork in the road was “rather blank,” he said, so he asked Airport Manager Marlana Nass if he could put a weather vane plane on a pole there.

“A couple of months ago he contacted us,” said Nass. “He made a flag pole and a weather vane on the top, and he just wanted to donate it to the airport.”

“Originally I wasn’t going to put a flag [on it],” said Van Zuiden. He’d planned to put a plane on a smaller pole, but he noticed that the airport didn’t have an Iowa flag underneath the American flag. He used a taller pole and added the flag.

“He does stuff like this, nice gestures for people,” said Van Zuiden’s boss, Mike Ohrt, but the unassuming introvert doesn’t seek recognition for it.

Van Zuiden grew up in Camanche and currently lives in Clinton. He has worked for Mike Orht for nearly 40 years, Ohrt said.

As a body man at the shop, Van Zuiden repairs vehicle exteriors from start to finish. “It’s kind of nice ... because you know how to do everything,” Van Zuiden said.

On his days off, instead of relaxing in front of the television, Van Zuiden is in his workshop building things. “I’m not a very big TV person.”

When he was younger, Van Zuiden took on bigger projects, he said. He’s even re-roofed his house.

Now that he’s older, Van Zuiden likes smaller projects the he can make on his workbench, projects that don’t require climbing.

But he had no outlet for his product. “I was collecting them myself. I basically ran out of room in my basement,” Van Zuiden said. He didn’t have time to set up at craft shows, but he couldn’t keep filling his house with the things he built.

Van Zuiden asked organizers of Junk in the Trunk Yard Sales that periodically meet in the Slumberland parking lot if people were allowed to sell handmade items. He took 50 birdhouses and lighthouses and sold about half of them, he said.

Van Zuiden doesn’t sell them to make money, he said. “I’d sell them just to get my cost out of them.”

Both the birdhouses and the lighthouses sold well.

Ohrt suggested Van Zuiden sell birdhouses at the body shop for Mother’s Day, he said. Van Zuiden sold 35.

About three years ago, Van Zuiden’s brother, Kevin, passed away after a long battle with cancer. Kevin, a Fulton resident, was a radio-controlled airplane enthusiast, and Van Zuiden inherited some of Kevin’s plane equipment.

In memory of his big brother, Van Zuiden made a weather vane plane for Kevin’s grave, using propellors from the RC airplane kits. The project added a new dimension to Van Zuiden’s handcrafts. What he did for his brother, he could do for the airport.

“It definitely spruced up the front of the drive there. It looks really nice. We really appreciated that he did that,” Nass said.

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