Clemons: an American Bench Built After Retirement

Clemons is the one-person bench American pipe maker Greg Clemons runs under his own name. It is not the product of a long-running family workshop or a factory, but of a pursuit taken up in middle age. Records indicate that Clemons retired after twenty-one years of service as an infantryman in the United States Marine Corps, and turned to the briar bench to fill the free time he had never before known.

His name appears in sources tied to both Tucson, Arizona, and San Diego, California; exactly where he worked and when has not been documented with certainty.

Stamp and Numbering

The most reliable way to identify the brand is its stamp. The maker strikes his name directly onto the briar body, alongside a four-digit number. The first two digits of this number give the production year, and the last two the piece's sequence number for that year. A stamp reading "04-71," accordingly, means the pipe was made in 2004 and was the seventy-first of that year. Since such a system gives a collector both the date and a sense of annual output at a single glance, it is a pattern often found at benches of similar scale within the American handmade pipe scene.