By Olly Constantine,
Media Editor.
For hundreds of years, the medieval and renaissance time periods have captured people’s imaginations. For auto shop teacher Mitch Utsey, this came in the form of making armor and fighting in international tournaments, a hobby he has had for about 30 years now.
His interest first started in high school after reading an article about the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), a non-profit organization that hosts immersive events based on the middle ages and renaissance time periods. The organization consists of, as Utsey put it, “a bunch of people who dress up in armor and beat each other with wooden swords.” After high school, he joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany, where he joined another SCA group. This is when his hobby first started to take off, noting the historical sites a stand-out part of his time in Germany. “It’s really fun to be fighting in a real castle in armor,” said Utsey.
It wasn’t until after coming back from the army, while living in Austin, that he would make his first suit of armor. He ordered some armor from a friend named Max, who he had met in the SCA, and went to visit his shop. After watching Max and his apprentice work together, Utsey decided that he wanted to try making something too. The skill came very naturally: “By the end of the day I had done more than the apprentice that had been working with [Max] for a couple of years,” said Utsey.
Max then offered him the chance to work off the price of the armor in the shop and Utsey took the opportunity. He ended up more than paying off the armor, but never received it. “But that’s okay,” Utsey explained. “I ended up getting a whole lot more than that.”
For a while, he continued making armor and participating in the SCA while attending Texas A&M University. Utsey decided to take a year off from school to teach conversational English in Japan. Before his trip he planned to stop and visit Max and his girlfriend, who had moved to Santa Rosa. A month or two before he was supposed to visit them, Utsey received a call that Max had just suffered an accident in which he almost lost his thumb, so he went to California early and stayed for a couple of months to help keep Max’s shop afloat until it was time for Utsey to leave for Japan and Max could start working again.
The night before he was supposed to buy his plane ticket, Utsey called his boss who had apparently been trying to get a hold of him for a week. The Japanese economy had tanked and all the language schools that he would’ve been working at shut down. His boss explained over the phone that “in about half an hour, I’m locking the door, throwing away the keys inside, and hopping in a taxi and flying to Los Angeles.” Utsey stayed in Santa Rosa and continued making armor.
Eventually, he started traveling around the country to continue making and selling armor and fighting in events. After he retires next year, Utsey plans to get back into making armor in his free time.
