Dome on the Range: The 2025 NIA National Show
Various types of insulators for sale
The 2025 National Insulator Association’s National Show was held just outside Boston this year, in Marlborough, MA at a Best Western with an unusually solid continental breakfast. OPEN was there with Reinsulator and had a blast. Below are some photos from the weekend; wish we’d snapped a selfie with Tom and Lynda Katonak—an incredibly sweet pair, seen seated in the next photo closest to the podium. A major omission here: the display by David and Jeffrey Scales. Sorry guys, I took snaps but they were super blurry. Looking forward to seeing folks at the next Pole Cat show!
Above: Bill and Jill Meier of Bill and Jill Insulators. This duo, along with Dario DiMare, Brenda and Al Klaus, and many others worked super hard to bring the National together. It seemed almost every vendor or exhibitor took time to work the door, move PA gear around, and help out in other ways.
Above: Al Klaus with his fantastic display incorporating loans from Gene Hawkins, Dario DiMare, Bob Lanpher, John Rajpolt, Chris Cotnoir, and Bob Fuqua. In the last photo, Al’s located one of his insulators in an old copy of Crown Jewels of the Wire from the Reinsulator display.
Niche within niche, Bill and Candy Haley had a wild display of “chair leg insulators.” These are insulators that, evidently, were placed upside-down on the legs of chairs. Some say to insulate and provide safety when working with electricity…others say it’s for sliding around. The last photo is of Bill, holding a painting I bought.
Here’s Bill’s painting, back home keeping some insulators company on a shelf. The bright blue one up top is the 2025 NIA Commemorative, next to it is the Commemorative from the first NIA show back in the early 70s.
A top-notch display from Maine’s father-and-son team, Ted and Earle Davis. Documenting all sorts of tools, accessories, and ephemera from 30 years of line work, the full setup even had a 1968 copy of Stuart's guide, signed! I wish I’d gotten more photos—it was a pleasure to see this one.
Above is Gus Stafford, the NIA’s archivist and all around interesting guy. A career Army Officer who served as Chief of Staff at West Point, Gus used his artistic talents to create original artwork for patches and planes—he even got the Shultz estate to allow his use of Snoopy. This collection of “Star Insulators” was hard to photograph but great. Gus is seen here signing an insulator zine he’d done original drawings for.
The first three photos here are from Marty Greco’s display showing off rare Hemingray colors. Marty’s a cool guy who manages venue security for a 9k cap room—bigger than anything OPEN has produced! The layout isn’t by CD# or age or anything—just about contrast and aesthetics, which I thought was nice. The last shot of Randall Partridge’s “Phone Booth Display” cabinets isn’t great—but I wanted to include it here cuz it looked fantastic in person.
Above are shots of people browsing, vendors vending, and of course, insulators. He’s cropped out but, in the first shot that little bit of plaid off to the right is one of the show hosts, Dario.
Last but not least—Reinsulator! This is OPEN’s display of books, zines, and other print ephemera from the hobby going back about 100 years. It was setup as a browsing library for guests to relax, read, and reference. We were able to get some rare issues donated to fellow collectors, and grabbed a nice pile of vintage Bottle News from the free table. Nobody stole anything—The Insulgator was watching! In the last two shots, Nathan Holmes and Michael Bruner sign copies of their works.
