It was 1968, and Wilbur Riddle was tromping around Eagle Creek, off Route 25 in backwoods Kentucky, scavenging for bell-shaped glass insulators fallen from overhead power lines. A buddy of his ...

So I helped myself.” A visitor to the Hammells’ yard enters a kind of glass menagerie, with thousands of the small, bell-shaped insulators perched on every platform imaginable, from a ...