Back in the early 1970s, the owner of a downtown Springfield gallery hired metalsmith Joe Spoon to work as the “artist in residence.” The gallery owner provided a small, open studio in the center of the shop, and tended to usher any customer who asked about jewelry straight over to Spoon’s workbench.

“We’d sit down and design a piece of jewelry, and two weeks later they’d come back and pick it up. It was fun,” Spoon says. One woman brought in a threaded metal pin that had been used to help her husband’s shoulder heal, with a request for Spoon to incorporate it into a special necklace. Another woman brought in vials containing her own surgically-removed gall stones, and Spoon fulfilled her vision by turning them into a pair of pitted pearl-like earrings. Mostly, though, he made custom wedding bands for, by his own estimate, “several hundred people” — including the owners’ son and daughter-in-law — over the course of the four years he worked at the gallery.

Spoon knew exactly why he was there, smack in the middle of what is now Tinsleys Dry Goods, where he felt like he was “working in a fish bowl.” He was there to lure shoppers into the gallery, and that was perfectly fine with him. “[The owners] knew they could do well with someone on site who could design jewelry right there in front of the customers,” he says. “I had a very good time working at Prairie House.”

Spoon exemplifies the kind of mutually beneficial relationship that owner Edith Myers forged between scores of artists and customers to make Prairie House a successful gallery for almost 40 years, first in its downtown location, and later on Springfield’s southwest side. But the Prairie House era is ending: last week, 92-year-old Myers announced that she plans to retire, and that she will close the gallery on June 20. Until then, she will continue working, part-time, along with her daughter-in-law Gale Myers, who manages