Rosie comes home to Taos
‘IT’S OFFICIAL: Rosie is on her way home,” exclaimed Davison Koenig. “Thanks to Rob Painter, her now previous owner, she has a new gas tank, a new starter, and she climbed up the trailer ramp under her own power. She is scheduled to arrive sometime Monday.”
Kibbey W. Couse was the son of Taos Society of Artists’ Irving Couse (18661936), who settled in Taos a century ago. The artist’s only child had demonstrated an interest in mechanics at an early age. After graduating from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1917, and briefly serving in World War I, he began to market some of his inventions on the East Coast.
Kibbey Couse founded Couse Laboratories, Inc., a New Mexico corporation, and developed a mobile machine shop for use in the oil field industry.
In 1936, he developed a mobile machine that could be used to service airplanes at remote airstrips, the Couse Mobile Airport. He set up a development laboratory at Hedden Place, East Orange, New Jersey, a short distance from the Casey Jones School of Aeronautics, Newark, New Jersey.
After the death of his mother in late 1929, Kibbey moved his family to Taos to care for his widowed father. He set up a machine shop in the family garage and developed the prototype for a mobile machine shop to repair mechanical equipment in the field.
After his father’s death in 1936, he abandoned his Taos workshop and built a plant in New Jersey to manufacture the machine shops. There he produced a line of mobile shops for the U.S. military as well as for private use. After he retired, the company records and drawings were returned to Taos and now exist as an adjunct to his early machinery and equipment at the Couse house.
Koenig is considering a small celebration to welcome “Rosie” back home, including a cheap bottle of champagne to break on her bumper.
For more on “Rosie,” Kibbey Couse’s machine shop, and the Couse-Sharp Historic Site, visit couse-sharp.org/machine-shop.