A lot of people go into business after they retire, expanding their hobbies into full-time enterprises.
     After 25 years of work at Grand Coulee Dam, Dennis King retired from the position he enjoyed most: an outage dispatcher.
     When Dennis retired he, like many others, started a new business. But in becoming “The Frame King,” Dennis wasn’t merely expanding some former leisure activity.
     In fact, Dennis had virtually no experience with woodworking or glass, and he had never even thought of cutting mats, matching colors or any of the other specialized tasks required of anyone who makes frames.
     “It was scary to start a business,” Dennis admits. But as his framing shop enters it's ninth year, it’s evident he has a knack for all phases of the work.
     His shop in Coulee Dam is full of a bewildering array of 400 styles of frames, and a rainbow variety of mat colors and styles—from the familiar artboard to such exotic materials as moiré silk, suede and decorative fabrics.
     In the beginning, all these were strange to him. But now, he moves and works as comfortable among the specialized tools and materials of framing as though he has spent his entire working life in the business.
     “I read a lot of books,” Dennis says. Before the books, though, he enjoyed the tutelage of an expert. “I have a friend in Chelan who’s an artist, and he made frames, too,” Dennis says. That friend, Gene Barkley, showed Dennis how it was done, and helped get him started.         
     Starting from scratch like that, Dennis found himself confronting the unknown at every turn.  “Just figuring what to charge was hard,” he says. In fact, the prices Dennis charges are quite low by the standards of the profession. He takes the national average charge for each element of a framing job—moulding, mat, glazing, multiple holes in mats and so on—and reduces it by 30 percent. The Frame King might be the least expensive framing professional in the United States.
     Although he knew nothing about the subject when he began the business, Dennis has since become an advocate of “conservation framing.” Designed to assure the item being framed is not only protected from damage, but is actually preserved by the framing, conservation framing can cost twice as much as conventional framing.
     “People just don’t understand why it would make a difference to frame something so as to assure that it last 300 years,” Dennis says. Conservation matting will not mark the object being framed, and will absorb pollutants from the air to actively protect the object.
     Dennis emphasizes to customers how important conservation framing is for unique items. Your grandparents’ wedding certificate, for instance, is not the front page of a newspaper, available in several archives and libraries. It’s the only one in the world, and well worth preserving for future generations.
      Dennis found that retirement offered enough free time to do more than just run a framing business. So, with an old, but worthy, Pentax camera given to him by his brother, Ron King, he began dabbling with photography. His photo of a sunset behind Steamboat Rock took first place in a photography competition in Wenatchee – the only photo contest Dennis has ever entered. He has since upgraded his equipment several times, now enjoying shooting with the Fuji FinePix S2, a high-resolution professional digital camera.
      “I don’t consider it art,” he says with a shrug. “I’m just working with what’s already there.”
     His modest opinion of his work is not shared by others. Gene Barkley, who first got Dennis interested in framing, has made several of Dennis’s landscape and wildlife photographs into pointillist oil painting. His brother Ron King, a well-known photographer and computer artist, has also turned many of his photographs into computer paintings.
     When he was approached by a company interested in using some of his photographic images on postcards, even Dennis had to admit he was “doing something right.”
     The grandchild of pioneering homesteaders and orchardists, Dennis is a native of Manson, where he was a four-sport letterman in high school. He came to work at Grand Coulee Dam after 2½ years at Boeing, managing an orchard and working with agricultural chemical businesses and helicopter pilots.
     Although he enjoyed all his jobs at Grand Coulee, he was particularly pleased to be an outage dispatcher, “helping make it safe for workers to work.”
     Dennis was instrumental in computerizing the dispatch process at the dam, and remains expert enough on computers that distant cousins—whom he has never met—call on him for help in tracking down family history on the Internet.
     Dennis and Sandra—his wife of more than 41 years—have lived in the same house in Coulee Dam for 32 years. Their son, daughter and five grandchildren—including twin boys—live in the Spokane valley and Cheney, near enough that the family can get together easily.