With the welter of commercial yarn available, an epidemic that by the mid-20th century had sent handspinning into near-terminal decline, an empirical question arises: Why spin?

The answer, to hear spinners tell it, lies in the craft’s tactile pleasure for the hands, visual pleasure for the eyes and, ultimately, restorative balm for the soul. To transform fiber on a wheel — with complete control over the color, thickness and texture that result — is, ardent spinners say, the real-world equivalent of spinning straw into gold.

Mr. Amos was, by all accounts, among the most ardent of them all.

Alden Scott Amos was born on Oct. 3, 1938, in Princess Anne, Va., a community within Virginia Beach. His was a distinguished family: His father, Marion, was a Coast Guard officer; a grandfather, also a Coast Guard officer, had accompanied Rear Adm. Robert Peary to the Arctic in the early 20th century.

From his mother, the former Betty Perham, a knitwear designer, Alden learned to knit at 4. At 8, needing a string for his yo-yo, he did his first spinning, fashioning a new, high-twist (and therefore high-energy) string himself, most likely by anchoring a length of cotton to a hook and twirling it by hand.

“I’d been playing with fibers and ropes and cords and yarns and threads ever since I was a little kid,” Mr. Alden said in a 2009 video interview, in which he also took pains to explain the importance, for the handspinner, of drinking beer.

In the 1960s, amid his three Army tours of Vietnam, Mr. Alden built his first spinning wheel from a pattern in Popular Mechanics. “It was a terrible wheel,” he said bluntly years later. “It didn’t spin.”

In the Army, he worked as a helicopter mechanic, and the understanding of the physics of rotary motion that the job gave him would stand him in fine stead as a wheelmaker.