One Woodworker's Beginnings

For a time it was my stepfather's routine to spend a portion of his Saturdays in his father's furniture shop and I often tagged along. At the time, some thirty years ago, I couldn't possibly have known how important those Saturdays would seem to me now, those idle hours passed with objectives no more pressing than simply feeling the heat from the coal-burning stove while outside, bitter cold eddies of winter wind piled snow against the ground-level windows.

The radio would be on with Dick Butkus and the Fighting Illini tearing up the Big Ten conference, and my stepfather, George, listening. I would be on a couch beside the stove at the far end of the shop. Sprawled across the worn cushions I would search for through a stack of True magazines for the story I had left unfinished the week before, harrowing tales of ten-foot grizzlies and hunters with nerves of steel.

My father's father, Wyman, relished the company; it was a one-man shop and he needed, if only for a few hours a week, a living, breathing audience. He would begin by addressing George, explanations on the joinery of whatever piece happened to be sitting half-assembled in the center of the room and George would, at first, respond with genuine interest. But in time his attention would wane and his responses lessen to the occasional nod and finally he would turn to the radio with his full concentration on the game.

Thus, half his gallery eliminated, Wyman would eventually, by default, turn to me and begin talking joinery as if it were personified. "She'll want to fit together like a kitten's mitten, boy," he would say, holding out a tenon with more cuts and configurations than the missing pieces of a jigsaw. I would close the magazine and settle deeper into the couch. my attention was all his now; he could, at times, be far more interesting than grizzly fighters.

"You know I could drive a Cadillac if I wanted to," he might go on, stoking the fire, "but by choice I drive the Ford. Sam with these," and he would motion to the desk in progress. "You could throw in all kinds of goo gaw, pretty little wedge and inlays and expose your spline...what have you, but it's not going to do you any good. A diamond necklace isn't going to make Mrs. Drew any prettier." (The widow Drew lived in the house next door). "You want to see diamond necklaces?'

I nodded, because it was what was expected.

'...well then go to the movies...go to Hollywood. Diamond necklaces in California. Cadillac convertibles and gaudy furniture with ivory inlays and exposed joints. In California they wear their money pinned to their lapels and drive around in convertibles and live in glass houses. You know there were glass houses, boy?"

I shook my head and smiled.

"Glass houses. People living like exposed skeletons. An exposed joint is like a skeleton. Would you want to look at a skeleton in your living room for the rest of your life?"

Wyman was an admirer of Gustav Stickly, a turn-of-the-century woodworker and self-proclaimed architect whose Craftsman magazine championed a grassroots approach to design; he bucked the trends of European and American designers who were becoming more production-minded, more ornament-minded, with the advent of large machinery that could suddenly punch out mortises and turn spindles in a fraction of the time required to perform these functions by hand. At a time when furniture was becoming more ornate, Stickly championed the return to the more utilitarian, almost Shaker-like style that found an audience, gained momentum, and was picked up by an American craftsman movement that lives to this day.

Wyman was one of these followers, as was George and even to some extent myself. Simplicity has always been the common denominator, simplicity and balance. Regardless of the complicated joinery, or exposed joints with fitted wedges, the piece should work on first glance; its separated parts should should never upstage the whole. The refinements, adornments, technical wizardry, are al there as a supporting cast, meant to blend together on this crucial first look like the secondary strokes of a painting, or the prose of a novel. They're to be appreciated, even perused and scrutinized, but only as an afterthought, for the sum of the most extravagant details can never carry a piece, can right an imbalanced design. Somewhere, amidst all the silly talk, this was the point Wyman attempted to make.

There's no old, overstuffed couch in my shop, no stacks of magazines, no potbellied stove. What I do have, however, is a small Polaroid pinned above the radio, partially faded now and usually coated with dust. It's a photograph of George and Wyman leaning against the workbench. Now and again I glance over to it and wonder what their reaction would be to my own migration to California, home to Hollywood and innovative designs. From their still-life perspective they can view the entire shop, including my four-year-old son Sam, who on this particular Saturday morning has his tools spread over the floor behind me. He's got George's cloth apron on, which fits like a skirt, and Wyman's ball peen hammer is busy tacking sixpenny finish nail to a length of redwood. They're arranged in a circle, toe-nailed to slant away from a small screw he's tapped into the center. it's a design of some kind, his design, like any of a dozen others he insists on my saving. But it suddenly occurs to me that it's more, that it's an expectable progression, a generational continuum that may lead full circle, with young Sam's maturity, to the very frivolous detailing his forefather's repeatedly rejected. I pulled the photograph down and repined it to face the wall. What they don't know won't hurt them.