Life Journey with Wood
My day job for over 50 years has been modern medicine: primary care pediatrics, teaching, and subsequently healthcare reform and quality improvement on a regional and statewide level. The reform journey involved difficult, important work, with a few successes and more memorable disappointments. I’m truly proud of the contributions over that career, but most of that work disappears into the mist in a matter of decades...or less. It seems I also needed to make something solid...smooth things I could hold...sturdy things support my weight...things that won’t leak...things that would endure for decades. I made those things out of wood.
If one loves wood, then one loves trees. Living in a wooden house, flanked by tall oak trees and looking south into a bank of redwoods, reinforces that admiration daily. That’s not an accident. My wife, Sandie, grew up in a modernistic redwood house designed by Paul Schweikher, built improbably on the Illinois prairie in the 1940’s. That structure is now an historic architectural landmark, but she remembers it as her home. [i] It became clear that wood was going to be big part of our lives from the beginning.
I was game. Wood was part of my life, too, just from a different angle. My mother loved “wide boards” and sought affordable antiques as far back as I can remember. When I started school, our family lived in rural Massachusetts in a house where the pre-revolutionary footings were 2 foot square, hard rock maple timbers set upon stone. My father could not stick a pen knife into that wood almost 200 years later.
My relationship with wood changed nature when I was introduced to steel tools in the 1950’s. Shop class was part of every boy’s learning experience back when those experiences were still mainstream offerings in American education. Boys sanded, and girls sewed. It’s just the way it was then.) [1] My shop teacher in elementary school, Don Thiel, stood me in front of a lathe in 7th grade. After a 13 year gap completing my education, I returned to that machine like a moth to the light. Sid Sharples mentored me and my longtime friend, Jim Beckett, on the lathe and other wonderful tools in his shop when we were interns in LA. I bought my first battered lathe in 1973. It was rickety, but it spun the wood around. After the turn of this century, my lathes got bigger, the tools grew sharper, and the trinkets proliferated. I have spent thousands of hours learning how to use them effectively, in addition to chain sawing prodigious amounts of fallen wood into future turning blanks. I am proud to have served as President of Santa Cruz Woodturners in the challenging years of 2020 and 2021.
Dutifully rectilinear furniture, however, was the ascendant woodwork priority for a newly married couple 50+ years ago. We lived as newlyweds in a ramshackle, redwood house built on margins of Stanford University in the 1890’s. We could see daylight between some of the rough 1x12’s that formed the walls and the floors. That sagging shack has long since been razed and replaced with a nondescript condo, but when we lived there, Sandie felt right at home. She could snag a splinter on nearly any surface she touched. She also stated, resolutely: No more mattress on the floor for me. That’s how our shared enterprise in woodworking began...rough-cut redwood 2x6’s and a particle board platform...a whole 6 inches off the floor. It started quite an avalanche of sawdust.
Each new article justified the purchase of a new tool. Each new project delivered new awareness as well as a chance to solve new problems...and add a few new mistakes to the expanding file. Fine Woodworking Magazine became a monthly stimulus to bookend all the medical stuff. I read about Japanese geniuses who could read a tree right through the bark, English and Australian turners who ushered in a whole new approach to the craft, cabinet makers with unforgettable names (Sam Maloof!) who did magical things with wood. That magazine and quite a few books taught me a lot and opened new doors, but those exposures to legendary craftsmen also assured that humility would accompany me into the shop.
There were other ways besides reading and making mistakes to learn how tables, drawers, and cabinets are assembled. Sandie, more often than I should admit, explained to salesmen in furniture stores that the guy lying on his back underneath the table with a measuring tape wasn’t sick...just simply curious about the corner braces or the attachments of the apron to the top. We upgraded gradually to oak, walnut, cherry, and, with one extravagant purchase at Hubbard and Johnson, teak. (More about tropical hardwoods below.)
It’s hard to count, but somewhere between 40 and 50 dining tables have emerged from my shop, half that many chests of drawers and beds, a couple thousand wooden bowls, and countless smaller tables, stools, boxes, chests, toys, kitchen implements, and other objects. I’ve made all of the furniture in my home...other than steam-bent chairs...and subsequently substantially equipped the households of three grown daughters and the dining rooms and bedrooms of dozens of friends. More recently, as my medical career has been drawing to a close, I’ve enjoyed teaching turning and woodwork...circling back to where it all started.
Man does not live by tables alone. There are foundations, floors, studs, windows, rafters, roofs, and siding. Sandie and I bought a house in La Honda during my pediatrics residency, and that opened a chapter of carpentry. We scraped and painted the exterior, sanded the floors, enclosed a deck to make a studio, built a new deck, excavated a small shop, remodeled the kitchen and the bathroom, all in 6 months. That meant spending pretty much every waking hour that wasn’t spent in the hospital or a few abalone dives. Then, back when it used to rain in a California winter, that house collapsed down the hill in a mudslide. That left us abruptly with no home and no money, an unreliable Fiat, some health problems, and precious little happiness...but some wonderful friends.
Pediatric residents worked hard but didn’t earn much money in those days. Once again, wood became a bigger part of our lives. I cut firewood and learned how to fell trees accurately...and repair a chainsaw. I learned basic carpentry from another mentor, Dan, who was a persuasive advocate for both strength and speed...and big tools. Living in the caretaker’s cottage in a former Girl Scout Camp, I put tools in an unused camp kitchen, ran some 220V cable, and made cabinets for sale. Clear, vertical grain redwood was affordable back then, but the cabinets always looked crooked...since there were no plumb lines or right angles in any dwelling in that unusual mountain community in the early 1970’s. Neil Young’s ranch may have been an exception.
I’ve been pleased to make custom furniture within my skill range ever since, and more recently bowls of increasing visual appeal, complexity, and dimension. Sandie and I direct proceeds for benefits for Kirby School, and we also support local charities with a cultural, educational, and health-related missions.
That brings me back to the wood itself. I think tropical hardwoods are beautiful from an aesthetic viewpoint as well as intriguing from a scientific angle...but those trees should be left standing where they grow. The devastation of huge ecosystems for lumber, in third world countries and right here at home, is a numbing counterpoint to the joy of using the material to make useful and pretty objects. Much of this rapacious behavior is driven by corporate profiteers and corrupt politicians...and a regrettable amount of the actual wood is turned into tacky junk, unsolicited mail, wanton litter, and acrid smoke. Every time we consumers buy that material...some tribe loses its heritage, some animal goes extinct, and some rain forest turns into a sterile plain feeding scrawny cattle for a corporate burger chain. I prefer to use local wood...which comes available when the winter storms rage or when somebody needs to bring one down on purpose. In temperate, forested Santa Cruz County, woodworkers have abundant choices: Redwood, of course, but also big leaf maple, coast live oak, black acacia, claro walnut, bay laurel, tan oak, sycamore, madrone, Monterey cypress, Douglas fir, willow, black locust, fruitwoods, and several species of eucalyptus. People have planted decorative trees in their yards, and over a generation or two, many of them grow tall, and some of them come down. Woodturners, in particular, seem to have a sixth sense that alerts them...perhaps it’s the siren song of the distant chainsaw. [ii]
Wood does much more than make furniture and paper, of course. We heat our house with a wood stove. I age commercial wine in oak barrels. [iii]
I mentioned evolving gender stereotypes in woodworking. My daughter, Aimee, was a valedictorian in Middle School in the early 1990’s. That was a fine achievement, but she also captured the Golden Hammer Shop Award, a scandal at the time for a girl. Heh heh.
[1] See note at the end about my daughter, Aimee, turning that gender stereotype on its nose to my enduring delight. The international Women in Turning is a major enterprise of the American Association of Woodturners, and I’m happy to say that our local woodturning guild has enjoyed steadily growing participation of women at the lathe.
[i] Paul Schweikher House, Schaumburg, Illinois Architect at Home: Paul Schweikher's House in Schaumburg, IL. (trystcraft.com)
[ii] See link to my article on Backyard Bowls on the www.SCWoodturners.org website. Microsoft Word - Backyard Bowls v5 4-2-19.docx (scwoodturners.org)
[iii] www.SalamandreWine.com
If one loves wood, then one loves trees. Living in a wooden house, flanked by tall oak trees and looking south into a bank of redwoods, reinforces that admiration daily. That’s not an accident. My wife, Sandie, grew up in a modernistic redwood house designed by Paul Schweikher, built improbably on the Illinois prairie in the 1940’s. That structure is now an historic architectural landmark, but she remembers it as her home. [i] It became clear that wood was going to be big part of our lives from the beginning.
I was game. Wood was part of my life, too, just from a different angle. My mother loved “wide boards” and sought affordable antiques as far back as I can remember. When I started school, our family lived in rural Massachusetts in a house where the pre-revolutionary footings were 2 foot square, hard rock maple timbers set upon stone. My father could not stick a pen knife into that wood almost 200 years later.
My relationship with wood changed nature when I was introduced to steel tools in the 1950’s. Shop class was part of every boy’s learning experience back when those experiences were still mainstream offerings in American education. Boys sanded, and girls sewed. It’s just the way it was then.) [1] My shop teacher in elementary school, Don Thiel, stood me in front of a lathe in 7th grade. After a 13 year gap completing my education, I returned to that machine like a moth to the light. Sid Sharples mentored me and my longtime friend, Jim Beckett, on the lathe and other wonderful tools in his shop when we were interns in LA. I bought my first battered lathe in 1973. It was rickety, but it spun the wood around. After the turn of this century, my lathes got bigger, the tools grew sharper, and the trinkets proliferated. I have spent thousands of hours learning how to use them effectively, in addition to chain sawing prodigious amounts of fallen wood into future turning blanks. I am proud to have served as President of Santa Cruz Woodturners in the challenging years of 2020 and 2021.
Dutifully rectilinear furniture, however, was the ascendant woodwork priority for a newly married couple 50+ years ago. We lived as newlyweds in a ramshackle, redwood house built on margins of Stanford University in the 1890’s. We could see daylight between some of the rough 1x12’s that formed the walls and the floors. That sagging shack has long since been razed and replaced with a nondescript condo, but when we lived there, Sandie felt right at home. She could snag a splinter on nearly any surface she touched. She also stated, resolutely: No more mattress on the floor for me. That’s how our shared enterprise in woodworking began...rough-cut redwood 2x6’s and a particle board platform...a whole 6 inches off the floor. It started quite an avalanche of sawdust.
Each new article justified the purchase of a new tool. Each new project delivered new awareness as well as a chance to solve new problems...and add a few new mistakes to the expanding file. Fine Woodworking Magazine became a monthly stimulus to bookend all the medical stuff. I read about Japanese geniuses who could read a tree right through the bark, English and Australian turners who ushered in a whole new approach to the craft, cabinet makers with unforgettable names (Sam Maloof!) who did magical things with wood. That magazine and quite a few books taught me a lot and opened new doors, but those exposures to legendary craftsmen also assured that humility would accompany me into the shop.
There were other ways besides reading and making mistakes to learn how tables, drawers, and cabinets are assembled. Sandie, more often than I should admit, explained to salesmen in furniture stores that the guy lying on his back underneath the table with a measuring tape wasn’t sick...just simply curious about the corner braces or the attachments of the apron to the top. We upgraded gradually to oak, walnut, cherry, and, with one extravagant purchase at Hubbard and Johnson, teak. (More about tropical hardwoods below.)
It’s hard to count, but somewhere between 40 and 50 dining tables have emerged from my shop, half that many chests of drawers and beds, a couple thousand wooden bowls, and countless smaller tables, stools, boxes, chests, toys, kitchen implements, and other objects. I’ve made all of the furniture in my home...other than steam-bent chairs...and subsequently substantially equipped the households of three grown daughters and the dining rooms and bedrooms of dozens of friends. More recently, as my medical career has been drawing to a close, I’ve enjoyed teaching turning and woodwork...circling back to where it all started.
Man does not live by tables alone. There are foundations, floors, studs, windows, rafters, roofs, and siding. Sandie and I bought a house in La Honda during my pediatrics residency, and that opened a chapter of carpentry. We scraped and painted the exterior, sanded the floors, enclosed a deck to make a studio, built a new deck, excavated a small shop, remodeled the kitchen and the bathroom, all in 6 months. That meant spending pretty much every waking hour that wasn’t spent in the hospital or a few abalone dives. Then, back when it used to rain in a California winter, that house collapsed down the hill in a mudslide. That left us abruptly with no home and no money, an unreliable Fiat, some health problems, and precious little happiness...but some wonderful friends.
Pediatric residents worked hard but didn’t earn much money in those days. Once again, wood became a bigger part of our lives. I cut firewood and learned how to fell trees accurately...and repair a chainsaw. I learned basic carpentry from another mentor, Dan, who was a persuasive advocate for both strength and speed...and big tools. Living in the caretaker’s cottage in a former Girl Scout Camp, I put tools in an unused camp kitchen, ran some 220V cable, and made cabinets for sale. Clear, vertical grain redwood was affordable back then, but the cabinets always looked crooked...since there were no plumb lines or right angles in any dwelling in that unusual mountain community in the early 1970’s. Neil Young’s ranch may have been an exception.
I’ve been pleased to make custom furniture within my skill range ever since, and more recently bowls of increasing visual appeal, complexity, and dimension. Sandie and I direct proceeds for benefits for Kirby School, and we also support local charities with a cultural, educational, and health-related missions.
That brings me back to the wood itself. I think tropical hardwoods are beautiful from an aesthetic viewpoint as well as intriguing from a scientific angle...but those trees should be left standing where they grow. The devastation of huge ecosystems for lumber, in third world countries and right here at home, is a numbing counterpoint to the joy of using the material to make useful and pretty objects. Much of this rapacious behavior is driven by corporate profiteers and corrupt politicians...and a regrettable amount of the actual wood is turned into tacky junk, unsolicited mail, wanton litter, and acrid smoke. Every time we consumers buy that material...some tribe loses its heritage, some animal goes extinct, and some rain forest turns into a sterile plain feeding scrawny cattle for a corporate burger chain. I prefer to use local wood...which comes available when the winter storms rage or when somebody needs to bring one down on purpose. In temperate, forested Santa Cruz County, woodworkers have abundant choices: Redwood, of course, but also big leaf maple, coast live oak, black acacia, claro walnut, bay laurel, tan oak, sycamore, madrone, Monterey cypress, Douglas fir, willow, black locust, fruitwoods, and several species of eucalyptus. People have planted decorative trees in their yards, and over a generation or two, many of them grow tall, and some of them come down. Woodturners, in particular, seem to have a sixth sense that alerts them...perhaps it’s the siren song of the distant chainsaw. [ii]
Wood does much more than make furniture and paper, of course. We heat our house with a wood stove. I age commercial wine in oak barrels. [iii]
I mentioned evolving gender stereotypes in woodworking. My daughter, Aimee, was a valedictorian in Middle School in the early 1990’s. That was a fine achievement, but she also captured the Golden Hammer Shop Award, a scandal at the time for a girl. Heh heh.
[1] See note at the end about my daughter, Aimee, turning that gender stereotype on its nose to my enduring delight. The international Women in Turning is a major enterprise of the American Association of Woodturners, and I’m happy to say that our local woodturning guild has enjoyed steadily growing participation of women at the lathe.
[i] Paul Schweikher House, Schaumburg, Illinois Architect at Home: Paul Schweikher's House in Schaumburg, IL. (trystcraft.com)
[ii] See link to my article on Backyard Bowls on the www.SCWoodturners.org website. Microsoft Word - Backyard Bowls v5 4-2-19.docx (scwoodturners.org)
[iii] www.SalamandreWine.com