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Category: James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints

‘A Pre-Kerouac Hippie’

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The second of Krenov’s short stories to be published in Dagens Nyheter. This story, titled “The Singing Heart,” was published on Nov. 19, 1950, and describes one of his first trips up to the Härjedalen province in central Sweden.

The following is excerpted from “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” by Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney.

After years of research and more than 150 interviews, Gaffney produced a definitive biography of Krenov, featuring historical documents, press clippings and hundreds of historical photographs. Gaffney traced Krenov’s life from his birth in a small village in far-flung Russia, to China, Seattle, Alaska, Sweden and finally to Northern California where he founded the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program (now The Krenov School). The book brims with the details of Krenov’s life that, until now, were known only to close friends and family.

And we, who leave our offices and factories to spend a few days – or weeks – outdoors, what is it that we seek? Each of us has his or her answer. Not everyone wants to – or can – really “get away from it all” during any great length of time. Nor can we easily adopt a mode of living from which materialism is isolating us. Yet for the majority of us there exists this fact: by discovering for ourselves a blossom, or a drop of dew, or through sailing, fishing, climbing, skiing – or by just walking in the sun, we tap a new source of life. Partaking of it, we become more vigorous, confident and happy, more at peace with ourselves. Our mind and body are restored. In nature, free and waiting, is something fine and enduring, to which money and high-pressure entertainment can never bring us. The harder the way to it, the more of ourselves we have to give, the more skill, strength, will and understanding we put into the search – the greater our final reward.
– An excerpt from an unpublished short story “For The Asking,” by James Krenov, written in March 1951.

Stockholm’s Gamla Stan (Old Town) neighborhood in 1947. Photo by Iwar Anderson, courtesy of The Swedish National Heritage Board.

[James] Krenov and his mother [Julia] arrived in Sweden in the winter of 1947-48, on the next leg of their life’s continued adventure. Sweden had maintained neutrality throughout World War II, and was relatively unscathed compared to the neighboring continental countries, which were still in a state of Allied occupation and reconstruction. Krenov’s passport bears a number of stamps from Norway, Occupied Denmark and Occupied Germany in his first year in Sweden; whatever stability he had in Seattle was soon traded for a renewed sense of adventure and independence in Europe.

“The war over, it was inevitable that I should go to Europe,” Krenov later wrote in “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook.” “I come from a family of restless people.”

Krenov’s friends at the Port of Seattle had told him that it was easy to find work in Sweden; after a short time around the continent, Krenov found work in a factory. Sweden’s factories were a melting pot at the time – thousands of refugees had fled the continent and the strife of war-torn Europe for the stability of Sweden and its steady economy. Many of Krenov’s coworkers, especially those from Poland and Czechoslovakia, were awaiting visas to the United States. Krenov would later call the environment “memorable,” with a great degree of optimism and hope among his company of “peasants, professors, doctors, and common thieves” from the continent. Many were alone, some had come from the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and a majority had suffered as soldiers or prisoners of the conflict.

Photos from 1948 of the Lumafabriken factory in Stockholm. Krenov never mentioned the specific factory he worked in, but the Lumafabriken factory was one of Stockholm’s largest manufacturers of electronics and lighting, and may well have been his employer. By descriptions of his work, it can be presumed that this factory resembles the one he was employed in during the seasons he wasn’t adventuring around the continent. Photos by Herman Bergne, courtesy of Tekniska Museet.

While he enjoyed the diversity of his coworkers and the “camaraderie that transcended the petty little rivalries and touches of nationalism or exaggerated patriotism,” the work was physically exhausting. The work was grueling and wore on the 28-year-old – he came to resent the “pace, the atmosphere, the lighting, everything.”

He knew, perhaps through his father’s experiences, that he could not survive a long-term jaunt in the factories, but the shortage of labor meant that Krenov could work through the long winters at various factories making “electrical equipment, radios, and neon-light fixtures,” and in the summers, he could venture from the city to the expanse of northern Scandinavia and the continent being rebuilt to the south. He would recall making enough money in his winters at the factories that he could take a “princely vacation” for a month or two and return to the factories in the autumn to work.

One of Krenov’s photos from his trips to the Härjedalen region in central Sweden. In his stories, he would recall his encounters with the rural farmers and the indigenous Sámi people with the same interest as the natural landscapes of the Swedish wilderness. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.

Krenov’s adventures in the summertime brought him to the remote northern reaches of Scandinavia, an environment not unlike that of the Taiga his father had so loved and the Arctic of his youth. His descriptions of remote Norway and Sweden also take on a language distinctly similar to that of his mother’s own writings of Siberia and Alaska.

“When in summertime I tramped the hills of Härjedalen, I felt an affinity, a ONENESS with them,” he wrote in “The Searching Soul,” one of the travelogues he wrote in the late 1940s. “I lost myself in the peace and harmony for which they stood. What I experienced was simple, earthly, warm.”

Following in his parents’ footsteps, Krenov developed a fascination with the mountainous isolation of Scandinavia. And, like Julia, Krenov took to writing about these jaunts into the north. He would write dozens of vignettes over his first few years in Sweden, in “fictional” stories that sometimes switched the name of the narrator of the story but were autobiographical. Hundreds of miles north of Stockholm, he would encounter something akin to the Siberian and Alaskan north that had so deeply impacted his mother’s life and set the stage for his own.

This new character he inhabited in the summer, that of a traveler and documentarian, was no doubt deeply influenced by his mother, herself a self-described “adventurer” and writer. There is little doubt his mother encouraged his exploits, as they lived together during his first years in Sweden, and his writings would even come to describe the native peoples he met in the remote northern reaches much like his mother’s. Krenov encountered the “Lapps” (the indigenous Sámi people) on his backpacking adventures, and documented their stories and mannerisms in an anthropological manner similar to his mother’s. Krenov’s travels north also showcased his self-sufficiency and deep-seated sense of adventure.

“After a few summers I knew a large area of that part of northern Sweden,” he wrote years later. “I knew where there were places one could seek shelter if the weather was bad; where there were fish; where I could meet reindeer herders who, even if they were not my friends in the sense of sharing an occupation, were friendly and understanding of anyone who walked as I did.”

Krenov would continue these northern adventures into the 1950s. In subsequent years, he would return frequently to a small hut in Härjedalen with his young family, introducing them to the wild north just as his father and mother had done with him – though, in this case, there was no threat of revolution or war nipping at his heels.

In addition to these northern escapades, Krenov also made summer trips to continental Europe, where he encountered the strife and difficulties of war that he had first heard of from the sailors in the Port of Seattle. His passport shows an early trip through occupied northern Europe and into France only a few months after his arrival in Sweden in 1948, and in subsequent years he would travel through Germany, France, Italy and many other countries in between, by boat, rail, bicycle and on foot.

“Castle,” a short travelogue written by Krenov in 1952 about his trip to Pontivy, France, and its historic castle. These stories were written in English and translated for the Swedish newspaper’s audience.

These trips were seemingly motivated less by the excitement of the frontier instilled in him by his childhood in the Arctic but more so in pursuit of the culture and experiences of his mother’s youth some 40 years earlier. Where his mother would detail the operas, ballets and refined culture of the continent in her memoirs, Krenov became enraptured by the architecture, the people and complex political situation of a post-war Europe. Some of Krenov’s friends from Sweden would recall later that he and his mother had initially come to Europe in search of something Julia had lost when she first fled to Siberia, be that the refinement, culture or a sense of old-world belonging. What they found was not the continent Julia had left, but it was a world that fascinated her son.

During this early time in Sweden, Julia settled into life as an expatriate. She again found work as a teacher and language tutor, helping a number of distinguished expatriates learn English and French, two languages in high demand in post-war Europe. While she may not have found the aristocracy of her youth, she did settle into a life in the company of diplomats and the upper-class. Poor though she was, her abilities with languages made her a valuable person in the increasingly affluent and worldly Swedish city of Stockholm, and it would be her lifeline and income for the rest of her life. Her granddaughter, Katya, would later recall a visit she took with Julia to the apartment of a diplomat – the company drank plum brandy and had conversations in the luxurious Stockholm apartment. Julia would also take Krenov and later her granddaughter to all manner of ballets, operas and traveling cultural events that would pass through Stockholm.

The first page of Julia’s “Legends from Alaska,” published by the Journal de la Société des Américanistes in 1951. The French introduction, written by Marcelle Bouteiller (an ethnographer who wrote comparisons of indigenous American shamanism and French folk medicine), notes some of Julia’s background in Alaska, and carries out the promise to thank Palageya Adrianova that Julia had made to the Russian elder decades earlier in Sleetmute.

Julia did have some success with her writing in 1951. After two decades of letters and sending manuscripts to publishers, she managed to get a portion of her transcribed legends published in 1951 in the Journal de la Société des Américanistes, a French academic journal of cultural anthropology in the Americas. While a small success, her memoir did not see the same results; Krenov later remembered trips with her to various publishers in the years that followed, hoping to have her longer writings published. Her failure to publish the memoir was clearly a disappointment and may have further provoked her urging for her son to write and publish his own stories.

Like his writings about the northern reaches of Scandinavia, Krenov again fashioned his stories about continental Europe as both travelogue and fiction. While his short stories concerning the north revolved around the remoteness and humbling presence of a harsh natural world, his writings of France, Italy and the continent focused more on the people and how he related with their lives, struggles and humanity.
Krenov made a determined play at having his writings published, and starting in 1949, he began sending stories to publishers in Stockholm, Paris and elsewhere. Among his papers, a number of the stories written in this period bear stamps and notes for publishers in Sweden. These documents, which also bear return addresses, dates and some biographical references, also provide the backbone for what little primary source information can be found for Krenov’s first years in Sweden.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed in November 1940, an event Krenov witnessed firsthand and wrote about later in Stockholm. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-46682.

The stories Krenov worked at having published covered a swath of his own adventures in his first three decades. “The Bridge,” a short story about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse in 1940 that Krenov witnessed firsthand, was among the stories sent for publication. Others included “The Lapp,” a short story about a Sámi native man who Krenov met in his travels north; “Searching Soul,” a travelogue about the deep wilderness of Sweden; “Forgotten Stones,” a story about an indigenous man leading a settler to a hidden mine in remote Alaska; and other such stories that followed his biographic arc.

He did see some early success in getting his work published. Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish newspaper based in Stockholm, published five stories from 1950 to 1955. The first was a collection of three Alaskan fables, presumably ones he had borrowed from his mother’s collection of translated fables, which appeared on Aug. 27, 1950. The subsequent four stories were his own travelogues, written about northern Sweden and the European continent. In a short biographical blurb in the travelogue of his northern trip, Krenov is described as “a young American, in love with Härjedalen’s mountain world … he felt as close to home as you can in foreign lands. His hometown is Seattle, and he spent seven years of his childhood in southern and inner Alaska – hence his home feeling in Härjedalen.” This short bio draws the clear connection to his time in Alaska and northern Sweden, drawn in his own words.

Over the course of these writings from his 20s and 30s, Krenov’s tone shifted from poetic travelogues and short fiction stories to a decidedly more idealistic and philosophic set of stories about the strife and challenge of European life. Krenov not only recalls with great detail the characters and places he encountered but what he saw as the ailments of the industrial society. In “Italiensk Resa” (Italian Journey) written in 1953, he mourned the overworked lower-classes and made a reproach of the dehumanizing force of capitalistic pursuits. His shift in tone reflected both his difficult time working in the factories and the beginnings of his own personal soul-searching, a philosophy that cast off “productivity” for emotional and holistic pursuits. He would continue to develop and pursue this theme for the next several decades, through to the publication of his first book on the subject of furniture making two decades later.

The first page of Krenov’s manuscript for “The Searching Soul,” a travelogue detailing one of Krenov’s trips into the Härjedalen region. His writing style bears a distinct similarity to his mother, Julia’s, and the essay describes both his encounters with the flora and fauna of the mountains and his conversations with fellow travelers and locals in a rural inn. As with his other writings from the time, which rarely mention the narrator or even give a name other than Krenov’s, it’s clear that this story draws from firsthand experience. Image courtesy of the Krenov family.

One of the first countries Krenov visited as a traveler was France, in the summer of 1949.

“In France, he had known elation and a sort of mental sharing,” Krenov wrote in 1953. “But life there was not for him; he could not become a part of it. They knew too much, the French. And knowing too much, they believed in very little – hardly anything, really, except their right to disbelieve. Michael could not stay in France. He liked the people, their wit and verve … but something within him shrank from so much wishing – and so little doing.”

While he found no home among the French, this trip altered the trajectory of Krenov’s life. It was a chance meeting at a café with a Swedish woman two years his junior, Britta Lindgren, that would change his course and anchor him to Sweden and a quieter life. Britta would become his companion and dedicated partner for the next 60 years.

Krenov’s ‘Childhood in the North’

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Krenov plays with a sailboat and one of his Airedale dogs in the Cook Inlet. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.

The following is excerpted from “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” by Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney. After years of research and more than 150 interviews, Gaffney produced the first and definitive biography of Krenov, featuring historical documents, press clippings and hundreds of historical photographs. Gaffney traces Krenov’s life from his birth in a small village in far-flung Russia, to China, Seattle, Alaska, Sweden and finally to Northern California where he founded the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program (now The Krenov School).

“I remember my first trip up north,” John began. “In ’24 I took a post as a schoolteacher in a small native village about two hundred miles up the Kuskokwim river. It was a dreary place, and the work was difficult. A teacher in Alaska is a sort of guardian to the natives under his care, being in fact doctor, minister, counsellor and sometimes even policeman. But he must first of all be the natives’ friend. For he can get along only if they trust him, and he in turn tries to understand the strange ways of his charges. There is a peculiar fascination and pride in this sort of work. It grows on one, as does the north itself.”*

*An excerpt from an unpublished short story “The Forgotten Stones,” by James Krenov, written in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Krenov had a habit of interspersing autobiographical details in the short stories he wrote in his 20s and 30s, often switching his name or details for that of his fictional character, as he does here for the character of John.

The Krenovs arrived in Seattle on Oct. 29, 1923, with $100 each, “just enough to be allowed to land,” as Julia notes in her memoir. An immigration document lists their place of residence on arrival as the Commerce Hotel. This inexpensive room in a hotel along First Avenue helped the couple stretch their meager funds. With a short amount of time before their pocketbook would be empty, the two of them set out to find work. Dmitri’s initial job in a factory left him with a finger injury and perhaps a greater wound to his pride; this employment was well below his qualifications as a lawyer. While working or out looking for work, the two left their young son at a daycare; the nurses complained that Krenov refused to nap or eat, and instead “stood on his cot and screamed at the top of his voice.” Julia decided that she had to find employment with a family that would allow her to keep her son with her during the day.

A photograph Julia had taken while the family was in Seattle, early in 1924. La Pine & Rogers was a well-known photography studio, and the photograph would have constituted no small expense for Julia. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.

At The Young Women’s Christian Association of Seattle, Julia met a young woman who offered her employment as a live-in nanny and housekeeper, taking care of a young boy the same age as her son. Her pay for this work was only $7 a week, with room and board in the family’s home. Julia served their meals and, only after the family was done eating and out of the house, she would clean up then cook for herself and her son. The young woman’s husband was a traveling salesman selling footstools, and while their home and status was above that of the recently arrived Russian immigrants, they didn’t provide Julia with adequate food for her and her young son; Julia remembered spending most of her salary providing for her and her son’s basic necessities. Over the course of a few months, the young woman slowly lessened Julia’s pay until she and her family left Seattle to live with her parents, apparently broke after the failure of her husband’s business. Their house was repossessed by the bank, and Julia was back to looking for work.

Julia found a second job, this time as a live-in caretaker for a seven-room boarding house for factory workers run by a Norwegian woman. She and her son had no room to themselves, instead sleeping on a sofa in the parlor, only after the workers had finished their card games late in the evening. The environment was bad for a child, Julia thought, but her son was enamored with their Norwegian host. Krenov fell ill during his stay in the boarding house, which Julia blamed on the “horrid lavatories with faulty plumbing and obscene scribblings on the walls.” Krenov recovered from this illness, but Julia was desperate to find another option for the family.

Julia, young Jim and the rest of the villagers of Sleetmute that were caught in town piled into boats for the flood in the spring of 1925, caused by a blockage of broken ice downstream. At its worst point, the water rose above the village’s windows, and one of the village’s children was killed by exposure during the 48-hour flood. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.

While she was working at the lodging house, Julia met a sea captain in Seattle who made regular visits to Alaska. After hearing about their time in Siberia among the Chukchi people, the captain prompted Julia and Dmitri to seek employment with the Bureau of Education in Alaska. At this time in Seattle, work was short, especially for recent émigrés from Russia, who were arriving in droves; an appointment for permanent employment, especially one that capitalized on their experience from Siberia, was a saving grace for the family. After visiting Mr. W. T. Lopp, the chief of the Bureau of Education, Alaska Division, and taking a short class in nursing, the Krenovs received an appointment from Washington to an outpost in Sleetmute, a small settlement in the interior of Alaska several hundred miles up the Kuskokwim River. Dmitri and Julia were hired as representatives of the United States government in the small village, and Julia became the sole schoolteacher of the village. The pay and conditions were marginally better than those they had lived through in Seattle, but the family was together, having been separated during Julia’s work as a nanny and boarding house caretaker, and Dmitri and Julia were able to use some of their advanced education in service of the natives.

In the summer of 1924, Dmitri, Julia and their young son sailed up the Pacific coast to Bethel on the Caroline Frances, an old schooner operated by Captain Worth, who became Jim’s friend during the journey. The Captain entertained the toddler on the bridge, showing him the navigational charts and compasses. Already, Krenov was showing an interest in boats and sailing, one that took root and grew over the course of his childhood.

At Bethel, a large settlement and trading post at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River, the Krenovs switched from the schooner to the “prehistoric flat-bottomed boat ‘Tana’ with an enormous wheel instead of a propeller,” as Krenov notes in his later writings. After a month sailing up the coast, they were now sailing up the river on a delivery boat, which stopped along the way to deliver cargo and trade at the villages on the banks of the river.

“To take Jim to the North from China was a crime,” Julia wrote in her memoir. “But so was life in Seattle in the homes of strangers. We had to survive somehow, seize the opportunity offered, risky as it may be, make the best of it. Adventurers like myself had no right to have children.”

When the family arrived in Sleetmute in 1924, what they found was nothing like Uelen and the Chukchi, with whom Julia had found comfort and camaraderie. Sleetmute had been established as a trading post with the Yupik natives by early Russian settlers in the 1830s to trade for furs and locally mined whetstones and ore. In the century since its founding, the indigenous people in this area had traded much of their traditional homes, clothing and food for that of the traders and settlers, which were ill-suited to the region’s harsh climate.

Jim and his classmates in his mother’s one-room schoolhouse. The chalkboard at the back of the room is a lesson on America’s Independence Day; the irony of a recent Russian émigré teaching indigenous children (whose family histories stretch back far before the purchase of Alaska from Russia decades earlier) is interesting to consider. Photo courtesy of the Krenov family.

“The warm igloos were replaced by poorly-built drafty log cabins,” Julia noted. “Instead of fur parkas and moccasins, they wore imported out-of-fashion coats made of cheap cloth, calico dresses and high-heel shoes.”

With those changes and exposure to the European settlers came tuberculosis. Of the 25 families in the village, Julia remembered only one older man who had never shown signs of the lung hemorrhages associated with the illness. In their first spring in Sleetmute, the entire population also suffered from influenza, and the family’s sole occupations were fetching water, cutting firewood and tending to the sick. Julia also cared for a young boy with meningitis in the same season. The illnesses were a seasonal occurrence, and though she had attended nursing classes in preparation for their assignment in Alaska, Julia was overwhelmed by the work. Her treatments were also subject to some scrutiny by the native people. That same spring, upon the outbreak of influenza and the case of meningitis, a local shaman arrived, but only after Julia had started the boy’s treatment with western medicine. The shaman refused to treat the boy, “once the white woman had been at the boy’s bedside,” and the 5-year-old died of his infection. By Julia’s account, the mournful parents had shown little faith in either the shaman or the Western medicine offered; their unfortunate position between the two cultures had left them without a comfortable place in either.

Sleetmute was not only set upon by the trials of “acculturation” and illness but also by natural disasters. The Kuskokwim river flooded its banks in the Krenovs’ second spring, due to a dam caused by an ice jam downstream from the village. For 48 hours, the villagers who had been in the town when the flood began had to float in an improvised raft. The flood killed one child and devastated the village’s buildings, having risen well above the windows of the poorly built structures; it took months to rebuild and rehabilitate.

The next year, a forest fire sparked by a forager’s careless bonfire upstream threatened the town’s existence. Sleetmute’s residents managed to save the town by digging trenches and using buckets of water to douse the flames that leapt from the pines and firs surrounding the town, but Julia remembers several weeks of uneasy sleep in the wake of the fire.

Julia’s main occupation at the village, when she was not functioning as an impromptu nurse and caretaker, was as a teacher in the one-room log schoolhouse. Though determined at her post, she was discouraged by the listless and inert pupils in her charge. After school, Julia made her rounds to the households of the village, caring for any of the sick and checking in with the families. Her presence was appreciated by the oft-unwell villagers whom she joined for tea, sitting on the floors of their log cabins.

Julia also took to recording and translating the stories of the people of Sleetmute, befriending an older Russian-speaking woman, Palageya Adrianova, whose family had settled in the village when Alaska was still a holding of Russia. It was Palageya who, at a young age, had been given the privilege of lowering the Russian flag at the settlement when Alaska was purchased by the United States from Russian in 1867, nearly 60 years earlier. The old woman spoke an old dialect of Russian alongside the local native language, and was able to share these old stories with Julia, which included creation myths, stories of famed chiefs and shamans, fables and local lore. These legends came to form a significant presence in her young son’s mind; later in his life, Krenov recalled these legends as an important part of his mystic considerations of the natural world around him.

James Krenov’s last College of the Redwoods Cabinet

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The last cabinet Krenov made at the school, the “Pearwood Drawer Cabinet.” David Welter pointed out that this leg shape, with its tapered and faceted shaping, was a new style for Krenov. “Jim often said that it was curiosity that kept him going,” noted Welter. Photo by David Welter.

The following is excerpted from “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” by Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney. After years of research and more than 150 interviews, Gaffney produced the first and definitive biography of Krenov, featuring historical documents, press clippings and hundreds of historical photographs. Gaffney traced Krenov’s life from his birth in a small village in far-flung Russia, to China, Seattle, Alaska, Sweden and finally to Northern California where he founded the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program.

While the school [what is now the Krenov School of Fine Furniture]was preparing for his withdrawal, [James] Krenov, too, was making plans for his life after the program. His craft practice had been uninterrupted in his last year, in spite of the turbulent conditions of his departure. He completed three cabinets, even venturing into a new form, a “drawer cabinet” whose interior was occupied by an array of drawers, with little or no open space inside the carcase. As he prepared to leave the school, unsure if he would or could return to the facilities, one student remembers that Krenov spent a sizable amount of time preparing and sawing materials for the cabinets he hoped to make when he returned home. The students, too, helped with Krenov’s move. Along with helping him with the physical move of his materials, the students built him a going-away gift of a veneer press, smaller than the school’s but sized to Krenov’s smaller scale of work.

Erik Owen, a student from the class of ’96, worked with the family to build an addition to the cabin behind the house on Forest Lane, to serve as a small workshop reminiscent of his Bromma basement workshop from Sweden. Into the shop they moved his workbench, a few small machines and his still ample supply of wood, all he needed for the construction of his small veneered cabinets on stands.

The move home was turbulent, and after leaving the school, it would be several months before Krenov would complete a cabinet in this diminutive space. But his family and friends also were careful to help see that Krenov would not have to endure too long a separation from his daily routine, for both Krenov’s and their own sakes. Tina remembers that Britta knew it was time for her husband to retire, having seen his demeanor and attitude with the school worsen, but was saddened to see it happen on terms not entirely his own.

Krenov’s ultimate critique of the school he gave after his retirement, now coming out from under his 20-year tenure, was that it could not bring the students to a place of maturity, both as technically solid craftspeople and capable designers. Krenov had never shied away from helping those students who sought his help, and many of his favorite students had come to the school without any background in furniture. Krenov had delighted at bringing many of those students far past a point of accomplishment that they themselves had thought possible. But he had long used an analogy that he had overheard Arthur Rubinstein, the famed Polish-American pianist, give when addressing the talents of his students.

“For example, you cannot teach a person to be musical,” he told Oscar Fitzgerald, just a few years later. “You can teach them to play, but you can’t teach them to be musical. I was in New York and I came back to my hotel room and they were having the 80th birthday concert by [Arthur] Rubinstein – Carnegie Hall, the whole ball of wax. And they were interviewing him in the intermission and somebody asked him … about the students of that time. He says, ‘Oh, such technicians, such skills. Oh, sometimes I ask one of them, when are you going to make music?’”

Krenov lectures from the bench in his back room at the school in 2002. Photo courtesy of the Krenov School.

In May 2002, Krenov officially retired from the program, after his 20th year at the school. Burns remembers that the last day was cathartic. Knowing that their time as colleagues was over, he and Krenov had a final argument, one that was their last conversation. However turbulent Krenov’s last years had been, the school’s faculty, with the addition of Hjorth-Westh and Smith, would forge ahead without Krenov, and the school continued outside of his presence on staff.

Krenov himself would not retreat, in totality, from the school for a few more years. He returned on occasion in subsequent years to see and advise on student work, suggest or offer up a board of wood for a certain project and, sometimes, to fill his pockets with dowels from the boxes in the machine room. The school’s students, too, would not cease to visit Krenov. Laura Mays, a second-year student in the first year without Krenov in residence, remembers that many of her classmates, even those who hadn’t studied under Krenov, would make frequent trips to the Krenovs’ house for tea and conversation. And alumni, those who had stayed in the area or who returned for visits, would come to their teacher’s home to check up on the aging cabinetmaker. Krenov would even weigh in on some students’ attempts at recreations or reinterpretations of his own designs; as late as 2008, Krenov advised one student, Tom Reid, on his version of Krenov’s “Carved Curves” cabinet, and gave Reid the compass plane he had made decades earlier for his own construction of the cabinet.

Krenov’s departure began the last chapter of his life. In those years, visitors to his home remember his fondness for Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Krenov, with failing eyesight, arthritis, body pains and faltering hearing was moving toward the end of his life, but retirement was never an option for the 82-year-old. From his small world on Forest Lane, he would still host a rotating cast of visitors, friends and well wishers, reach out into the world by phone and written word, and continue to pursue a craft practice by any means necessary.

Meeting James Krenov in Exile

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James Krenov, the well-known furniture maker born in Russia, author of the hugely influential “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” for 21 years the lead instructor of what is now the Krenov School in Fort Bragg, Calif., and who died at 88 in 2009, was not always revered. When my late wife, Carolyn Grew-Sheridan, and I met with him in 1974, in a suburb outside Stockholm, Sweden, he had been rejected for a teaching position at the School for American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology and thought himself to be in exile. His wife, a native of Sweden, was supporting them as a high school teacher of economics. His professional world was a tiny basement with small machines and a bench where he made his signature handplanes.

While cleaning out several old boxes, I recently found notes from our trip to Scandinavia. Carolyn and I had taken a six-week backpacking and youth hosteling trip to visit woodworkers, museums and schools there. We had just finished a 14-month apprenticeship with Karl Seemuller and Andy Willner at the Peters Valley School of Crafts in New Jersey. Arrangements for that placement, which saved us huge tuition bills, had been made by Dan Jackson, a creative genius who died far too early.

On May 15, 1974, I wrote the following short notes without the benefit of a tape recorder:

A four-and-a-half-hour visit to a meticulously maintained shop. A chance to hear master cabinetmaker, James Krenov, formerly of Seattle, talk about wood, furniture and, most importantly, people. We made the appointment on the recommendation of the editor of FORM magazine, Kirstin Wickman.

I wrote that “he lives in a pleasant house 25 minutes outside the city. Huge high-rise complexes built for the commuter rail line surround his detached house and others in the area, but the overall feeling in May is of light and sunshine. He met us at the train and immediately showed himself to be on the defensive. He asked me why I was wearing hiking boots, ‘those heavy things.’ Well, I didn’t want to tell him that I used to own a pair of shoes like his Wallabies, but they hurt my feet. So I just said that my boots were comfortable for our traveling.

“This short, strong, grey-haired man then led us toward his house while our attempts to make conversation failed. But that didn’t stop him from talking. It simply meant that there was no exchange, at least for a while, until things warmed up. We were offered the hospitality of cake and coffee and a tour of his workshop. We found his basement space to be immaculate, with perfectly sharpened tools and handmade planes. Everything was in its assigned place. He had a few of his pieces there, including a clock with one hand.

“Krenov appeared to Carolyn and me to be working on a delicate scale with discipline and consistency. He made only minimal, preliminary sketches and did not believe that woodworkers have to know how to draw.

His opinion was that “they can respond to the wood. Too many students get lost in their drawings and find themselves only able to think on paper.”

During our conversations he apologized for his being antagonistic, but said that he didn’t know how people felt about him, or his methods and style of work. He was tired of being a curiosity. He was defensive. We heard (and he confirmed) that in Scandinavia young people were not interested in training to be cabinetmakers. New companies like IKEA were being created. (We brought home as a souvenir the first IKEA catalog). He felt that he himself needed only simple tools and machinery. He loved and treasured his wood collection.

He was not accepted for a teaching position at the School for American Crafts at RIT after teaching and auditioning there. He came to the conclusion that the school drove out the sensitive students, was trying to be everything to everyone and, as a result, was not serving its purpose. The curriculum was not congruent with his philosophy and techniques.

He was critical of other prominent furniture makers and not content within his own work. Krenov singled out Art Espenet Carpenter, founder of the Baulines Guild in the California Bay Area. “Beauty doesn’t come by the pound,” he said. In addition, I noted that he called Carpenter’s work “amateur dabbling” and regretted that Carpenter had been such a big influence on the West Coast.

He felt that Wendell Castle, also teaching at Rochester and who was becoming a towering presence in sculpture and woodworking, was ignorant about wood as a material and a bad teacher. “Castle made too many Wendell Castles,” he said. He emphasized that when teaching at RIT he wouldn’t even grade some of the student projects that were Castle-influenced. He accepted Castle as a sculptor but he thought that he was not responsive to the wood itself and that he should be working in another medium. This was in reference to Castle’s stack-laminated and carved work. (Krenov was unaware that Castle received an MFA in cast bronze sculpture.)

He was fond of my informal mentor at the Philadelphia University of the Arts, Dan Jackson. He thought that Jackson had a lot of sensitivity and ability. At the same time he said that the school encouraged too much originality and “razzmatazz.”

When talking about his own work he mentioned the importance of achieving “the singing drawer” in a cabinet. The fit of the drawer in the finished cabinet. He thought this was a crucial quality that needed be discussed and understood. For him a completed piece has to be good from every side and should not contain plywood. For a woodworker the “joy is in taking a piece completely through each step,” in contrast to industrial line production where the employee has to do the same thing over and over.

He thought that the quality of tools in Europe and the United States was declining (this was in the early 1970s) so he recommended Japanese saws, which were then new to us. In addition, he had a collection of older tools and plane irons. The specialty tool makers that we know today did not exist then.

It was his experience after being in many shows that in Scandinavia those awarding commissions did not often think of ordering a cabinet for a specific space. Usually such work went to weavers or painters. However, Krenov felt that in the United States a buying public for works in wood could be developed if the buyer was able to appreciate the cost of the time in the work.

For someone whose worldwide fame was still in front of him, but very close, we noticed how worried he was about how much longer he would be able to work. He worried about his strength and alertness, even though he was only 53 when we met him.

Unfortunately, we took no pictures of our visit with James Krenov. In the months that followed we finished our second summer as assistants in the Peters Valley wood studio At the same time, Carolyn, who had worked for three years after college as a book editor, attempted to organize Krenov’s thoughts and notes into a publishable format. Eventually she sent her files back to Krenov, who found a publisher for his best-selling “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook.” We started our Grew-Sheridan Studio in San Francisco. It seemed to us to be the cheapest city in the country in which to find working space. There was no “tech.”

Some notable Krenov quotes from the visit:

“Americans want to design a piece on Tuesday and have it ready on Saturday.”

“They want originality. There is none.”

“Craftsmanship has its own justification”.

“Craft must be able to offer something that factories cannot.”

“It is a fallacy to say that a craftsman can make a better joint than a factory.”

“There is a need to explore questions of value and aesthetics.”

“I enjoy teaching.”

“I don’t feel that the best craftsmen will survive but the most aggressive will.”

“I don’t like curves that are just part of a circle. Too boring.”

“Asymmetrical work should be subtle not forceful.”

“No tool is a magic key.”

We had been traveling to see “Scandinavian Design.” Krenov thought it was “living on its past laurels.” IKEA was just getting started. The future of studio furniture making was in the United States.

— John Sheridan

“James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” the biography of James Krenov by Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney, is available here.

Video: Krenov’s ‘Pagoda Cabinet’ Conservation

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The 1971 “Pagoda Cabinet” – a classical form with the James Krenov touch. Photo by Bengt Carlén.

One of the first furniture images in “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints” – Brendan Gaffney’s biography of a 20th century woodworking icon – is the “Pagoda Cabinet” that Krenov built in 1971 from European cherry. David Welter, a student of Krenov’s then a long-time faculty member at the school he founded (now called the Krenov School), chose it to showcase in his foreword for the book because it’s one of his favorite furniture pieces.

The Pagoda Cabinet, which remained in Sweden for 50 years, was recently acquired by a former student of the Krenov School, who turned it over to Welter for cleaning and conservation. In June 2022, Welter gave a talk to the school on the cabinet and his process. Watch it below, courtesy of the Krenov Foundation.