Category: Little Acorns: Profiles by Nancy Hiller

It was Peter Follansbee who suggested I consider interviewing Ed Maday for the Lost Art Press blog. “We’ve only met once, before I ‘knew who he was,’” he wrote in a note a few weeks ago.

Back when I worked in the museum field, one day this ordinary tourist type was slumping around. Belt & suspenders, shorts, shirt not tucked in. I happened to be hewing a bowl from a catalpa log and when this fellow made his way to my spot, he told me he used catalpa a lot, as an instrument maker. Made the backs of non-traditional violins from catalpa & loved the sound it makes…didn’t get his name. It was a short interaction. Probably 7-10 years ago.

Some time later, I was at Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking w[ith] Bob Van Dyke. When I’m there, we usually have dinner with Leslie Dockeray, a friend/student/collaborator there. She teaches violin to children in NYC. My twins had just started violin lessons, and we were generally talking violins. I mentioned this man, and his use of catalpa. Leslie exclaimed “THAT’S ED MADAY!” – which meant nothing to me. Then she went on to tell me he’s one of the best violin-makers in New York. 

He’s amazing. I can make all manner of household junk out of wood – but it doesn’t make a sound. Ed’s things come to life.

At the corner of Broadway and Johnson Place, in the playground of Woodmere Public School on Long Island, N.Y., a catalpa tree grew three stories high, Ed recalled. Always among the last trees to form leaves, it blanketed the ground with popcorn as the end of spring semester approached. On close inspection, each exploded kernel revealed an orchid-like form – creamy petals surrounding a magenta- and gold-flecked throat. In summer, the tree’s dense canopy of bright-green leaves, each shaped like a heart, offered shade and a backrest to readers. It littered the playground with long brown seedpods just as children began to dream about costumes for Halloween.

“In the 1960s, we all played under this tree,” he said. The living landmark had stood over the monkey bars even when his father was a kid at the same school.

The playground was closed when the school expanded its library in the mid-1990s. The authorities took down the tree.

“When I saw the tree down,” said Ed, “I went up there that night with my Chevy Astro van. My wife went…with me. We rolled the logs in.” His brothers Jimmy and Albert set their band saw mill in the yard and cut up the tree with help from Ed and their eldest brother, Joe. “From this catalpa tree I’ve made about 80 instruments so far,” said Ed. “It’s a little like black walnut in density. It rings like a bell and has this beautiful grain and is perfect for instrument making. It’s even great for violins. [Most] people will choose Bosnian maple, but this catalpa makes a beautiful sound for fiddles, for old-time music.” So beautiful that he made a model of Maybelle Carter’s 1929 Gibson L5 as a gift for Nashville-based bluegrass musician Molly Tuttle (the first woman awarded an International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year) in 2019. “I knew her from going to the bluegrass festivals,” he continued, adding that he has always loved the Maybelle Carter Gibson. He also made a cello from the catalpa for Madeline Fayette, who plays with the Orpheus Chamber Group (you can hear a performance of hers on the Maday catalpa cello here); her sister, Abigail, is a professional musician who plays a violin Ed made from Bosnian maple.

Ed, 63, earns his living by making highly customized string instruments, from the daintiest of fiddles to the most sonorous double bass. To date, he has made some 350 of them; his repertoire also extends to viola dagambas and mandolins. Many of his customers know him from his time repairing and restoring antique instruments; in addition to work for well-known musicians, he performed basic sound adjustments to his customers’ preferences. “I’ll make [an instrument] play to the way they want to hear it and feel it,” he explains. “[All instruments] are affected by weather changes in the wood. Mostly people come here…because they know me, they like me.”

His customers select their preferred wood, partly for looks but mainly for sound. Ed buys Lombardy poplar, a common wood for cellos and violas, from Italy. Most people who come to him for a classical instrument want flamed Bosnian maple for the back and sides, and spruce from Italy or Bavaria for the tops (i.e., the front). Some come to him for custom dimensions; it’s critical that the instrument fit the player’s body. Almost all want something “really cool that’s not commercial.”

One commission was a rebec he made for a client who wanted her instrument to resemble Rocinante, Don Quixote’s horse. A predecessor to the violin, used from the 13th-15th centuries, the rebec is carved entirely from a single block of wood, as you’d carve a spoon. Some customers ask him to carve a head at the scroll; several months ago, during the pandemic, he carved a John the Baptist head, complete with a beard and eyes looking to heaven for guidance. An upcoming job will have a dolphin instead of a human head. Once, a lady in Portugal commissioned an instrument with the head of a dragon. As Follansbee observed, these are musical instruments: they not only demand an artist’s skill in carving; they also have to sound good. Ed assured me, “I get ’em to sound nice.”

For the past 2-1/2 months Ed has been working on a double bass for a teacher on Long Island who plays jazz. Ed carved the back from catalpa planks, though these didn’t come from his childhood tree. At 44″ long in the body and requiring two 3″-thick pieces, each 10-12″ wide, he needed something more substantial. That catalpa came from his friend Jimmy Koehler’s yard. “His tree is big enough to make double basses out of,” he said. Ed has carved the neck and scroll, and dovetailed the neck to the body. With luck, the piece will be ready for varnish in the next three to four weeks. He’ll finish it with a traditional violin maker’s varnish made with fossil amber (also known as Baltic amber), the same material used by Dutch masters in the 17th century. He cooks the amber with linseed oil and rosin for 4-5 hours, until it polymerizes – that’s the process that makes it dry – and colors it with pigments made from natural materials such as madder root and walnut husks, “pretty much the way it was done in the 1700s.”

Family

Ed, the second of five children, was born in Woodmere in 1957. He has lived there his whole life. Today, he and his wife live in the house where he grew up, a place his parents built in 1960 that’s less than a half-mile from the Woodmere Public School.

Ed’s father, who was born in 1930, grew up in the house next door. He owned an auto body shop in Woodmere but was a lifelong woodworker who spent hours in a shop converted from a garage, building boats, carving wood and making furniture for his family. He always encouraged Ed and his siblings to join him in the shop and make whatever they wanted; Ed recalls making balsa airplanes. The only catch: They were not allowed to use power tools of any sort, because their father had lost four fingers on his left hand in a woodworking accident at the age of 16.

Another influence Ed mentioned is the traditional culture of Woodmere Bay (also cited on maps as Brosewere Bay), which was historically home to clam diggers and farmers. Along with many others who lived near the bay, his family had a bay house on stilts where they spent a good part of each summer. At a time when much of America was abandoning traditional ways of living for new conveniences, from electric washers to frozen dinners, and the nation’s evening ritual became relaxing in front of a black-and-white TV, these bay houses had no electricity; kerosene lamps provided light, and coal stoves generated heat. “Everyone did stuff by hand,” Ed said. Those summers made a deep impression. Sadly, the Madays’ stilt house was washed away by Hurricane Sandy, but its echoes linger in Ed’s cluttered shop, which he likens to Geppetto’s.

After Ed came Johnny, followed by their sister, Jane, then brother Jimmy. Albert is the baby of the family. Everyone played the violin except Joe, who played banjo. Ed has played violin since third grade. Their mother worked at their school, first as a kindergarten aid and later as a library assistant. “She played folk guitar and sang songs around the house. At family gatherings everyone would hang out in the kitchen and sing,” said Ed.

His parents didn’t push him in any particular direction, which was nice, considering that he knew he wanted to be a violin maker from an early age. He made his first violin at 15, after three years of reading library books on the subject and experimenting with materials and techniques. In the mandatory meeting with his guidance counselor to discuss further education and possibilities for a career, he expressed his interest in making violins. “She didn’t know what to do with that,” he said. She suggested he should first learn a bit about business and talked him into studying accounting at Hofstra University.

He applied to Hofstra and decided to major in business, but flunked out of business after two semesters. “The courses I did really good with were music, English, philosophy, arts. Any of the arts: the humanities.”

Meanwhile, he had never stopped playing violin. His violin teacher, Olga Bloom (best known as the force behind Bargemusic, a floating concert venue under the Brooklyn Bridge), was one of his professors at Hofstra. She encouraged him to stick with music. He won a scholarship to play violin, which got him parts in chamber group sessions and playing in the orchestra pit for the theater department.

Throughout his time at college he built and repaired instruments on the side. Three or four nights each week he also played fiddle on stage in Long Island and the metro area, and sometimes in New York City – early style jazz and swing with The Uptown Radio Cowboys, bluegrass with the Jumbo String Band – sometimes working ’til dawn. It was the mid-’70s – a time, said Ed, when there was “a bluegrass wave.” He could see a future combining bluegrass and swing with violin making.

In the end, he didn’t graduate from Hofstra. He took a part-time job in the produce department of his local Key Food grocery store, where his work ethic made such an impression on his employers that they offered him the position of produce manager, a regular job with 40 hours a week and grown-up benefits. “I remember looking at the guy and saying, ‘No, man, that’s not why I’m here.’” A pivotal moment came soon after, while he was eating a slice of pizza on his lunch break. He spotted an ad in the Long Island Newsday for a scholarship at Molloy College, which had recently added a music department. “It always bothered me that I didn’t finish college,” he says. “I walked over to the payphone, put in a quarter and called.” They scheduled him to audition on violin. He won a full scholarship and graduated in 1984 with a degree in violin performance.

Within a month and a half of graduating, he found a job with Kolstein’s, a well-respected business that repaired and restored string instruments. Ed “did a lot of repair work,” much of it for musicians with household names. He met Percy Heath and George Duvivier, who played for jazz greats Coleman Hawkins and Sy Oliver, as well as more widely known stars such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Lena Horne. Beverly Peer, who played bass for such stars as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis and Bobby Short, was a customer. “He’d come over and stick a couple of bucks in [your] shirt pocket and say ‘Get yourself something nice for lunch.’ All these cool old guys would come in there. So I’ve always kept in touch with the Kolsteins.”

Still, Ed wanted to make violins. His friend Joe Tripodi, whose place Ed had taken at Kolstein’s when Joe left to open his own business, hosted quartet parties in his home once a week, where he and his friends got together to play Beethoven and Mozart. Joe had trained at the Cremona International School of Violin Making in Italy, where 17th-century master Antonio Stradivari had made violins; he was steeped in the Italian method. Around 1984 he offered Ed a job he couldn’t refuse – it was, said Ed, “a super-great opportunity for me to learn. Joe taught me a whole lot of cool stuff.” (Note the typical Ed Maday understatement.)

One of Joe Tripodi’s friends, Stan Schmidt, was a Chicago-based painting conservator. Because his clients were museums, he was seriously interested in original pigments used in the 17th and 18th centuries. Stan’s enthusiasm spread to Ed and Joe, who began to research historic Italian varnishes. Ed quoted a widespread belief to underscore the importance of finishes in string instrument making: “The varnish is the secret of the sound.” Stan showed them how to precipitate pigments and make varnishes as an artist would, rather than using methods common among furniture makers. Historically, Ed pointed out, varnish makers were a separate guild from violin makers. Thanks in good part to Stan’s encouragement, Ed’s varnish today is as historically accurate as possible.

“Joe was very anti-capitalist” in those days, Ed said. “He wanted everyone to be treated fairly. When repair work came in, he’d ask, ‘Who wants the job?’” Joe might take 10 percent of the cost of the job, but the rest went to the person who did the work. Ed appreciates the respect for workers inherent in this m.o. but said “it didn’t really work out. Joe wasn’t making any money, and nobody else was [either].”

Ed left Joe’s shop in 1990 and went to work at his childhood home. He’d always kept a work area there, routinely putting in 20-30 hours a week after his regular job. (He’s had his bench, a gift from a neighbor, since he was 12 or 13, and still uses it for carving.) He expanded the shop, and when his parents moved out in 1997, he and Janet bought the place and moved in. “Now,” he said, “the whole house is stuffed up with instruments and wood” – not so surprising when you consider Janet’s a cellist who gives lessons in their home. A devoted instructor, she teaches well into the evenings – from 2:30 in the afternoon to 9:30 or 10 at night in the school season. With the pandemic, however, “everything’s done through Zoom,” said Ed. “It makes it hard, because some of the younger ones can’t physically manage their cellos yet.”

Despite the pandemic, Ed’s business is thriving. He has six instruments on order after the double bass that’s currently on his bench; his customer has been talking for three years about hiring Ed to make the instrument. “All the musicians I know, they’re out of work. They’re taking on any odd jobs they can find to make money. Some of the greatest musicians. Around here, in New York, they have no work. The ones that would work in clubs, bars, little venues, that’s all out the window. [There’s] minimal work here and there, but not enough to make a living.” For college students who hope to make a living playing music in orchestras, hopes have dwindled. “It’s kind of depressing,” he said. “It’s not good for the music.”

As for that stash of catalpa from his beloved childhood tree, he says, “I have a lot of it. I don’t think I’ll ever get through it all, ’cause I’m 63 now.” Whether Ed uses it up or not, the playground catalpa lives on in the music brought to life through the instruments he makes.

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” and “Kitchen Think”

Finally, here is one of my favorite cello performances of all time, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUgdbqt2ON0″>Jacqueline du Pré performing the first movement of Elgar’s Cello Concerto

From the vantage point of 2020, it’s jarring to recall a time before you could Google the length of a human colon while taking a bathroom break, share shots via Zoom in real time with friends in another hemisphere or ask Siri for the latest update on the Kardashians. (Then again, why would you want to do any of these?) Has Facebook really been around for just 16 years? Instagram no more than a decade? In fact, the internet itself only became publicly available in 1991.

In the primitive age that preceded this era of often-superficial connection, woodworkers and their fellow artisans had other ways to communicate and show their work to potential buyers. Some published paper catalogs sent to thousands of prospective customers by U.S. Mail. Some bought ads in newspapers and magazines where they might also be lucky enough to have their products featured. Others displayed their work in what we now call brick-and-mortar galleries, in exchange for a cut of the price – often as much as 40 percent. But one of the most affordable ways to show and sell work was at art fairs and craft shows.

After a strong start to 2020, shows, conferences and in-person performances of all kinds have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, demanding that those whose livelihoods depend on such events find new ways of teaching, entertaining and selling their wares. Given how challenging such pivots can be, Vicki and Lance Munn have found a silver lining of sorts in the timing of their unexpected retirement in late 2019. For 40 years, they’d supported themselves by making furnishings, from Japanese-style vases, wood-framed mirrors and wall-hung artwork to freestanding cabinets, desks and tables, all of which they sold at shows throughout the Midwest and on the East coast.

Lance and Vicki met in 1969. Lance, who’d been drafted, was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, where Vicki had a job in the post exchange. Lance was lucky to avoid deployment to Vietnam; he served in the States as a member of the military police. “The Army made him grow up,” says Vicki. “All of a sudden you’re not special. You get your head shaved, you wear a uniform. You’re only what you are inside, not the projected image others see.”

After completing his term, Lance moved home to Indianapolis to live and work with his parents, who were in the restaurant business. Vicki earned a degree in political science at Kansas State University-Manhattan while continuing to work part-time at the post exchange. She lived in her employer’s basement. (“At the time, I didn’t realize I was poor,” she says of the arrangement.) She graduated in 1971, packed up her belongings in cardboard boxes, shipped them to Indianapolis on a Greyhound Bus and took a plane to join Lance. Shortly after, they were married.

At first they each worked two jobs, a logistical feat considering that they shared a car – and it was more than 20 years old. Lance returned to college while working part-time and graduated with a degree in biological science from Purdue University. Meanwhile, Vicki worked her way up to office manager in her job at an electrical supply office. When she asked for a raise in keeping with her increased responsibilities, her employer told her the job was only worth the $100 a week she was already getting – not much on which to build a future. With no prospect of advancement, she gave her notice. That would be her last regular job until 2020.

While renting a house on the western outskirts of Indianapolis, they decided to put in a garden. They saved up for a Troy-Bilt tiller; once they’d bought it, they realized they owned a potentially valuable asset, so they ran a classified ad for tilling services in the local paper. Business took off, and before long they needed a pickup truck to move the tiller. “Now we’re in the hauling business,” Vicki remembers thinking. They added moving services to their repertoire and trucked junk to the recycling center for people who were clearing out garages. When winter brought a major ice storm that downed trees, blocking streets and closing the city, they invested in a chainsaw and worked to clear limbs.

Around this time a friend who’d moved to Hawaii sent them a gift of some puka-shell necklaces. Where others saw a cool bit of jewelry made of natural objects, Vicki and Lance saw opportunity: They invested in some shells and made their own necklaces to sell at art fairs. At one show they spotted some wooden planters backed with mirrors – another item Vicki suggested Lance could make. “We had tools,” she says, “because we did everything for ourselves.” The planters sold even better than the jewelry. That was their start in wood.

Their son, Peter Brian, was born in 1977, followed by their daughter, Kelly, two years later. It was time to look for a piece of property to make their own. They searched in Brown County, an area some 60 miles southeast of Indianapolis known for its forested hills and history as a home to artists since the early 20^th century, but found nothing affordable. They looked on the outskirts of Bloomington, home to the flagship campus of Indiana University, which draws students and faculty members from around the world. Also unaffordable. From there they set their sights farther to the south and west, in Greene County, where for $40,000 they found a property of 50 acres “with an old farmhouse at the top of a hill and a garage that stood at a slant.”  The owner was willing to sell on contract, which clinched the deal. They made the down payment in cash, because that was how people paid for purchases at art shows in the ’70s. “I think they thought we were drug dealers,” Vicki laughs. “We had no business sense at all.” It was 1979. Vicki was 29, Lance 31.

A major show in Indianapolis’s Broadripple neighborhood was coming up in May. They plugged their tools into an outlet in an old shed on their new property and worked in the yard to prepare. Shortly after, they had a 40’ x 40’ pole barn built for a shop. They still weren’t making furniture, but looking back, it’s clear they were headed in that direction as they ventured into simple wooden table bases topped with Italian tile. They learned about wood movement from their mistakes; before long they had to decide between making a fast buck and doing things right. “We read Tage Frid, we read Fine Woodworking, we read books,” Vicki says. “We never considered ourselves artists; we wanted to be the best craftsmen we could.” They named their business Viclan Designs.

Early on, thinking that a business should have employees, they hired a few to work in the shop. Before long they concluded they were chasing their tails. Having employees proved exhausting; as Vicki says, “it was like I’d gone through five divorces and 10 DUIs without ever having had any of them myself.” On top of that, Vicki and Lance were gone all the time; it looked like their children were going to be raised by a babysitter. It made more sense to let the employees go and do everything themselves.

They added more shows every year, packing up their booth and stock for sale and driving – first, to Ann Arbor, Louisville, Cincinnati and Toledo, in addition to selling at shows closer to home in Broadripple and at Bloomington’s Fourth Street Festival, then increasingly far afield. Things improved. “Lance and I together are such a good team,” Vicki says. “People would buy stuff from us because they liked us. People want to meet the artists. The internet is not the same as talking to the artists and touching things before you buy them.” When Peter was a baby, she put him in a crib under one of the tables in the booth, but having two small children at a show was too much, so Lance did some of the shows by himself while Vicki and the kids stayed home.

As anyone who has tried to make a living by doing art and craft shows can attest, their schedule was grueling, their income totally undependable. “Shows are fickle,” as Vicki puts it. They always worked hard, but there were years when they made no money beyond basic expenses.

Building the Business

They made improvements to the shop as they were able, starting with a loft for storage, then adding another 600 square feet at the back. Later they added 300 square feet more for lumber storage. In 1990 they built a new house to replace the dilapidated farmhouse. They’d started with antique equipment – a chain-fed rip saw from the 1930s, a ’40s overhead router – driving to auctions and buying what they could afford. Their first piece of new equipment was a wide-belt sander they purchased in the mid-1980s; they took out a loan to pay the $10,000 cost. For their anniversary around 2014, they bought each other a Powermatic band saw – an unusual anniversary gift, but they enjoyed buying things for the business because it made their lives easier.

The more they learned, the more sophisticated their work became and their sales improved. Vicki traveled to Japan in 2000; Peter’s girlfriend, a Japanese-American, was teaching English there and invited her to visit. “It was my 50^th birthday present,” she explains, adding that Lance took the opportunity to go fly fishing in New Zealand. During her month in Japan, Vicki happened on a thousand-year-old pagoda. “It was red,” she exclaims, which prompted her to wonder “Why can’t we do red?” They started to experiment with aniline dyes.

Experience had taught them the importance of having smaller, affordable pieces to sell at shows. “If you have an item that sells, that gives you the freedom to make other things that you want to.” For a while they made Craftsman-style picture frames. Vicki was drawn to the Japanese art of floral arranging called ikebana. Ikebana vessels became one of their business staples; she made them until she was sick of them, then kept on making more. She cut out the basic shape at the band saw, then moved to the edge sander. “I’d put on my headphones and step up to the edge sander and go “fifty dollars, fifty dollars, fifty dollars. I know a lot of our artist friends would say ‘how can you do that?’ And I’d say ‘it pays our phone, it pays our gas…’ When you’re selling something for $50 it’s an easier sale then something for $5,000. Pretty soon, as we got into the better shows, we could [afford to] make cabinets.”

As time went by, the Munns found they could sell more substantial pieces. “Mostly we looked at ourselves and thought ‘how can anybody pay that?’ But as [we did] the better shows, we always seemed to pick up someone who would buy more than one piece, and then they’d call and [ask for custom work]. We made things for people that they couldn’t find. Often in later years we would sell more by order than from the booth.”

Among the unusual features of their work are the wooden pulls they made for doors and drawers.

Lance had made a pull like those on the olive-tiger maple cabinet (in the image with the band saw) for some doors in their house. “I always loved them,” Vicki says. “At first when we got into the cabinets, we offered two types of pulls…smooth and gnarly.” She notes that they “would invariably have the wrong pull on the cabinet the customer wanted in the booth,” a situation that will be familiar to most of those who build to order. “Finally, gnarly won out. [Making those was] a very dirty job on the bullnose of our edge sander. Lance did an excellent job of making matched sets of pulls. I was never able to get two the same.”

Business & Aging

Today Vicki is 70, Lance 72. For most of their years in business, Viclan Designs was organized as a sole proprietorship, but when Lance was old enough to qualify for Social Security, their accountant advised them to incorporate so that their joint income wouldn’t disqualify them for the Social Security they were due.

When I asked about economic downturns such as the Great Recession, which devastated many furniture makers, Vicki said they’ve always come through relatively unscathed. Some of their artist friends maintained that Vicki and Lance charged too little for their work, but as Vicki says, “We always felt we need to make a living at this,” so they made sure they had pieces that were all but guaranteed to sell.

Having started with so little, they spent 40 years investing in their shop and business and were rewarded not just with higher income, but opportunities to grow as designers and craftspersons. With loyal customers who returned yearly to buy from them at shows around the Midwest and on the East coast, in addition to commissioning custom work, they were enjoying a successful season in 2019 and building up stock for the upcoming Fourth Street Festival – Vicki was a longstanding member of the show’s organizing committee.

In the small hours of August 5^th, they awoke to the sound of someone banging on the front door. “We have no neighbors,” Vicki remarks, recalling the shock. It was the sheriff, asking “Does anybody live in that building?” He was pointing to their shop.

“The roof was already [falling] in,” Vicki says. A stranger who happened to be passing on the road a half-mile away had spotted the flames and called 911. By then it was too late – the building, the tools, the lumber, the completed pieces ready for the upcoming show and their two shop cats – all gone.

The shock was devastating. They wracked their minds, trying to figure out what had happened. It was August; the woodstove had been cold for months. Nor had they been staining, she was relieved to realize. In their early days, when they worked in the garage at a rented house, they used Danish oil; after working late one night they’d dumped the rags in their garden cart and pushed it out on the driveway. The only thing left of the cart the next morning was the wheels. After that, they’d always been extremely careful with finishes, storing rags in a firmly shut can and finishes in a metal safety cabinet. An inspector suspected the fire had started in the electrical wiring.

Although they’d insured the shop in their early years, the cost of coverage had gone through the roof. First it was $4,000 a year, then $5,000. Pretty soon the premium had increased to $10,000, partly because they heated with wood and used solvent-based finishes, partly because their location was so remote and the local fire department was all-volunteer. They’d decided they would just have to be careful.

Friends organized a fundraiser. “That saved us,” says Vicki. “It enabled us to pay off our bills. We had just gotten lumber on Friday, a delivery of cherry, and the fire was Sunday.” Not only did they still have to pay for that lumber; they also had to return deposits to customers who had commissioned pieces to pick up at upcoming shows – Cherry Creek (in Colorado) and Ann Arbor (in Michigan). “We had some customers who wouldn’t even take their deposits back,” she says, her voice breaking. (Among them were the patrons for whom Vicki and Lance made the olive-tiger maple cabinet in the photo of the band saw.) “It makes you feel good about yourself and thankful for other people.”

“We lost our cats, our bicycles, our kayaks. And all of the little things. We paid off our bills, returned our deposits, and got a grant from CERF (the Craft Emergency Relief Fund) and bought tools.” The maximum grant available through CERF is $3,000. “To us it was $3,000-worth of tools. We didn’t have that money.” This time, they bought smaller tools – a Festool sander, a Domino mortiser, a track saw – that enable them to work on projects around the house, but not the kind of furniture they used to make.

Their daughter offered Vicki a part-time job in her medical office to help her parents make ends meet. They also receive some Social Security income. “We’re not doing anything great, but we’re happy. We’re pleased to have more time for our granddaughter, Piper,” Vicki says, adding “we miss the shop.”

After decades of not having a dog because they were on the road for so much of each year, they adopted a couple of Labrador puppies, Kiki and Tuck, in July.

They took down their website, because most of their inventory was destroyed. “We were in shock for a long time. Then came COVID. But life is getting more normal. If it weren’t for the fire, we’d still be working in the shop…. We have just a few things left that we are showing at By Hand Gallery in Bloomington. Basically, we are starting a new life in our seventies.” 

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Kitchen Think” and “Making Things Work”

Editor’s Note: Apologies if you received this post twice. We had some technical problems with this entry (our fault and not Nancy’s).

In her profile on the Brigham and Women’s residency alumni web page, Dr. Ouida Vincent had some fun with the pro forma question “DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE MEMORY FROM RESIDENCY?”

“Spending the night out with co-residents at the ’70s disco,” she answered, punctuating her response with a single word: “Polyester.”

This disarming response will come as no surprise to those who know Ouida, whether in person or from Instagram, where her warmth, humor and sense of adventure are on regular display. “Headed to Handworks by way of MSP,” she wrote in May 2017. “Please say hello… I’ll be the BWWDL” – as she’d previously described herself, the “BLACK WOMAN WITH DREAD LOCKS” – because (let’s be real) how many Black women (or men) with dreads would you typically expect see at a gathering of hand-tool woodworkers in rural Iowa?

When we spoke, on a crisp Saturday morning this fall, she’d just returned from delivering sourdough cinnamon rolls to her mother. It was a short walk up the hill by her house; she was still in her pajamas, under a Carhartt jacket.

Along with thousands of others, Ouida (pronounced WEE-da) took up sourdough bread baking in April, when the pandemic prompted so many to plunge themselves into baking that stores could not keep yeast on the shelves. It wasn’t her first experience with baking; at Cornell she did a medical school rotation on the Navajo Reservation in 1989, staying with a family who baked wholewheat bread or cookies every day. Inspired by their example, she took up baking herself when she returned to med school. Although her first few loaves were “like hubcaps,” she kept at it and quickly improved. She baked every weekend until her professional work became too demanding.

Ouida approaches sourdough baking with the analytical rigor of a scientist and the enthusiasm of one who bakes for love, not money. Her Instagram feed is full of boules and batards – some whole, some sliced in half to reveal herbs, olives or “crumb.” An early September entry that shows the kind of springy texture I can only dream of producing reads like notes on an undergraduate’s experiment:

“[W]hen I want to check oven spring, I look at how the holes are oriented and if the entire loaf from bottom to top was involved in ‘spring.’ You can get three patterns[:] no spring (dense loaf) that may or may not have risen any, spring primarily on the outside of the loaf with a dense (yet hopefully done) interior and spring that involves the whole loaf. The holes will be elongated in the direction of spring and will glisten.”

She brings the same studious curiosity to woodworking. Ouida sees a piece of furniture she likes and figures out how to build it. Her office and home are furnished with pieces of her own making. And when she decided a proofing box would be a boon to her sourdough baking, she puzzled out what it would take to fabricate one.

These days, Ouida, whose day job is clinical director of a hospital on the Navajo Reservation, is “in a mask 10 hours a day, five days a week.” Anyone who pays attention to national events will be aware that Native Americans have been affected terribly by Covid-19. Ouida adds, “Even when there is a vaccine, I will wear my mask (even after getting the vaccine). This is about public health.”

Ouida was born in Nashville, Tenn., the fourth of five children. When her mother and father married, her father brought three from a previous marriage and her mother brought her; they had one son together. Her name is common in the South. “My mother told me that she heard the name and wanted me to be remembered, so she gave me the name.” Then comes the zinger: “You can imagine what kids and substitute teachers did with [it].”  

She can’t remember a time when she wasn’t fascinated by making things and figuring out how to fix them. Her older brother David was “a real Mr. Fix It” from the start, Ouida says; she followed him around and learned from his example.

After her parents split when Ouida was 10, her mother moved Ouida and her younger brother from one place to another, wherever she could find work, usually in college financial aid offices. Ouida would have signed up for shop class in school, but as a girl born in 1963 she wasn’t allowed to. That changed when her family moved to Virginia Beach, Va., in 1976; she enrolled in shop class and small engine repair. She and her classmates learned to strip down and rebuild two-stroke and four-stroke engines, restoring them to working order; they also had to frame the corner of a house, complete with functioning plumbing and electrical service.  

When they moved to Alabama in 1979, Ouida found herself barred from shop class once again. Undeterred, she decided to go ahead and build things on her own, though she found that was more easily said than done, with few tools and no shop. While working on a body for an electric guitar she asked the shop teacher at school if she could use the band saw. He asked her to prove she knew how – a challenge she met in short order. He gave her permission to use the shop facilities when classes weren’t in session. She’s been building ever since.

Given her facility for learning new skills and diagnosing problems, it’s not terribly surprising that Ouida, who excelled academically, found her way into medicine. She graduated from Cornell Medical College in 1990 at the age of 27, then did a residency at Brigham and Women’s in Boston. “My uncle was an Ob/Gyn. It was really the first medical career I was exposed to. I was briefly attracted to general surgery, but the general surgeons I was exposed to seemed not to have personal lives. I was ultimately attracted to the combination of surgery and diagnostic medicine that obstetrics and gynecology offers.”

She originally hoped to do a medical student rotation in Alaska, but when she inquired, she learned that all rotations there were filled – she would have had to apply at least a year in advance, rather than a few months ahead of the starting date. “When I walked in to talk with one of our deans, she was opening a letter from alumni who had taken jobs in Shiprock, N.M. They had space for students, so I went. The year was 1989. I fell in love with the medical community and knew I wanted to return,” though she adds “I didn’t plan on making a career out of it.” 

In 1998 she moved to Gallup, N.M., and became Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology. When her real estate agent heard about her interest in woodworking, she mentioned there were classes at the local branch of the University of New Mexico. Ouida signed up for a course in cabinetmaking. The college had a well-equipped machine shop, but no hand tools. As she deepened her experience of working with machines, she learned another valuable lesson – “the frustration of power tools!” Even though the college had a full-time staff person charged with repair and maintenance, “there was always a machine down.”

Ouida’s work responsibilities grew, leaving her with less time for classes, yet she continued to pack in as much woodworking as she could. One of her early projects was an 8’-high x 3’-wide media cabinet. Another was a hutch based on an article in Fine Woodworking; it’s in her office today.

In 2006 she bought a property in Colorado, attracted in part by a dilapidated barn on the site. “This is my woodshop,” she remembers thinking when she first saw it. Termites and rain had done their worst; contractors she called for estimates to rehabilitate the structure said it wasn’t worth saving, that she should build something new. “But I wanted to work in a barn,” she says. Eventually she found a contractor who was willing to fix it up for her.

Ouida slowly taught herself to use hand tools. She learned a lot from Chris Schwarz’s videos on hand tool basics and watched the Popular Woodworking series “I Can Do That.” She made a desk of ambrosia maple and cherry for a friend; the hand-cut dovetails were “so gappy that I made the gaps the same size and backfilled them with filler of a different color.” She persevered and improved. The same went for sharpening. “The first time I sharpened a plane blade it took six hours,” she says. But she found the more she worked in hardwoods, the greater her appreciation of the need for sharpening and the better at it she became. In the end, she says, “the wood became my best teacher.”

Around 2011 she made some shop stools based on a video by Mike Siemsen. When “The Anarchist’s Design Book” was published, she built one project after another from it – a boarded bookcase, staked desk (now in her office), six-board chest and staked chair. “I would have made more from that book,” she says, “had Peter Follansbee not published his book and completely derailed my life! I’ve literally done nothing but carve since 2019.”

Ouida is well aware of the sacrifices her mother made as a single parent. She also deeply appreciates her maternal grandmother’s support, calling her “a constant figure in my life until she passed away in 2001.” She cites one incident in particular, which culminated in the United States Supreme Court case NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, to illustrate the impression her grandmother Dolly made.

Dolly Thompson was from Mississippi and had a ninth-grade education. “It was in the Jim Crow South,” Ouida points out by way of context. Even though the population of Claiborne County, where they lived, was majority Black, all the political seats were held by White people. Her grandparents owned a funeral home and were solidly middle-class. But when they traveled cross-country to attend mortuary conventions, they always had to think about where they’d be allowed to stay at night.

It was common in that time and place for Black people to be called names (if their presence was even acknowledged) and forbidden to use public restrooms or sit at lunch counters. Tired of being treated as second-class citizens when they were upstanding members of the community, Ouida’s grandmother (her grandfather died in 1962) and many of her fellow community members, working with a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), decided to “talk with their dollars.” They organized a boycott of White-owned businesses, setting up a supply house of their own called Our Mart to keep fellow citizens supplied with hardware, food, clothes and other everyday needs. They funded the project by selling shares.

Several of the White-owned businesses joined forces and sued for damages – in a majority-Black county, their businesses couldn’t survive without the now-missing income. When the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in the White businesses’ favor, Ouida’s grandmother and her fellow boycotters took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the NAACP.

The whole thing, she notes, came about “simply because that group of people wanted better treatment.” Although this was her grandparents’ experience, Ouida understands it’s not that far removed from our own time — she belongs to the first generation to grow up outside of Jim Crow. And it’s easy to see how Ouida, with these determined and hardworking role models, became the kind of woodworker who doesn’t flinch at challenges, but sticks at a task until she has mastered it, having lots of fun along the way.

Summing up our conversation, she reflects that “the reason I’ve continued doing [woodworking] is the stimulation it provides.” She trained as a surgeon, but her work for the past several years has been in administration. She misses the contact with tools and materials. Bread making helps fill the gap; woodworking goes even further. “Now I get to hold instruments in my hand that use fine motor skills., similar to using a scalpel,” she adds. No wonder she can’t stop carving.

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Kitchen Think” and “Making Things Work“

Throw a spanner in the works, and even the smoothest-running machinery will come to a stop. Most of the time you can diagnose the problem, make a quick repair and get back to business with minimal delay.

But when the spanner takes the form of a pandemic, not so much. You can moan and groan, lament lost income and opportunities, retreat into a funk. If you’re lucky, you may reach a point where you recognize yourself as weirdly liberated from the everyday grind and be open to new directions.

This is how I found Australian woodworker Bern Chandley when we spoke at the end of September. Ordinarily a prolific and highly focused designer-builder of contemporary chairs, Bern, based in Melbourne, has spent much of his time over the past few months laboring over a single piece of furniture: a small settee in blackwood. “I’ve had very limited time in the workshop this year,” he says. With schools closed, he has been helping his wife, Alice, home-school their 9-year-old son, Flannery. Since March, Bern has had just two or three short days a week to work in the shop; a curfew has kept him from staying into the night.

The settee is a commission, the form and joinery – Nakashima meets Wegner, with staked legs (both curved and tapered), steam-bent spindles, a hand-scooped seat and stretchers that swoop up to support the arms – a new paradigm in the Chandley repertoire. There are more jigs than usual, as well as more machines, including a PantoRouter. There’s not a single right angle. Even though he’s getting paid well for the piece, the pay won’t cover the investment required to puzzle out the making. “But because it’s a new design,” he reasons, “it’s going to give me a whole lot of other chairs.” The sculptural piece of seating will become a mainstay of his build-to-order portfolio, so he’s putting in the work to make all of the processes readily repeatable. “I want them all down pat,” he says, because efficient production is important to how he makes his living.

Family & Starting Out

In July Bern turned 50. “Aging has never been something that has particularly preoccupied my thoughts,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “I’ve always felt birthdays were a good excuse to draw in close the ones you love and that the warmth of their returned love is a reflection of the happiness I’ve achieved in life. I don’t care how old I am each time I feel it, just that I’m feeling it. It is life affirming.

“Today as I turn 50, in this time of physical isolation, I count myself incredibly lucky to spend the day on remote learning with my son Flann Brian Chandley, Grandson to Brian Frederick Chandley, my beautiful Dad, who we lost just a little more th[a]n 6 months ago today. Every time I think of him I’m flooded with longing to see him and speak with him. We miss him an enormous amount. He was and is, along with Mum, my greatest inspiration to be as good a person as I can be. As I look at my son, as he looks at me, as we talk to each other I’m aware of how lucky I am to have had such brilliant role models. Dad’s in my thoughts daily but I feel him especially close today.”

You can chart how important Bern’s family is to him in his voice. Nothing in our conversation makes him more animated than the stories he tells about family members, each anecdote filled with detail and color. Most of his ancestors came to Australia from Ireland. Some arrived against their will, he notes, referring to the British practice of exporting convicts to penal colonies in the late 18^th century. Others came as farmers looking for opportunity. Farming remained central to the family for generations. Bern’s father, Brian, was one of nine children born on a farm near the port city of Geelong (pronounced “Ja-long”) in the state of Victoria, about 50 miles southwest of the capital, Melbourne.

The family lost the farm during the Great Depression and had to move into Geelong to look for employment. His paternal grandfather, Bill Chandley, went to work at a factory. Bern has fond memories of Bill, who was “already quite on in years” by the time Bern came along. Bill had one leg that was longer than the other, due to a bout of polio he suffered as a child. The family didn’t own a car, so he got around by bus. “He knew all the bus drivers in Geelong by their first name. He rode on a bus with a little airline bag and his rollie (handrolled) cigarettes. He was a very warm, lovely fellow,” Bern remembers, then adds in the kind of detail especially important to a child: “My nana” – her name was Nellie – “made a sponge cake for everyone’s birthday.”

Bern’s mother was a nurse-midwife, his dad a diesel mechanic fitter and turner. “You call them engineers over there,” he offers, “like toolmaking – working with heavy machinery.” Geelong being a port town, many businesses were involved with shipping.

In 1986, at the age of 16, Bern left school to start an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner. “I’m from a big working-class family,” he says. “I’ve got a million cousins who are all tradesmen. I’m one of four kids; my older brother was the first in our extended family to go to university.”

It was meant to be a four-year apprenticeship, with time alternating between coursework at trade school and work for a boss who ran a house framing business. At school Bern studied building methodology – stairs, joinery techniques and traditional handwork with dovetails and mortise and tenons – not because there was a market for that kind of work (there wasn’t), but because the curriculum hadn’t been updated in years, for which he gives thanks. On the job, they framed houses; Bern has vivid memories of building pitched roofs in eucalyptus, “big, tall, straight-grain trees used in construction.” The roofs would then be topped with weatherproof corrugated steel. That way of roofing is long gone, he says; these days builders simply install trusses.

Bern finished his apprenticeship early, at the age of 19. Typically an apprentice would stay on with the boss who’d sponsored the training, but these two didn’t get along. “He was a bit of a hammer thrower,” Bern says – “a good carpenter, but always the most hated person on the site. The day I finished my apprenticeship, I quit-slash-he fired me. We had a big fight on the site.”

After a few more carpentry jobs he was ready to leave Geelong. His older sister was training to be a nurse in Melbourne, so he moved there. For two years he worked as a hospital orderly, an experience he found fascinating. “I was suddenly confronted with life and death. I was still a silly young bloke. I had to come to terms with people dying on a regular basis…and form an understanding of it…. Nurses are amazing. They’ve just got to carry on, no matter what.” He worked in the emergency room. “You’re on the front line,” he says. “There are some horrific injuries. People were thrashing around, semi-conscious, and you had to hold them down.” Part of his job was to help the nurses wrap cadavers in plastic and take them to the mortuary. “It knocked the immaturity out of me, which I’m very thankful for.”

In his 20s he did some traveling around Europe. On his return, he found his way into building sets for television, theater and American movies that were being filmed in Melbourne. Each gig lasted almost a year. One of these productions was set in the Second World War; when the crew couldn’t find a specific piece of period-authentic furniture, they brought him a picture and he figured out how to make it. “I was just knocking the [props] out, out of MDF and pine,” he says; the painters on the set “were magicians” who made the stuff look like it was built of mahogany.

“The thing with set building is, it’s very good for problem solving. The designers are notorious for giving you the easy measurements” while leaving the challenging stuff involved in curves and angles for the set builders to work out. “Depending on the job, there could be nary a right angle. ‘Star Wars’ had the most curves and angles. That’s space ships for you!” He points out that this was before CNC routers, so you couldn’t just pop what values you had into a computer. “You had to work it out yourself. You had to be very inventive.”

He’d always had an interest in furniture, so Bern filled the time between jobs with furniture commissions, taking on “anything and everything” – tables, cabinets, built-ins, carpentry jobs. He realized that making furniture was what he really wanted to do and started his own business, getting work by word of mouth. Without a shop, he built things in his backyard, or in the client’s. “I got it done,” he says. He persevered and learned from his mistakes.

Between 2005 and 2016 he shared space in group shops, a good way to build up a business when you don’t have the capital to tool up on your own. Needless to say, it could be trying; people had different priorities and interests. The others were building furniture part-time, whereas he was running a business. Eventually he concluded he needed a space of his own.

He got to know his wife, Alice Byrne, as a friend in 2006. It was summer, and Bern was in Paris. Alice happened to be there, too; her boyfriend, Alan, had been awarded a traveling scholarship. An oil painter, she’d been in Paris seven years before as the scholarship’s inaugural winner. She and Bern spent some time together visiting galleries. “I was smitten,” he says, “in the sense of ‘I’ve really got to meet a girl like Alice.’” After about a week, Bern went on his way, not knowing whether he’d ever see her again.

But shortly after he got home to Melbourne, Alice’s brother George called with news that Alice was back. Alan wasn’t with her; he had returned to Sydney. Soon after, Bern and Alice went on a first date, a pub meal and dancing – with George. They’ve been together ever since, and were married in 2009.

Alice put her painting aside when she got pregnant, concerned about the health risks of solvents. After Flannery was born, in 2011, Bern was the family’s main breadwinner. Alice went back to work outside the home part-time when Flann was 2; she manages an art supply shop that does both retail and wholesale work, along with specialty painting services such as framing and stretching canvas. Although she still has a studio space, she has largely put that work aside while raising Flann.

The Move to Chairs

Like many of us, Bern started out in “bespoke” (custom) work. In retrospect, he sees custom work as “a bit of a trap you can fall into. That’s the best way to burn yourself; if you haven’t built something before, you’re not ever going to get paid enough to sort out all the preliminary stuff before you make it. But it’s the best way to learn a lot.”

He stuck with custom work until about 2010, building tables, cabinets, whatever a client might want, while working part-time for a fellow woodworker, Alastair Boell, who had a school, the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking. Alastair was eager to have Bern teach, but Bern had always hated public speaking. “It kind of terrified me.” He gave it a try. He’s glad he did. When Alastair invited Peter Galbert to teach a class on North American Windsor chairs, Bern assisted and found himself smitten with the joinery. Pete, Bern says, is “egoless. Very comprehending, very inventive as a maker… a very inspiring teacher.” In fact, so inspiring “that from that moment all I wanted to do was make chairs.”

Pete encouraged Bern to visit the States and teach at his school in New Hampshire. They made it happen. He taught one class in 2018 and two in 2019 on a chair of his own design that he calls the “No. 14 Chair” – “after Thonet,” he laughs, “because I’m shit at naming things.”

He still makes other forms when he’s really keen on a particular piece, but chairs have become his livelihood. Here we return to the topic of efficiency. “You have to have your own product,” he believes; that way, you’ve got the jigs and processes in place. People order one (or 14!) of that thing “and you can just go straight to work, without thinking” – at least, in principle. He admits “that’s easier said than done.”

He now teaches chairmaking classes at his shop in Thomastown, an industrial area on the northern outskirts of Melbourne. With block walls and a concrete floor, it’s around 2,000 square feet in a gray brick building surrounded by old factories. Teaching has changed the nature of his business, injecting a welcome bit of variety. He keeps classes small, with no more than four students at a time, so that people with different skill levels can all keep up, and he tries to design each class so that students at any level of experience can get something from it.

Teaching has also proved a stabilizing influence in economic terms. “It’s more lucrative than general chairmaking,” he says. “It can afford you that little bit of extra time.” He’s come to regard a few teaching gigs through the year as “economic pillars” around which he can schedule the rest of his work and hopes the higher income from teaching will allow him more time to develop new designs. In Bern’s view, a good chair design combines durability, structural integrity and comfort. “I love designing chairs. Developing them is the most fun you can possibly have.”

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” and “Kitchen Think”

Interviewing furniture maker Michael Puryear feels a bit like listening in on a geography or sociology class delivered by a laid-back professor with the mellow voice of Richie Havens and a warm, easy laugh. When asked where he grew up, Michael starts further back than most, with the culture of slavery in the southern states – specifically, Virginia, which was home to many of his forebears.

“Those families in the tidewater area did not grow cotton,” he begins, differentiating the area’s history from the widespread stereotype. Slavery existed, for sure, but in varied forms, each tied to a particular region and the agricultural products that would thrive there. The primary crop in tidewater states was tobacco, grown on smaller farms with fewer slaves, many of whom lived in the same house as their masters. Sea island slavery was another form, this one off the coast of Georgia and North Carolina and based on the cultivation of rice and indigo, which these slaves’ ancestors had grown in Africa. Sea island slaves lived in villages they organized themselves and spoke Gullah, the language of their African heritage. Their owners were generally absentee, living in Charleston and Savannah; while there were overseers, the slaves were “pretty much left on their own to do the work.” Finally, there was Antebellum slavery, focused on the growing of cotton in the hot, wet climate of more central southern states with well-drained soils.

Why start with slavery? As Michael says in a quote on the Smithsonian website, he wants “to acknowledge and honor the contributions of African American slaves to this country. Like my own ancestry this heritage began before the founding of the United States. African Americans have fought with honor and loyalty in every war of our nation. They have significantly contributed economically, socially, culturally and politically to American culture.”

From the South, we jumped far to the North, with more eye-opening history. Although Michael’s father’s side of the family has its North American roots in the tidewater area, his father was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and grew up in Philadelphia. Michael explains the move. His paternal grandfather, Moses, was a Baptist minister in Africville, a major terminus of the Underground Railroad.

His paternal grandmother, Elma Clark, died as a consequence of giving birth to her second child, Ruth. Moses remarried and continued to live in Africville with his children; they were still living there on December 6, 1917, when a Norwegian steamship loaded with supplies for a World War I relief effort collided with a French vessel carrying munitions to France, killing almost 2,000 people and injuring some 9,000 others, most of them Halifax civilians. In addition, the blast caused a tsunami that demolished a nearby branch of the Mi’kmaq First Nation. The horror of the explosion was magnified as locals imagined it was the result of a bomb – this was, after all, during a war. Hospitals were overwhelmed by injured people, and even as would-be rescuers headed to the area from Canada and the United States, they found themselves unable to get through as a blizzard covered Halifax and its environs with more than a foot of snow. Michael says his father, Reginald, who was 9 at the time, recalled seeing dead bodies frozen on the ground.

How had I never heard about any of this? 

Michael’s grandfather moved to Toronto, where he died, likely of a heart attack, leaving Reginald and Ruth orphaned. The children were sent to live with an aunt in Pittsburgh. As a single mother who worked as a domestic, their aunt already had her hands full, so she arranged for them to attend a boarding school, St. Katharine Drexel School, outside of Philadelphia. Michael’s father went on to high school at the Saint Emma Military Academy in Virginia, and rose to the rank of captain. While there, his best friend introduced him to his sister, Martina Morse. And so began Michael’s immediate family.

The couple made their home in Washington, D.C., where Martina’s family goes back at least four generations. At a time when the highest level of employment an African-American could hope to attain was working for the Post Office or being a teacher, Michael says, “that’s what my parents did” – his father worked in the Post Office; his mother taught school, following a tradition on her side of the family.

Michael was born in 1944, the third of seven children. Early on, they lived in an apartment in the city’s southwest quadrant; the last two of his siblings were born after the family moved to a house on the city’s northeast side. “It was a very nice house,” he remembers – a detached house built in the 1920s with a gambrel roof, hardwood floors and unpainted chestnut trim. There was a garage under the front porch, and a basement, all in “a very nice neighborhood with big yards” around a park-like area that drew opossums and other wildlife. The family of nine lived with a single bathroom, which didn’t even strike them as worthy of notice, though Michael is now especially appreciative of the cooperation and mutual respect this must have required.

“When we moved there, we were the third Black family on the block; the other two were doctors. We were the first one with young kids. The neighborhood became predominantly Black with white flight. When we sold the house, we sold to the first white people moving back to the neighborhood.”

From first through third grade, Michael attended a segregated public school. After the family moved, he switched to an integrated Catholic school, where he almost had to repeat fourth grade – other students were already taking notes, writing in cursive and doing multiplication and division, all of it foreign to him. He persevered and caught up.

His favorite subjects were social studies, geography and science. But some of his most valuable learning experiences came from his parents, who took the children to cultural institutions such as the Smithsonian. “That was an amazing place to go and see the diversity of what man does and the differences in cultures and the natural world. It was really a refuge for us. We would go on our own, when we were old enough, and just spend hours looking in the museum.” He and his siblings also got library cards as soon as they could print their names. “That was also a very important part of my education. Those things [museums and books] created a sense of curiosity, an awareness of something larger than ourselves.”

Their parents also took them camping. “We were the only African-Americans we came across that camped. It wasn’t really an issue, other than that awareness.” These family trips sparked a lifelong love of the outdoors. “One of the most important things to me, as a consequence of growing up, is my awareness and interest in nature,” he says. Later, with his wife, Sarah Wells, he camped, went backpacking, kayaked (they built their own boats), made long-distance trips by bicycle (once riding the entire length of Newfoundland from south to north) and did an extended trip in Europe. He has also been to the Arctic twice with his brother Martin.

He credits his upbringing with instilling a sense of individuality, but adds that “growing up in a close-knit family, we had a sense of responsibility to others, as well. My mother demanded of us a certain level of behavior that I think was even more so than parochial school. I feel fortunate in my growing up. I think my parents basically did an amazing job of giving us what we needed to survive.”

After high school, Michael studied at Howard University for two years but dropped out because he was “floundering.” He points out that he was paying his own way, “the deal my parents made with us. They paid for our grade and high school, and we were expected to pay for our college education. In those days, that was possible. Most of my siblings got scholarships. Howard University was subsidized, so its tuition was reasonable.

“I felt like I was wasting my time and money” he goes on. “I didn’t have a sense of direction, of what I should be doing. There was an expectation that we would all go to school, so when I dropped out, I felt like I was letting my parents down.” He was surprised and grateful when they accepted his decision and said he could live at home, but “’You have to pay a little rent,’” they told him. He got a job as a page at the D.C. Library. “It was seamless,” he says with appreciation. “My guilt was stronger than their reaction.”

Military Service

Two years later, in 1965, he was drafted into the Army. The Vietnam War was in full force. Because he did well on the entry tests, those in charge wanted him to become an officer. He had his own opinion. “I knew that would be a mistake; I knew as a draftee I would only have to be on active duty for two years, and if I had become an officer, I would have to have an active duty period of four years. That wasn’t a very good equation, as far as I was concerned. I was actually against the war. It was before there was a lot of counseling about being a resistor.” Besides the lack of guidance for those who might have sought conscientious objector status, he felt a sense of responsibility to his parents to fulfill his duty as a citizen.

During basic training there were so many draftees that instead of barracks, Michael’s unit slept in tents set up with six cots apiece on concrete pads left over from the World War II. “It was better,” he thinks, “because you were not under the constant eye of the sergeants.” He volunteered to be a truck driver, which got him out of kitchen patrol and guard duty.

He recognizes he was fortunate. He was trained as a medical lab tech doing biochemistry and toxicology in St. Louis, which kept him from going to Vietnam. The job wasn’t on a military base, and the hours, from 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m., with no weekends, were easy. All in all, he says, “it was very un-military!” He never even wore his dress uniform, because they wore whites at work.

After two years, he’d satisfied his military obligation and returned to his job at the library in Washington, D.C., where he ended up working for 11 years, advancing from page all the way to supervisor of circulation.

He traces his career in furniture making back to this job at the library. “I was always interested in design, in shape and form,” he explains. “I was teaching myself photography at that point; it was form that was very much part of the images I was making. I became aware of the Shakers and the Scandinavian furniture movement. There were books there! I started reading books about woodworking.”

At this point he brings the conversation back to the neighborhood where he grew up: it was populated by homeowners who worked office jobs for the government, but most of them worked on their own homes, and neighbors helped each other. When his father was painting their house, Mr. Morris around the corner pitched in with his ladder. Michael’s father had been trained as an electrician in high school, which made him a real neighborhood asset. “It didn’t seem like a big deal,” Michael remarks. “You figure out how to do [something], and you do it.” He and his older brother, Martin, agree that attitude gave them the confidence to pursue their interests in art and craft. The family had a workshop in the basement and access to a range of tools – chisels, planes, screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, most of them manufactured by Stanley, from the tool chest their mother had given their dad when they were first married. (“It was probably from Montogmery Ward,” Michael adds.) “I used to hang out with [Dad] and other neighbors who were handy. I was like their buddy. They would tolerate me. I would be like a go-fer. That was very important to who I have become.”

At some point while working at the library, Michael became aware of James Krenov and Wharton Esherick. “What they were doing was very interesting to me,” he remembers. Working at the library was “a great job, with nice people. But there was something about it that felt like, ‘I wanted to live what I call an integrated life.’”

He went back to college on the GI Bill and got a degree in anthropology.

Life in New York

“I’d been doing photography and had some recognition. Looking at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, there were Penn and Hiro and [other] well-known photographers.” When his girlfriend at the time transferred from American University to Pratt in New York, Michael thought he’d move to the city with her and become a photographer. He quickly found he “didn’t know anything about running a business. You can have all the skill you have, but if you don’t know how to run a business, you’ll fail.”

He had a landlord who was a plumber; the landlord happened to be working on a kitchen for a client. The brownstones in north Brooklyn were just starting to be converted from rental apartments back to single-family homes. Michael did the kitchen with his older brother. Word got around as people on the block saw him working; they asked if they could hire him. Then a friend who taught college and had invested in four brownstones asked Michael to renovate them all, which gave him significant experience.

But as much as he enjoyed the work, he says he found “being a contractor was much more about the headaches – the estimates, the crew, material procurement, subcontractors…” He decided to move away from general contracting to work of more pointed scope. Kitchen cabinets were a start; he’d built some before he even had a shop, in the basement of the house where he’d been living. But with kitchen cabinets, he said, “the only creative aspect of it was the facades.” (Ouch.)  

The first piece of furniture he made and sold was a desk for the friend with the brownstones. With time, he got more commissions and the work became increasingly interesting. “At a certain point,” he says, “I decided to call myself a furniture maker.” He ended up working as a furniture maker, sharing a shop with friends at Brooklyn Model Works, whose company did props and special effects for advertising and film. He learned on the job; with each succeeding piece, he’d add “one aspect that I had not done before” to develop new skills. Again, books were invaluable – Charles Hayward on joinery, “Cabinetmaking & Millwork” by John Feirer, the “Encyclopedia of Furniture.”

In 1976 he met photographer Sarah Wells, who would become his wife. Sarah and a friend moved into a loft on the Bowery; as Michael’s relationship with her developed, he moved in with them. A couple of creatives making a home together in a New York loft may sound enviable today, but Michael is quick to bring that fantasy back to reality: “It was pretty rough. We were heating with a wood stove.”  In 1980 they were bought out by the restaurant supply business across the street. “That was the first example I knew of a loft being turned back into a commercial space,” he laughs.

They moved to a loft in Chelsea that became home for the next 25 years. Sarah did photography for artists, collectors, galleries and museums. (Two examples of books illustrated by her photographs are “Against the Grain: Bentwood Furniture From the Collection of Fern & Manfred Steinfeld” and “The Newark Museum Collection of American Art Pottery”.) “People loved her,” he says. “I always considered that she was so unjudgmental. She didn’t have strong negative responses to people. So we would have community dinners – we had a tradition of having a Thanksgiving dinner in our loft where we would have 25 people. You couldn’t ask for a better life, in a way, other than that you had to always think about being evicted!”  

Michael flourished as a furniture maker. In the late 1980s he was accepted to the first show he ever applied to – at no less than the Smithsonian Museum of Craft. Encouraged, he started doing more shows – the Philadelphia Furniture Show, the Philadelphia Museum Craft Show and the Ace Craft Show in Evanston, Ill. – and kept at it for about 20 years. “These were considered the top shows,” he notes. “They were run by women’s committees – well-to-do women. So the clients, the people who came, were of that class.” But despite the well-heeled visitors, he found that he and his fellow furniture makers made surprisingly few sales at the shows. “Furniture has always been a tough sell,” he reasons. “People don’t buy it just on a whim, the price point and being a large item they had to have the space and need. All my furniture-maker friends, we talked about how it was the stepchild of the craft show, while people doing ceramics, fabric and jewelry sold well. People felt free to buy [those things].” Furniture, on the other hand, required a major investment – “more than most people would do at the drop of a hat.” Over this entire period, he thinks he sold two or three pieces off the floor at shows. Instead, he says, the value of doing shows “was more about talking to people,” checking back with them later and developing a reputation based on word of mouth once people had seen his work in person. His one effort at advertising  in magazines was in Metropolis early on; while that didn’t directly bring in any business, it brought him name recognition.

Meanwhile, he and Sarah shared a life rich in outdoor experiences. They took off a month every summer and went on a trip; they took a week-long back-country ski trip in the winter. “There was not a lot of money involved, but we used to be amazed how much we could do with so little money. It felt like the integrated life I wanted to live.” They backpacked in the Canadian Rockies and the deserts of the Southwest, kayaked the coast of Maine, skied New England and Canada, traveled up the Amazon while in Brazil and studied Tai Chi in China. They were paying $800 a month for their loft in Chelsea, and New York State Loft Law kept the monthly payment at that rate for 25 years.

After Sarah died of cancer in 1998, Michael stayed on in the loft. A new owner bought the building as an investment. More and more of those moving into lofts were not artists but well-paid professionals who coveted the spacious live-in studios in old industrial buildings. Michael understands. “They wanted some of that, too!” Unable to recoup his investment with rents so low, the building’s new owner asked Michael if he’d be willing to be bought out. Finally, in 2005, he was ready to move.

Making a New Life

At first he thought he’d find a place in Brooklyn, but rents were “skyrocketing,” while his income was not. His brother Martin had moved from Chicago to the Catskills; Michael was familiar with the area because he and Sarah had spent time there. He figured he could run his business there just as well as in the city. It took two years to find the right place, in part because he needed shop space, but he eventually found an 1870s farmhouse in Catskill Park. Though the property around the house had originally belonged to the farm, it had been subdivided and developed with houses.

The barn would serve fine as a shop, though it needed major renovation – insulation, electrical wiring, heating and more recently, plumbing. At 24′ x 36′ with 10′ ceilings, it’s smaller than his former shop in Brooklyn, which had about 1,000 square feet and (my heart!) a 15′ ceiling, “but it works,” he says; “I really like it.” And while Michael doesn’t have any domestic animals at present, he shares his piece of earth with bears, deer, foxes, woodchucks, rabbits and skunks, as well as lots of wild birds. “I’m pretty happy here. I have what I need. As you get older, you don’t really need a lot more.”

Michael’s work has slowed since the 2008 recession. For a few years he was part of a group called the Hudson Valley Furniture Makers, with young and older members. The group’s activities in person together “kind of fizzled,” though he says they’re all still friends.

He still gets jobs from time to time, such as a bench for Brockport College near Rochester. The college gave lumber from some trees on campus to six New York furniture makers who would design and build benches for the school. In 2015 he was a visiting artist at Australian National University in Canberra. And he would have participated in the 2020 World Wood Day event in Japan, had it not been cancelled, along with so much else, due to the pandemic.

On the other hand, as a furniture maker who lives and works alone, he says the pandemic hasn’t affected him as badly as it has many others. For fun he bikes, goes fly fishing or skis. He visits friends at a distance and thinks “there’s no point in railing against it, because you can’t do anything about it.”

He also continues to teach. His first teaching job was at Penland in 1995; he taught there again in ’96, ’97, 2002 and 2006. Since then, he has taught at Arrowmont, Anderson Ranch, Haystack, Parsons, the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship and SUNY Purchase. He’s now teaching a series of classes at the Hudson River Maritime Museum’s wooden boat school called “Foundations of Woodworking,” which covers understanding wood, the use and care of tools and joinery, and culminates in a project. “That’s a lot of fun, because it’s people who aren’t seeking a degree. They just want to learn stuff. I’ve always liked teaching, because, one, it clarifies your thinking about what you do, and the other thing is that I just like working with the people. They’re so grateful, so appreciative. And a lot of them are discovering things about themselves they didn’t know.” Classes have just started up again; he’ll start teaching in late September. On top of this, he teaches boatbuilding.

Boatbuilding? I asked. Isn’t that a specialized subject?

“There’s something about reading,” he chuckles. “I taught myself photography from reading. I taught myself woodworking from reading. It’s the curiosity that’s the important part.”

See a Smithsonian interview of Michael Puryear here.

See American Craft magazine’s article about Michael.

– Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work”