Category: Profiles

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”

“Highland Woodworking is unlike any other woodworking store I’ve ever been in on the whole planet,” Chris Schwarz told me, explaining why he thought the business and the family behind it would make an ideal contribution to this series. “It’s this wonderful, family, homey…” here he trailed off, as though in a happy dream, before resuming the narration of his reverie. “It’s just kind of overwhelming, like a candy store. If every town had a Highland, woodworking would be as popular as golf.”

Having seen pictures of the store’s façade, a drool-worthy architectural confection in century-old brick, a clay tile roof overhang supported by curly corbels, tall divided-light windows spanning nearly its entire front, I found his description almost compelling enough to plan a drive to Atlanta. Then I remembered we’re in the middle of a pandemic.

Chris discovered the place in the 1990s through the company’s black and white catalog, which they mail to a list that has grown to more than 100,000 addresses. If you know anything about Chris, you won’t be surprised to learn that he was attracted to the catalog not just by its promise of great tools, but by the warmth of its hand-drawn illustrations, a striking anachronism in the digital age. “They were one of the few people that had a full range of hand tools,” he says. “In the ’90s it was hard to find anybody who had more than one or two brands.” In fact, he adds, they had pretty much “EVERYTHING. And they were always supporting small makers, such as Independence Tool.”

It was Highland Woodworking that introduced Chris to Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, before the internet, when he called in his orders by phone. Though he still hadn’t seen the place in person, it felt familiar, largely thanks to the employee bios in the catalog. One year, Popular Woodworking assigned him to cover the International Woodworking Fair (IWF), which takes place in Atlanta. He played hooky one afternoon and made the pilgrimage. “I was speechless,” he says. “There was a suitcase on the floor; Roy Underhill was there, demonstrating. “I just couldn’t believe it. It exceeded my every expectation.”

Charmed by everything he’d seen, he got to know the owners, Chris and Sharon Bagby, and their daughters, Kelley and Molly. Their zaniness appeals to him – their willingness to do stuff “that’s off the beaten path,” as he says, proceeding to invoke a SawStop demonstration video in which Roy Underhill uses fried chicken, a good Southern staple, instead of the classic hot dog to trigger the stop. “They’re solid fried-gold people. It’s a funky neighborhood. They’re the bedrock there. The neighborhood has grown up around them.”

How could the Bagbys be so good at running a hardware store for specialty tools when neither of them was a woodworker? Jimmy Carter has taken classes at Highland Woodworking; Sam Maloof taught there. Here’s a glimpse into the business that should provide at least some clues.

Chris Bagby provided the following introduction:

“In 1974 Chris and Sharon Bagby, then recent Georgia Tech graduates, became managers of a King Hardware branch store on Piedmont Avenue in Atlanta. By coincidence, this particular King Hardware store happened to be the lone southeastern dealership for the Shopsmith combination woodworking machine. As the Bagbys worked to find ways to dramatically increase Shopsmith sales at the store, including introducing the sale of hardwood lumber, the store began to attract a growing community of woodworkers.

“In 1977 the Bagbys and their staff published a four-page woodworking newsletter they called “Wood News.” Response to it was enthusiastic. They published two more issues before deciding in the spring of 1978 to resign from King Hardware and start their own hardware store, Highland Hardware. Chris was 28. Sharon was 26.”

“At that time Shopsmith had begun opening its own retail stores nationwide and told the Bagbys they were not interested in making Highland Hardware a Shopsmith dealer. However, the couple soon connected with the Garrett Wade Company of New York, the U.S. importer of Swiss-made Inca Tools, and in 1978 began selling Inca tablesaws, bandsaws and planer-jointers. Highland Hardware became a local Atlanta retail source for Record and ECE hand planes, Marples chisels, Tyzack handsaws and many other fine woodworking tools purchased wholesale from Garrett Wade. They also continued to sell hardwood lumber and established a small millwork shop in the basement of the store.”

I spoke with Molly, 34, the younger daughter, who provided most of what follows. Both she and Kelley, who’s 10 years older, work for the business – Molly in Atlanta; Kelley, from her home in Massachusetts.

The business started out as an old-fashioned mom and pop hardware store selling the kind of stuff you need to fix a washing machine or plant flowers in a barrel – screwdrivers, nails, plumbing supplies, gardening tools. As time went on, they had more and more requests from woodworkers looking for specialized tools, so they brought in hand saws of higher quality, along with chisels, planes and more – now, as Chris Schwarz can attest, much more. Along with a full range of tools by Lie-Nielsen and some 400 distinct manufacturers, they also sell products by Festool and SawStop. Early on, when Home Depot, Lowe’s and Ace Hardware branches were proliferating across the country, selling really good woodworking tools was especially critical in setting the small, friendly store apart and giving them a competitive edge.

They moved the business to its present location (across the street from the original one) in 1984, more than doubling the store’s square footage. This time they set down roots, buying the property instead of paying rent. In 1995, just over a decade later, they did a large-scale renovation, adding 8,000 square feet of space, including a large classroom where seminars and hands-on woodworking classes are now taught. Also included in the renovation was a new shipping and receiving department, complete with loading dock and office space for management. The following year they launched their website; before long, the online business was hard to keep up with. They increased their shipping department and added more warehouse storage.

“Before long,” Chris Bagby continues,

“Highland Hardware published its own small tool catalog as the company evolved to become an importer of fine tools in its own right, and began to develop a wide following nationwide with a reputation as a leader in woodworking education, offering weekend classes throughout the year. In 1992, the company decided to merge the newsletter into the catalog and thereafter began publishing three catalogs a year. “Wood News” as a separate entity was no more, until 2005 when it was resurrected on the web as Wood News Online , where it continues to be published monthly.”

(You can read the 1981-82 catalog here, thanks to John Cashman, who sent me this document.)

Molly shared one of Sharon’s memories of working at the cash register. “She looks up and sees a man with an earpiece and sunglasses and gets a little worried. And then she looks to the left of him and sees it’s Jimmy Carter!”

Chris adds another Carter story:

“Back in the early ‘80s when we were still hand applying labels to our annual tool catalog mailings ourselves, Kelley [who was only about 6 or 7 at the time] came to the one with President Carter’s name and address on it. On a whim she wrote him a little note and stuck it in the catalog. A few days later she received a personally handwritten reply from Mr. Carter, thanking her for the note. We framed it and I think it is still hanging on the wall at Sharon’s house.”

President Carter first visited the store in March 1981, a couple of months after he left office, adds Chris.

“He arrived with a dozen Secret Service agents and shopped for some glue, a book and a few other things. While touring our store, he saw where we taught woodworking classes in the basement. He told me that if we were ever able to host Tage Frid for a seminar, he would like to attend.

“The next day I wrote to Mr. Frid (whom I did not know personally) and told him that President Carter would like to come to Highland to attend a class taught by him. Mr. Frid was interested, and indeed came to Atlanta to teach a weekend seminar that Mr. Carter attended on both days. As part of the event we arranged for us all to have dinner together at a nearby restaurant.

“Tage Frid went on to teach a seminar at Highland every year for 11 years. He and President Carter remained friends until Frid’s death in 2004.”

Today, Highland Woodworking employs about 20 people, most of whom live in Atlanta or the greater metro area. Three work in shipping. Sharon, says her daughter, is a “jack of all trades”; she dabbles in almost every aspect of operating the business, including purchasing, receiving, accounting and answering the phones. Several managers run all aspects of the website, SEO, catalog production, marketing and social media. A products manager searches out new stuff at conferences and tool shows, and orders stock from vendors. A dozen or so, most of them part-time, work the sales floor helping customers, showing them how to use tools, answering the phone, taking orders and providing technical support.

That’s a lot of employees for a mom and pop business. I asked Molly why they stay. “It’s a very laid-back work environment,” she answers. “My parents kind of just run the store in their own management style, and I think that has helped [with] employee retention, because it’s not super-corporate, not super-reliant on ‘human resources’ and a strict schedule with meetings and everything.” They provide full-time employees with health insurance.

Chris, Kelley and Molly share the marketing. All work remotely much of the time. Though Molly now lives in Atlanta, she used to work from Queens in New York City. Chris dials in from wherever he happens to be. (It might well be a spot along the Appalachian Trail, which he has hiked three times.)

Highland Woodworking holds tent sales and promotional events to celebrate anniversaries; these sound more like giant parties than the usual stuffy corporate affair. The most recent was in 2018, when they toasted their 40^th year in business. Molly produced the event, bringing in Nick Offerman and Tom Lie-Nielsen to join Roy Underhill, who’s based closer by. The trio proved a big draw. “We weren’t expecting as big of a crowd as we got with Nick Offerman,” she says. Nick was there to sign copies of his latest book “Good Clean Fun.” “It was a very steady crowd to come meet him, the whole day, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.”

One of the company’s strengths since its inception has been classes in a variety of woodworking skills. “Part of the reason we have so many staff on the sales floor is we want to be able to answer your woodworking questions,” Molly notes. “Our staff have the knowledge to be able to answer whatever question you ask about.” She mentions Phil Colson as an example; he started working for them in 1985 (he’s also Molly’s godfather, which says something about how close this family is with its employees) and teaches woodturning in addition to his other work at the store.

Sharon and Chris tried to retire – she in 1994, he in 1998. They also got divorced in 1994. But when the economy crashed in 2008 and the store took a hit, both came out of retirement to get the place running again. Says Molly: “they haven’t had time to retire since.” They’re great friends and work well together.

With the onset of the pandemic, they closed the retail storefront. Most of the business, even before, came from online sales, which have only increased, rivaling the pace during most years’ holiday rush. To save local customers the delay and cost of shipping, they offer curbside pickup. Unable to run classes in-store, they’re moving at least temporarily to an online model. (You can learn more here.)

“We’re blessed to have attracted a core group of longtime employees who know their stuff and enjoy sharing what they know about any of the tools we sell, in person during normal times and otherwise by phone,” adds Chris.

Of our 18 current staff members, 12 have been with us for over 20 years each. Phil and Sidney have both worked here since 1985. Only one of our current employees has been here less than 5 years. For all that they faithfully contribute, our employees are the main reason we have been fortunate enough to attract generations of loyal customers from all over the country since 1978. We are very grateful.”

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

At 7 a.m. on a Wednesday in mid-August, 2020, it’s 52° (F). There was snow a couple of days ago. Bars and cinemas are open as usual, and no one’s wearing a mask.

If this picture strikes you as something out of a parallel universe, that’s because it is. I’m on the phone with Laura McCusker, who’s bundled up in a sweater, relaxing at the end of her day in Hobart, Tasmania, which she calls “an island, off an island, at the bottom of the planet.”

“Tasmania is a good place to be riding this out,” she says, referring to the Covid-19 pandemic. “We are an island state. The borders were locked down early; there have been no active cases for two months.”

The more you learn about Laura and her life, the lovelier this picture becomes. Laura and her husband, Pete Howard, live in West Hobart, a five-minute walk from the center of town. Their three-bedroom house sits on a hill overlooking the river, with fruit trees, a dog and chickens in the backyard. A bush reserve down the street is home to wallabies, possums and pademelons.

Laura’s workshop, in the suburb of Moonah, Tasmania (an indigenous name for a type of eucalyptus, or gum tree), is a 17-minute ride away on her electric bike. The building was constructed as an apple-packing shed circa 1911. Layers of brick with sawdust insulation between them keep the temperature stable and the shop noise down. Add a timber ceiling, picture the place set by a babbling brook, and you’ll get why Laura calls it “completely idyllic. When we came here from Sydney, I couldn’t believe there could be such pretty industrial buildings so close to town.” Tasmania has a lot of Georgian buildings, she goes on; because the economy was depressed for many years, the buildings escaped the razing that most of us know as “development.” As a result, “a lot of old towns look like they’re straight out of Jane Austen.”

Laura’s background is more cosmopolitan than her charmed domestic and work situation these days might suggest. The second of four children (her brother, Jim, is two years older; sister, Anna-Lucia, 2-1/2 years younger; and the baby of the family, Daniel, is 8 years younger), she was born to a Brazilian mother, Lucia, and her father, Charlie, is from Northern Ireland via Glasgow and Adelaide. Both parents are doctors (Lucia, now retired, is a specialist in chronic pain management and palliative care, and Charlie’s an OB-GYN) who met as students at The Memorial Hospital in Worcester, Mass., did their residencies in Glasgow, then returned to Australia.

Laura went to an all-girls high school in Sydney where classes beyond strict academics were limited to home economics or textiles and design. She had no idea that there were people who made furniture for a living. She understood that her future would involve university, followed by a profession.

But in the pause between high school and college, Laura planned to travel. Shortly after she took her final exams at the age of 18, she flew to London. Two days later, she’d slept off the jet lag and headed over to a pub for something to eat. “The guy behind the bar said ‘Oh, you’re from Australia. Are you looking for work?’” He mentioned that a pub around the corner was hiring. She checked it out. “Does the job come with accommodation?” she asked. It didn’t, but the manager said she could sleep on the pull-out sofa in his flat upstairs. Pete was the manager’s flat mate. “I met Pete on the third day I was in London, and that was 27 years ago,” she says, laughing.

They stayed in London for about 18 months, with a trip around the Greek islands along the way. After a while, Laura switched from selling drinks to selling medicinal herbs for Culpepers in Covent Garden. Then, in 1994, it was time to go home and enroll at Sydney University.

Pete followed six weeks later. While she was in classes, he was employed – first at a butcher’s shop, then at a bakery. He forewent candlestick making in favor of management; two notable jobs were preparing for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and working for Opera Australia.

Laura started a degree in fine arts, but left because “it wasn’t hands-on enough.” She took classes in medieval history, classical mythology and social anthropology, then heard that students in an architecture class were building tables. She signed up for the course. But when she heard it was going to cover concrete stress fracture points and building regulations, she says, she “ran screaming from the room,” thinking “there must be an easier way to learn how to build a table.”

Shortly after, she entered a training apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker through Lidcombe TAFE, a vocational school in New South Wales, where she began what would result in a Certificate III in Cabinetmaking.

It was the late-1990s, when a lot of manufacturing was moving to China; that made it hard to find a position as an apprentice. She hired on at a business that made high-end furniture out of particleboard with architectural veneers for offices and law libraries. While it was valuable experience, it wasn’t what she really wanted to do. “It wasn’t solid timber, and it wasn’t fine woodworking,” she says, “but it was a fantastic training in how to be efficient in the workshop and get the job done.” So after a couple of years she went back to school, this time at the Sturt School for Wood, just outside Sydney, which specializes in craft-based traditional woodworking. There she learned coopering, laminating, steam bending, dovetails – the whole shebang.

That was a year-long course. “Completely wonderful,” she says of the experience. “It was monastic. Beautiful. You could cut dovetails to your heart’s content seven days a week.” But she will always appreciate the pragmatic training she got from the job in the cabinet shop, where she learned to run a business and pay the rent.

On graduating from the Sturt School, Laura moved to Sydney and worked at a co-operative, the Splinter Workshop. There were about eight members who shared the space and machines. She set up her own corner and started building and selling furniture, relying on word of mouth at the start. When she didn’t have paid work, she built prototypes to her own design and did her best to get coverage in the local paper. She also tried small-batch products such as wooden vessels to hold ceramic dishes for burning essential oils, a venture that she says barely covered her costs, “but it was really good training in small-batch production, marketing and building relationships with galleries.” She worked there for five years, during which she gave birth to her daughter, Ella, and her son, Jimmy.

In 2003, when Ella was 4 and Jimmy a few months old, she and Pete decided to move to Tasmania. Real estate prices in Sydney were out of reach for a furniture maker and arts administrator, and getting worse by the month. They realized that quality of life was important and felt that they wanted to give their kids a home where they could settle, rather than having to move every year or so from rental to rental. With no local contacts or work lined up, Laura took a job at a shipyard, building furniture for a 60-metre (nearly 200′) luxury super yacht. She also completed a bachelor’s degree in adult and vocational education, which certified her to train others in the trades. It seemed like a good idea – she could spend part of her time teaching and the rest in design-build for her own business. But as things turned out, she didn’t need the back-up plan. “Work got so busy, it was hard to do both,” she says. “I made the choice to go back to my studio practice.” In 2010, she convinced Pete to leave his work in management and work with her full-time.

When we spoke, they’d just finished a set of shelves for a local client and would be moving on to a couple of mobile cabinets for a client in the hospitality business. Other jobs coming up include a big dining table in Huon pine. They’re also trying to finish up some jobs at home, such as a pair of decks and a studio flat on the lower floor of their house. It may be a place for friends to stay, or perhaps an AirBnB.

They work primarily in local species. One is Tasmanian oak, which Laura points out is not in fact an oak, but an umbrella term for a variety of eucalypts. “In Tasmania they call up to five different euycalypt species ‘Tasmanian oak,’ she says. But in Victoria they’ve got the same lumber and they call it ‘Victorian ash.’” It’s a big tree, so she suspects Europeans who took over the region simply called it “oak” in a generic sense. It’s easy to get, kiln-dried, quartersawn, consistent in color and consistent in price. Although it’s used primarily as a building material, Laura says “I actually think it’s a beautiful furniture timber as well.”

Huon pine is another prized species. Laura says it’s soft, and perfect for boats. But “it costs a lot of money, so people think it has status.” Another regional species is blackwood, which she compares to chocolate cake. It’s variable in color, which makes it hard to get a uniform look for a piece of furniture, and the dust is carcinogenic.

Much of their work to date has been for clients in the tourism and hospitality industries – hotels and event spaces. They’ve done pieces for the MONA Museum and built tables and seating for restaurants. Tasmania’s economy relies heavily on tourism; as a result of the pandemic, that kind of business has taken a big hit. But as more people have shifted to working from home, those in the building trades have had new orders for decks, home offices and interior renovations. She and Pete have moved, at least for now, from contract clients to domestic ones. “I feel we’ve been really lucky,” Laura says. “It’s kind of weird to get on national television and see what’s happening in the rest of the world.”

She didn’t expect to make a living as a furniture maker when they moved to Tasmania, but as it happens, she could not have been more mistaken about the prospects for doing just that. “If I could find some way to live, own my own home and have a high quality of life,” she remembers dreaming, “to actually have a viable business making beautiful and interesting furniture for people… I never expected to be able to do that in Tasmania.” Handmade furniture, she explains, was always “very, very expensive.” But Tasmania turned out to be the ideal place to make furniture for a living. “You don’t have huge overheads, so it doesn’t have to be that expensive or exclusive.” She compares her current circumstances to those of the past, recalling how she and Pete weighed pros and cons as they considered the move to Hobart. There’s a lot of money in Sydney – “big-city paychecks.” She wouldn’t have that in Tasmania. But, she thought, “I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll flip burgers, or I’ll teach.” In fact, her studio rent plummeted with the move; her annual rent for that idyllic timber-ceilinged industrial space is what she paid in Sydney each month. Marketing via the internet means she doesn’t have to sell her work through galleries; given that galleries typically make their money by doubling (or more than doubling) the price an artist puts on her work, selling directly to customers makes her work vastly more affordable. And shipping costs from Hobart to Sydney have turned out to be almost the same as what it cost to move a piece of furniture from her studio on one side of Sydney to the other.

“But it’s also a much nicer quality of life,” Laura adds. “Living in a big city was wonderful when we didn’t have kids, but once you have kids it all changes. We had a wish list consisting of (amongst other things) good coffee, live music/theatre venues, good food, museums, beautiful beaches, bushwalks etc. and an airport so we could get out quickly if and when we needed to visit family overseas and interstate. Hobart ticked all these boxes and more…they even have the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and now there’s MONA. It’s also in the same timezone as Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane so it doesn’t really feel like we’re very far away from grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins when the kids speak on the phone. Hobart is still a small town but has enough to keep us interested and it’s only a short flight to Melbourne or Sydney when you feel you need a fix.”

At this point, Ella has one year to go in her fine arts degree at the National Art School in Sydney, with a focus on printmaking. Tuition is paid for by the government through the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS); students repay the investment in their education by means of a prorated tax over the course of their working life, once their income reaches a certain threshold – interest-free. “So, if you’re an artist or a teacher or a nurse, you pay a lower rate” and it takes longer, Laura explains.

Jim, she says, “has a really mathematical and engineering brain” but is also into philosophy – he reads Kafka, Foucault and Chomsky “for fun” – and plays piano and guitar. At 17, she says he’s “interested in everything. I don’t think he’ll be hanging around Hobart.”

Reflecting on how views of work and higher ed have changed over the course of her life, Laura recalls the way things were when she was the age her kids are now. “If you’re intelligent and good at academics, you will go to university and become a professional. The fact that I didn’t want to do that – the idea of wanting to go into a trade – wasn’t ever on the table. If you’re a girl who’s smart, you don’t go into a trade.

“I think I was just a bit of a shit stirrer; I probably wanted to wind my parents up a bit.” She mentions Matthew Crawford and Richard Sennett. “If you work with your hands, you’re not very bright, and if you’re bright you get ‘rewarded’ by being able to work behind a computer for up to 10 hours a day!

“I feel very lucky to have a job where it’s intellectually challenging as well as physically rewarding. I’m able to be creative and analytical… It’s like productive yoga. It feels so good to be moving and producing and making and…by the end of the day you look around and it’s very satisfying.”

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

The first woman I was ever aware of in the realm of woodworking publications is Aimé Ontario Fraser. It was the early 1990s when I began to notice her name, and occasionally her picture, in the pages of Fine Woodworking. By then, I had spent a decade in custom furniture and cabinet shops in England and the States. One of the shops where I’d worked had three women, along with about ten men. But in the pages of the woodworking magazines I read, women rarely made an appearance.

The last article I remember seeing with Fraser’s byline was in 2005. After that, she slipped from my notice. Every so often I wondered what had become of this woman who was among the first to normalize images of women in woodworking – to get our eyeballs so used to seeing women (of all ages, sizes, etc., just as we do with men) fitting butt hinges, planing boards, ripping panels on table saws, carving mantels, and so on, that we may someday no longer say “wow, a woman woodworker” and simply see someone building a cabinet or applying her skill in the furnishing of an interior. So I contacted Fine Woodworking’s unfailingly helpful Betsy Engel, who forwarded my inquiry to Fraser. To my delight, she agreed to speak with me.

***

Fraser got her start in woodworking as a high school exchange student in New Zealand. It was 1976 and New Zealand was the center of modern wood composite boatbuilding technology – we’re talking 1/8” or thinner layers of wood laminated with epoxy and fiberglass cloth to produce hulls that are very light and strong. Even though she hadn’t been allowed to take woodworking classes in high school back home (she had to take home economics instead), she got a job working for a boat builder. She loved the work.

Back in the States, she wanted to keep building. She became romantically involved with a sailing buddy in Connecticut whom she would later marry. “He built stuff, so we started doing boat stuff,” she says. Building boats and finishing hulls became her work for the next decade-plus. This is how she learned woodworking.

Fifteen years later, she worked her way into running the boat shop at The Maritime Center (now the Maritime Aquarium), where she focused on traditional local boats and boatbuilding techniques. She led a group of serious volunteer builders, and the job also allowed her to work with schoolchildren; at one point she and a group of seventh graders built four boats in two weeks and then raced them on the river behind the Center.

On the Topic of Gender

At this point it’s worth noting that the trajectory of Fraser’s woodworking career has had a lot to do with being a woman in a field long dominated by men. “I’m pretty skilled as a woodworker,” she says. “I know how to make odd shapes and how to fit things together so well that the water doesn’t come in.” If you know anything about boatbuilding, you’ll appreciate she’s being modest. Such meticulous work is no mean feat. “But I never worked in a boatyard or on a building site. I honestly didn’t want to put up with that s**t.”

Take mansplaining, for instance. (Please, do take it, and never bring it back.) “I remember when I was in charge of the boat shop at the Maritime Center,” Fraser recounts, “and one of my jobs was to build boats so that people could watch me. I was a display! I had a team of volunteers including a V.P. from GE, a retired general, some heavy-duty people I had to manage. They would come into the shop and work, and we worked together to build boats in a traditional manner. But then men would wander by to watch the display. Some high level work was going on, and random men would tell me I was doing it wrong and start lecturing me on how to use a chisel or plane. Anyone who knew anything about building could see what I was really doing, yet so many clueless men felt compelled to tell me I was wrong. This phenomenon has always been hard for me to fathom.”

It’s fair to say that neither Fraser nor I would claim that such advice is only given to women. What’s irksome – well, aside from the “correction” being based on a widely held belief that fails to take all relevant factors into account – is the experience of people assuming you know less than you do because you’re a woman. Which is pretty ironic in Fraser’s case, considering she’s something of an expert on this subject. In 2002 she wrote an article on sharpening handplanes for Fine Woodworking (#157, July/August 2002) that involved electron micrographing plane irons and sharpening stones.

Shortly after, she put together a team for the New England Handplaning Contest (organized by The Woodworkers Store in Norwalk Connecticut); her team included the then-president of DMT, students, and friends, and relied heavily on Harrelson Stanley of HMS Enterprises, importer of Japanese tools and sharpening equipment. They trained by sharpening planes every day for weeks prior and discussed technique. The president of DMT made them a diamond flattening device so they could flatten the soles of their planes. Fraser was named the New England Handplane Champion for producing a 9-foot long lace-thin shaving of Alaskan cedar. “After I won it, I had to go to the grocery store on my way home. I remember walking down the frozen food aisle and thinking, ‘I’m the New England Hand Plane Champion!’” she recalls, chuckling at the geekiness of it all.

Nevertheless, corrections from men on the proper way to put down a plane continued to dog her. She did a TV commercial for Woodcraft in which she was planing a wide panel while talking about the company’s products. She put the plane down upright on the bench. Alarm bells went off around the country. “People throughout my career who were not professional woodworkers, people who did not win the New England Handplane Championship, would tell me I was doing it wrong!” she laughs. “I would have to say, ‘no if you put it on its side you risk nicking the blade [or] cutting yourself. Put it down gently, but not on its side, [or] somebody’s gonna get hurt.”

And then there’s just plain old-fashioned sexism. “I always faced a lot of crap for being a woman,” she continues. “‘Oh, you do that and you’re a woman?!’ I didn’t let it bother me. Writing helped a lot because it gave me many more opportunities than if I’d been a tradesperson alone. But I always felt, ‘This is what I am, this is what I do.’ I think like a woodworker. I never wanted to get too bothered about gender, though it’s always been there. At this one boatyard, one guy called me the Varnish Muffin. I said, ‘Look, I’m a professional; I have a staff of four and thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. If you want me to come and varnish your boats, I will, but I am not a ‘Varnish Muffin.’ I don’t varnish just because I’m the captain’s girlfriend and girls varnish. I varnish because it’s my part of my profession.”

The Taunton Connection

Throughout the early years of her career she wrote for WoodenBoat and other boat-related magazines, in addition to running her own business on the side. One winter’s day, as she headed out to work on a 60-foot yacht in the water, she realized, “if I fall off this dock I will die, and no one will know, because I’m the only one out here and it’s too cold, and the current is too swift [to survive].” She started looking for another way to stay in woodworking and was hired by the Taunton Press.

After leaving Taunton around 1998, she had a job as the director of education, planning classes and teaching at The Woodworkers Store in Norwalk, CT that had a woodworkers’ club. People paid for shop time by the hour and there was someone on hand to help with projects. “I tended not to do ‘woodworking for women’ because I felt that was talking down to people,” she says. “I recognize that women at that time needed extra encouragement. But I didn’t like the idea of putting the women off in another room. I [did teach] boatbuilding classes. It was Taunton’s 25th anniversary; the owner of the franchise teamed up with Taunton and we had a bunch of authors come in and demonstrate while working.”

After that, she was the Principle Instructor at the Wooden Boat Workshop, also in Norwalk. It operated on a similar concept, focused on building small boats.

Fraser has written two books: Getting Started in Woodworking and Your First Workshop. She did technical editing for Taunton Books, working on the Mark Duginske’s Band Saw Handbook and the second edition of Bruce Hoadley’s classic, Understanding Wood. After that, she hooked up with John Kelsey and Ian Kirby; together they had a small company called Cambium Press, which published Kirby’s books on sharpening and dovetails, along with other books. She also ghost-wrote James Krenov’s book With Wakened Hands. “I was given a box of photographs and several hours of recordings, and we made that book.” She spent a week with Krenov to finish it up – a special experience, given that he was one of her heroes from the 1970s. “I had the good fortune to hang out with people who were my heroes,” she reflects. “Krenov, Mark Duginske, Ian Kirby, and others. We became good friends and had a lot of fun together.”

By 2008 Fraser had gone out on her own, with a 1500-square-foot woodworking shop in an old warehouse in Connecticut. Along with other types of cabinets, she did specialized work for equestrians, designing and building travel cases for all manner of dressage equipment.

Then the economy shifted, culminating in the housing crisis and the Great Recession. As a one-person business without the capitalization necessary to survive the drying up of high-end spending, she was devastated. She worked all day in her shop, then went to an evening job at a grocery store in an effort to keep the bills paid. “When they taught me how to run the fryer, I cried just a little,” she says. Eventually she realized she could not keep her business going. She sold all of her machinery, though she kept the hand tools and clamps.

Just last year, Fraser was hired as New England Training Coordinator for Mueller Reports, a company that specializes in insurance inspections for homeowners and small business. She trains people to inspect buildings. Not surprisingly, her knowledge of building and woodworking is invaluable. “It’s a wonderful challenge, and the steadiest paycheck I’ve had in my life,” aside from when she was at Taunton Press.

For the present, Fraser thinks of woodworking as a fallow field she’s letting rest. She lives in a community that regulates how she uses her garage. “But I do have a basement and tons of clamps and tons of tools,” she adds, thinking about how she’ll get back into it.

Finally, what about the name Ontario? I’ve always been curious, so I asked. Fraser’s family is from Upstate New York near the Canadian border. Her grandmother was from Ontario, and her parents had a summer cottage on Lake Ontario, so that became her middle name.

Thank you, Aimé, for allowing me to interview you, for digging up all these old photographs, and for being one of the early public faces of women in our field.

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work“

A few images of Fraser’s work

Whether he’s playing Ron Swanson in “Parks and Recreation,” Forest in “Devs” or Frank Fisher in “Hearts Beat Loud,” Nick Offerman is immediately recognizable as that hunky actor with a twinkle in his eye and a lush crop of facial hair. So closely has he come to be identified with his mustache and beards, plural, which range from just-beyond-stubble to “full bush,” that some fans are taken aback when some new role demands he be clean-shaven.

Nick’s humor is dry, understated and often conveyed wordlessly, through masterful timing and manipulation of his brow. Call me a sick puppy (you won’t be the first), but the performance of Nick’s that I’ve found most hilarious to date concerns a quote he found on Twitter a few years back: “I saw Nick Offerman without his moustache. I vomited and died.” He followed this citation with a plainspoken reminder to his audience that the face they may feel at liberty to trash was made by his parents, who would be hurt by such a remark.

Humor is a weird thing. In this case, it was something about the juxtaposition of a cruel comment thoughtlessly hurled into cyberspace for all to see, and the way Nick brought his own reduction from complex individual to objectified celebrity home to the world of Mom, Dad and genes, that left me weeping, doubled over with laughter. He did it all with a straight face, which made it all the funnier. And even as my diaphragm spasms left me gasping for breath, I was sharply aware that he was engaged in the serious business of moral counsel, doing his part to make the world a kinder, more caring place. Which made it wickeder still – I mean, we’re talking the Golden Rule, delivered via a heartfelt response from a typically confident character to a self-entitled tweet. Welcome to Nick’s world of serious fun.

Mention Nick Offerman and most of those familiar with his name will conjure an image of Ron Swanson, fictional director of the Parks and Recreation department in the (also-fictional) town of Pawnee, Indiana. The part made Nick a household name, especially among those under the age of 60. What many don’t know is that (1) Nick had been acting for a couple of decades before he became famous for his role as the series’ pivotal character, and (2) in a very important sense, he credits his success as an actor to woodworking. “From the age of 16, my tool box and framing bags saved my life again and again over the years,” he told me. “I became an artist by the good graces of the lumberyard.”

Nick grew up in Minooka, Illinois, a small Midwestern farm town he describes as “Norman Rockwellian,” located “about an hour and fifty years southwest of Chicago.” He was blessed to have “charismatic examples of woodworking” in his own family, and in particular cites his father’s “intrepid ability to take a competency with hammer and nail and saw and build legitimate pieces of oak furniture” for their home. His father, Ric Offerman, had had no woodworking instruction. “Everything was put together with nails but still very gorgeous. That was what first instilled in me that with our hands and a bit of cleverness we can make wonderful things in wood.”

Nick’s parents grew up on farms four miles from each other. His dad taught social studies in junior high. “He was very much a renaissance man,” Nick says. “He had a farmer’s capability when it came to earning income for his family. He drove a school bus, coached sports, worked on a blacktop crew, did hired-hand work for my mom’s family.” His mom, Cathy Offerman, was about 20 when she had her first child; she became a homemaker, raising four kids (Nick is the second) and, Nick says, “wielding all the superpowers of any member of the Laura Ingalls Wilder family.” When the youngest was out to school, she finished a nursing degree and became a full-time labor and delivery nurse in Joliet, Illinois, a profession she pursued for 25 years.

“They’re really incredible Americans, my mom and dad,” he goes on, calling them “people who would fit neatly into the fellowship of Wendell Berry’s fictional community.” Not that he appreciated this as a child. It wasn’t until he went to theater school that Nick realized how bucolic his childhood had been, working with his uncles and his mom’s family who raised pigs, corn and soybeans. “I was fascinated with them, with working on a farm, riding bikes with my cousin and playing baseball – enjoying the fruits of these wonderfully home-economical parents.”

Born in 1970, Nick describes himself as “a child of Saturday morning cartoons.” The nearest theater was in a town about 20 minutes away. They went to the movies once a month, which was a special treat. “It seems like a storybook childhood. We were not overly wealthy, but I was unaware because my life was extremely rich in other ways.”

Minooka formed Nick’s entire world. In his junior year at high school, he and the rest of his cohort had to declare their plans for a career. It was before the widespread use of computers for printing, and he vividly recalls the high school guidance counselor presenting him with a list of 36 worthy professions printed in purple ink from a ditto machine. “You had to pick one,” he says. “Mine isn’t really on here,” he told the guidance counselor. “I think I want to entertain people, like, be an actor.” The counselor responded with something along the lines of “I don’t think you can get there from here.”

Fortunately for Nick and the rest of us, his girlfriend at the time was auditioning for the dance department at the University of Illinois. He drove her to the audition. While chatting with some theater students in the hallway, he learned you could get a degree in theater there – and get paid professional wages to perform in plays. “And I said ‘By god, I knew it!’” He auditioned for the school’s theater department, which accepted only 16 actors a year. He portrays his acceptance in characteristically modest terms: “They had just run up [against] a shortage of meatheads. In any theater department you need a couple of beefy meatheads to carry the talented people on and off stage. I got there just in time.”

“I had some great teachers,” he continues. One, Shozo Sato, a master of Zen arts from Japan, taught them kabuki. He took them touring in Japan and Europe, performing a kabuki version of “The Iliad.” There was also a class in set building – “a bunch of suburban kids who don’t know a standard from a Phillips head, and I step in and they look at me like I’m a ringer.” He began to appreciate his abilities as a carpenter, which he’d learned on the farm and in summer jobs framing houses. The theater department started paying him to build scenery.

Because of the extra time spent on tour, he took five years instead of four to graduate. He considers the additional investment unquestionably worthwhile, though he insists he “still wasn’t very good at acting” by the time he graduated. “But people kept me around because I was good at stage combat – sword fights and fisticuffs. They figured out that if they gave me a couple of small lines in a play, I would build the whole set.”

Leaving home

After college Nick moved to Chicago, which has a thriving theater culture (or did, before COVID-19). Carpentry proved an important part of his income there. He built scenery for big theaters including the Northlight, Victory Gardens and Shakespeare Repertory, and acted in plays at night. But his favorite memories of Chicago involve a company, the Defiant Theater, that he started with some friends. “We did some of the greatest work of my life, because of the freedom that your mid-20s bring with them. We had no budget. We’d go see shows at the big theaters…and they’d do something cool on the stage and we’d go back to our storefront theater and say, ‘we want to put a car chase in this play’…. We would build a couple of cars out of refrigerator boxes or luan and have stage hands dressed in black shove these boxes around the stage. We learned that if you engage the audience’s imagination, they go along with it. Together we all agreed that this was a high-speed car chase happening onstage, and that had them rolling in the aisles. It makes for a more rewarding theatrical experience than all the budget in the world can provide. It was one of the first establishing moments in my body of work, of understanding the value of wabi sabi, the imperfections being the thing to showcase.”

Nick moved to Los Angeles in his late 20s. Chicago had been good to him, but like most people, he thought of LA as big-time. “Things had been going very well in Chicago, both onstage and backstage,” he explains. “I didn’t get rich financially, but I lived like a king. I thought that living in LA would be a continuation of that arc. I was dead wrong. LA is just not a theater town. At all! My 27-year-old manhood, such as it was, was built on the rock of my professional work in the theater…and so I spent a few years kind of flailing, trying to find my footing. Which in my late 20s meant drinking too much bourbon with my best friend, and trying to find the footbridge from youth to adulthood.”

He turned to freelance carpentry – cabins in people’s yards, decks, “the biggest things I could [do] without needing to be a licensed contractor.” His eye had been caught by the work of Greene and Greene and Frank Lloyd Wright – the Gamble House, the Blacker House, the pieces at the Huntington Museum – which he says “really knocked my socks off.” He also became aware of Sam Maloof. Nick started working details from these inspirations into his decks and other jobs, and describes his first bridle joints for a decorative deck railing as “just revelatory.” When he got a gig to build a yoga studio, he decided to use post-and-beam construction. “Those were my first mortises and tenons. I also worked in bridle joints,” both types of joinery he’d seen in antique furniture. He experienced a kind of epiphany: “I think I’ve accidentally become a woodworker.”

“I had a couple decades of carpentry in which at times my peers and I would make fun of any woodworker we came across, especially in the scenery shops of Chicago,” Nick recalls. There was a very nice guy named Brad who sometimes would bring his very nice roll of Two Cherries chisels…and we would make fun of this sensitive artist with his nice chisel roll because scene carpentry can be so much more brutal an existence. In the scene shop, chisels are used exclusively for opening paint cans.” There would be no more making fun of sensitive woodworkers.

An acquaintance gave Nick a stack of Fine Woodworking magazines. “I saw that magazine for the first time at 28 or 29 and just flipped out,” he remembers. He spent a few years teaching himself, up to the point where he built a blanket chest with dovetails (“probably a Becksvoort project,” he adds, invoking one of his furniture-making heroes) and a couple of Nakashima tables. “While my acting career was going better and better, with every woodworking project I would up the degree of difficulty.” At some point he knew he had to try a small boat, because it would require a whole new way of working with the material. “My friends with [professional] shops hated me then,” he remarks, “and they hate me to this day, because they need to crank out kitchen cabinets to pay their LA shop rent, and I’ve had the good fortune of my acting jobs making it so that I could choose my woodworking projects.”

Even so, he describes his years in LA before he met Megan Mullally, who is now his wife, as “the nadir of my adult life.” Their meeting, in 2000, was a fortuitous by-product of his stubborn determination to pursue his original métier. “I know this is a TV and film town,” he remembers thinking, “but my whole thing is doing theater, so even though it’s not necessarily what’s done, I’m going to do a play.” Some casting directors hooked him up with an audition for a play called “Berlin Circle.” He won a role. (Naturally, he also helped build the set.) Megan showed up as a fellow cast member. Nick says their meeting, and the relationship that grew out of it, “really did save my life. Here was an opportunity to clean up my act and…become a productive citizen.” He adds, “I don’t believe I’ve had an unhappy day since.”

Several years later, Megan got a job in a Mel Brooks production of “Young Frankenstein” on Broadway. In keeping with their commitment to avoid spending long stretches of time apart from each other, Nick planned to move with her; he hoped to find a space in New York where he could build his first canoe. There he met his friend Jimmy DiResta, whom he describes as “a master of filming all of his work and making it palatable to viewers.” Jimmy agreed to shoot the whole canoe-building process at Nick’s shop space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, an experience he considers “a graduation” to realizing that “really, anything is possible with wood.”

“In 2008, after 18 months of astonishing audiences with her powerhouse talents, Megan finished her run on Broadway and we headed home to Los Angeles,” Nick wrote in follow-up correspondence. “I am grateful for the life lesson that resulted from that time. Had I obeyed the typical actor’s narcissism, I would have stayed in LA ‘in case I got a TV pilot or some great movie gig,’ thereby missing out on a year and a half living happily with my bride for the very slim chance of something good. Instead, by making our marriage the priority, I got to witness her triumph first-hand (I saw the show 25 times), I got to build my first 18-foot cedar-strip canoe, I did a film with Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst and an award-winning musical (“Adding Machine”). Conan O’Brien had turned me on to road cycling, and I got my first nice bicycle, which I then rode every day 18 miles round trip to my shop in Red Hook and back to the Upper West Side. The moral being that by remaining open to life’s possibilities, and placing my relationship above my own selfish needs, I think I reaped a good deal more bounty than I would have otherwise.”

Patience made possible by woodworking pays off

With each year Nick worked in film and TV, his roles became more frequent and substantial. People told him they thought he had something unique. “Stick around,” they’d urge. That helped him persevere through the kind of times that have sent plenty of others back to more conventional ways of making a living. The seed of his big break came when he auditioned for “The Office.” One of the writers, Mike Schur, who went on to be part of the creative team for “Parks and Recreation,” wanted to cast him in the “Office” role for which he’d auditioned, but Nick ended up having a conflicting gig, so Mike wrote Nick’s name on a Post-it Note and kept it for future reference.

When they got around to making “Parks and Recreation,” NBC didn’t want Nick, who was then 38, in the role of Ron Swanson – the character was written as someone 20 years older. But Mike and his co-creator, Greg Daniels, were adamant. “They saw something peculiar in me that they weren’t prepared to do without.” He compares it to Gary Knox Bennett’s once-infamous (and now quite famous) nail. “It’s just a matter of experience and talent and a lot of luck and serendipity.”

After two decades, his acting career finally took off. Up to then, he’d had a one-man woodworking shop with occasional helpers. Now, he realized, “I’m going to need to put some employees in the shop or it’s gonna sit here in the dark.” He hired RH Lee, then the Offerman Woodshop crew grew to five or six. Nick started touring as a comedian, a performance genre he claims he’d never had in his sights. (This is literally incredible to most of us who know his work.) “I’m a theater actor,” he offers by way of explanation. “I perform other people’s writing. But when colleges began mistakenly inviting me, I took advantage of the opportunity to talk to a couple thousand young people, and now I’m apparently a humorist.” (He is definitely a humorist.) At the same time, his skills in playing the guitar improved – so of course he wanted to learn to make one. He read some books, which tempered his bravado a tad. “Every book ends with an admonition about getting just the right amount of shaving for the sound but to keep it from being so thin it would explode.” To ease himself into the craft, he started with a ukulele, “because their strings are plastic and it’s going to be a less painful mistake.” He describes the ukuleles he has built as his primer course in preparation for acoustic guitars.

Artists in pandemic mode

As with sports, Nick observes, performing artists generally require an audience. Even in TV and film, which don’t require a live audience, groups of people are part of the process: actors, directors, camera people and more. His 2020 schedule had him touring in England and Europe, as well as shooting the next series of “Making It,” his show with Amy Poehler about working with your hands. All of these plans have been cancelled or severely postponed.

“It’s quite dejecting,” he remarks. “I have never experienced this as an adult. I’ve always been able to find some way to make myself feel useful. Those of us that are lucky enough to not have to be on the front lines of dealing with the pandemic or with the social unrest we’re undergoing…. For me, my self-worth is predicated on feeling like I’m doing somebody some good, somewhere. And under the auspices of this lockdown I can still do some good for my household and immediate family and some friends…. I’m figuring out some ways of doing some good for my audience, or my fan base. But it’s really been very strange.”

He recently spoke with an older actor friend who was having a hard time; he had to remind him, as well as himself, that “a lot of people in the world go through stuff like this” – the lack of paid employment, the isolation from friends and family, the extreme limitations on travel and other activities – “all the time. The fact that this is entirely new to us feels like an incredibly privileged position to be in,” he says.

“The things I can do as more of a contribution are reaching out to my friends and family and asking, ‘How’s it going in Minooka? …in England?’ Shows are beginning to strategize ways to keep creating content.” In addition, he has made three comedy specials available online at nickofferman.co, with all proceeds going to America’s Food Fund during the pandemic. “I wanted to find a way to provide this content for people who find me funny, but I’m very comfortable financially, so I don’t feel good plugging my wares, so I thought what if I donate all of my ‘wares’ to America’s Food Fund?” I’m much better working for a show or a film. I’m not a great lone wolf. So I’m really looking forward to smarter people than me putting me back to work.”

In the meantime, he’s working in his shop. Some friends are running local grass-fed meat programs; he buys a box of meat every so often and gives it away as a gift.

And he’s working on another book, his fifth. (His others are “Gumption,” “Paddle Your Own Canoe,” “Good Clean Fun” and “The Greatest Love Story Ever Told.”) “That,” he says, “feels very medicinal.” This one is a book about our relationship, as humans, with nature – or lack thereof. “The stuff that I’m reading, the homework I’ve been doing for it over the past couple of years, that’s personally an incredible salve. It feels like what Wendell Berry would hopefully consider ‘good work.’ And down the road I should also get paid for it,” says Nick.

“Books remain the bedrock of democracy,” he believes. “As a clumsy and flawed human, when I can look past all of the distractions of modern life, it is in books that I find the signposts pointing me towards the pursuit of decency. Even in some books not about woodworking.”

– Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” (which Nick calls “poignant, honest, sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious but always masterful stories”) and “Kitchen Think”

With thanks to Cathy Offerman for hunting down early pictures.