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Meet the Author: John Porritt (Part 2)

Posted on by Kara Uhl

Read “Meet the Author: John Porritt (Part 1)” here.

John with his first stick chair, elm and yew, 1987, and a child’s highchair, also elm and yew, 1988.

Early on John Porritt (author of “The Belligerent Finisher“) enjoyed playing around with bits of wood in his spare time. In the early 1970s, he carved a face into a piece of hazel and strung it onto leather as a necklace. He used a heated rod to create and carve a pipe. During a difficult period in his life, he made a carving out of soft maple based on Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”  

In 1979, John attended Shrewsbury Technical College (now Shrewsbury College) for one year. At first, they refused him a grant, but John appealed and won, “which was marvelous,” he says. He studied fine furniture making with John Price who trained with Edward Barnsley in the Arts & Crafts tradition. 

“I remember the first week I virtually shook with nerves about being in the college and being back in school because I didn’t have great experiences in school and it felt odd being there,” he says. “John Price came by, and he looked at my work and laughed. And I said, ‘Don’t laugh; show me what I’m doing wrong. Show me – go on. After that, we started to get on, and it was grand.” 

John loved his time at Shrewsbury College. He remembers playing football at lunchtime (and a woman from Liverpool, nicknamed Carol Keegan, who was studying ceramics, beating them all every time) and an exhibition they had at Shrewsbury Castle. John showed a cabinet based on Chinese forms.

A cabinet John built while attending Shrewsbury. Walnut, ash, ebony and silver. 1980.

“At Shrewsbury, the finish we used (this was between 1979 and 1980) was polyurethane thinned 50/50, and put on really thin with a clean, well-washed rag,” he says. After several coats we gently cut back with flour paper, then applied a couple more thin coats, burnishing with a taut cloth pad as we went. This gave a great finish. I remember saying to the design lecturer, after using it on a cabinet, What a fine finish! He said, There is no such thing as a fine finish. There is only a finish appropriate for the job. This shut me up. He was a serious, definite man given to pronouncements; however, over the years this thought does come back to me – that’s just another can of worms. But I suppose we all decide what is appropriate – it is fluid after all.”

John says he loved his time at Shrewsbury. After Shrewsbury, John worked briefly as a carpenter then, in 1980, he went off on his own, working out of his parents’ single-car garage, trying to get commissions. 

“And that was very hard,” he says. “I was very naïve about it, really. It was hand-to-mouth as I recall.”

Zippo the Clown and his assistant Tommy. A prop John made in collaboration with Alfie Van Derplank in 1981 as a prop for a theater show for kids about energy.

In 1982, he got a commission from Winchester Cathedral, “which was quite something,” he says.

The piece was to be used as a stand for The Book of Remembrance in the Epiphany Chapel in the cathedral. John designed the piece within about three minutes of the meeting. The cathedral, he says, which was built from 1079 to 1532, is a mishmash of styles.

“I tried for a few days to find other designs, but the first one was the best. The cathedral has a stunning roof, and it’s got superb columns and mouldings. And I designed this piece as three columns, two in the front and one in the back, as a symbol of Calvary.”

The Book of Remembrance Stand, designed by John, 1982 to 1983. The silver gilt lettering was designed and made by P.C. (Phil) Craze.

The columns, made out of brown oak, are held together with laminated curves of soft maple designed to echo the ribs in the roof. John used Indian ink to gradate the stain of the rails from blue to purple and back again, carrying the colors of the chapel’s stained glass windows designed by Edward Burne-Jones with William Morris & Co.

John hoped more work would come from this commission than did. People did, however, start to ask him about restorations. 

“And I really didn’t want to do restoration work,” he says. “I hadn’t trained for it, I didn’t know a lot about it. But I did it. And as time went on, I got somewhat better at it. And I had help from two great guys, my friends Spike Knight and Johnny Gould. I started to understand color and texture, and surface. And that was a wonderful thing and that’s added to what I do. And that has come back again, to my interpretations of the Welsh chairs.”

In 1981, John had met Keith Rand, who trained as a cartographer, went on to art school then studied sculpture in Scotland. Keith made fine sculptures and occasionally chairs for a living, as well as teaching. Keith and John ended up becoming good friends and shared a workshop for a while; he was John’s best man at his wedding. John taught Keith about tools – how to sharpen them, how to work them – and Keith taught John how to better understand and explore form.

“For a while, we were embryonic chairmakers,” John says. “He worked from leaning seats onto chairs inspired by agricultural forms using tines. Then years later onto beautifully realized Windsors with very few components. They really worked so well. Mine were firmly in the country furniture mould, inspired by the yew-wood Windsors that I was often restoring. Keith was a great man to know and share with.”

In the early ’80s, John became interested in paint, particularly industrial paint. A friend, Phil Craze, an artist and inspiration, showed him the joy of coral and turquoise together. He partnered pigments and created stunning effects. He put the colors onto plywood and made simple, geometric objects. Phil had designed and made the silver gilt lettering for the Book of Remembrance stand John made for Winchester Cathedral.

Paint samples, Hammerite and cellulose, 1982-1983.

“One thing that did come from this commission was that Phil and I were invited to an aluminum anodizing plant to experiment with different effects using color and shape on the raw aluminum,” John says. “This was actually a lot of fun. We kept some of the work, and they kept some for their gallery.”

John tried to do craft fairs, selling things like mirrors made out of thin plywood, but he had trouble selling fine furniture or colorful things. He did, however, successfully sell a cricket table at a fair in the Guildhall Winchester. However, he made it as a joke. 

“I made a small top and then I had three legs coming out of it at odd angles and then an even smaller base so it was actually quite unstable,” he says. “I did the top blue like a sky and I did the legs white in ash and the base green. I got a turned piece of wood and I colored this up red so my cricket table was like the three stumps and a ball in a game of cricket. I made a couple of bales on the base that were knocked off so the guy was out. And it got me on the front page of the local paper. The headline was ‘John Bowls the Maiden Over.’ It was a play on words which in Britain people do a lot and I’ve always enjoyed. A ‘maiden over’ is six bowled balls with no runs made from any of them.”

Mirror frame photographed with the sky, soft maple, green copperas with Indian ink and enamel paint. John says Dexion industrial shelving served as inspiration. 1983.

In 1983, John’s father died, “which was as huge blow for me,” he says. “It was huge.” In his grief he carved a massive head, shaped liked a world, and painted it blue, with rockets going off all over it. 

“My mum said, ‘What are you doing that for?’ And I remember saying, ‘I have just got to do this,’” John says. 

Falling in Love in Paris, Making a Life in England, Moving to the States

In 1984, John went to France. Sue, an American who was in Paris studying art, was standing outside of a hotel on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. They talked. They fell in love. Eventually, John had to get back to England to make some more money. They planned to meet next outside the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. The meeting spot was a lot bigger than they each realized, and they spent a lot of time walking around, looking for each other.

“When we finally bumped into each other I had my one small bag filled with clothes and she had massive amounts of luggage,” John says. “We traveled over northern Italy together, discarding bits of her luggage along the way.”

A simple table inspired by the massive oil platforms on the North Sea, 1985.
A flat-top table base John made during his first trip to the U.S. in 1985. Everything was purchased at a local hardwood store: plywood, yellow pine and maple dowels. The top looked like it wasn’t flat, but it was. John says he was inspired by military aircraft, “the wonder and the horror.”

John and Sue got married in 1987 and moved to Shrewsbury, England, where they lived for 20 years and had a daughter who is now 18.

“I never thought I’d have a child,” John says. “It’s like having a room opened, another room in your life, full of stuff you never realized. It’s an astonishing thing. It’s not really explainable.”

Davenport desk, early Regency design, 1988, commissioned.
A chair based on West Country forms, ash, colored with caustic soda (lye), 1988.
John built three of these chairs. This is the second one and he still owns the first. Yew with burr elm seat, 1988.
Welsh-inspired cricket table, burr elm and ash, 1989.
Windsor chair based on Michael Dunbar’s C-arm design, 1989.

Around this time John got into spoon carving. He liked the idea of creating things with small tools and bits of wood that he could carry around, a traveling workshop of a chisel, small axe and a couple of knives. He liked the simplicity. 

A spoon that John made in the Catskills. Hard maple, 2009.

“I think spoon carving is a fantastic thing for people to do and gain a better understanding of line and form,” he says. “I look at the spoons that people make today and some of the work is just lovely. Wonderful, wonderful things.”

John’s mother died in 2006.

“It was almost inconceivable that my mum died,” he says. “We were very close. She was always very encouraging about whatever I was doing. And she’d always like coming out to places with me and meeting different people. That was good.”

Welsh-inspired 10-stick chair, oak and ash, 2004. “I enjoy this one a lot,” John says.
Gothic-attempt chair, soft maple and yew from the owner’s estate. The chair is situated in Pontesford House, a regency mansion in Shropshire, England. The home’s arch gothic window inspired the back of the chair. “I’m glad I made it,” John says. “It is almost successful, like a lot of things in life.”

John and Sue decided to be nearer to her family so they moved to the U.S. in 2008. They lived in the Catskills for a year and then bought an 18th-century house with a red barn situated next to a picturesque stream in Spencertown, New York, near the Shaker Museum in Chatham. Sue loves to help John with advice on color. 

“There are a lot of great people here,” John says. “I’ve got a couple friends here who I wouldn’t agree with on very many things other than our friendship and our woodwork. They have completely different views from me but they’re great people. It’s an interesting thing to think of the different ways people see things. Celebrate the similarities and enjoy the differences, where possible.”

Photographs Spilling Out of a Book: How ‘The Belligerent Finisher’ Came to Be

John has done a lot of restoration over the years for well-known English and Welsh antique collectors and dealers, including Tim Bowen and Richard Bebb. Tim suggested John send pictures of his chairs to “a lad down here who likes stick chairs.” So, John did.

Nicholson plough plane, restored 2012. This restoration project launched John’s career as a tool restorer in the U.S.

“Many, many years later, I got a phone call completely out of the blue,” John says. “And it was Chris Williams. And he said, ‘Why all those years ago did you send me those pictures?’ And I said, ‘Because Tim Bowen told me you were interested in chairs and I just wanted to share them with you, reach out, for the camaraderie.’ And he stuck them in a book and completely forgot about them. And then many years later, Chris Schwarz came to see him. He was looking at a book and these pictures fell out. And they had a look at them. And that’s how Chris Schwarz heard about me, I think.”

Around the same time, Chris Williams heard about John again through Tim. Tim and Richard had separately been talking about restoration projects John had done and they couldn’t work out how John had done them.

And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“I thought to myself, My god, this could be it,” John says. “We could die from this. I didn’t know what to expect or think. So I decided I’m going to go out and do stuff I really want to do that I put off that I couldn’t afford to do or that I didn’t think people wanted. So I made the chairs that are featured in the book. Starting with the black North Walian four stick chair, and I’m really glad I did that. It’s hard to make speculative stuff and run a business as well.”

John sent pictures of these chairs to Chris Williams who then sent them on to Christopher Schwarz. And that’s how “The Belligerent Finisher” was born.

“Some of them are good I think,” John says, when talking about his chairs. “I’m not vain but I know some of them are good. Because I’ve looked at a lot of stuff I’ve made that isn’t good. I’ve always felt that the only person I’m in competition with is me. I’m inspired by other people and occasionally disappointed by them. But I’m not in competition with them. To create, a person’s got to be honest with themselves, look at something they’ve done, assess it, praise it, destroy it even (this decision is often better slept on), whatever, but really be honest about it and walk away and move on and think about the next thing. You learn from what’s happened.”

Talking about the chairs he’s making now, John says: “They almost frighten me because they’re quite hard to do, to get the proportions together. They have to look right and be comfortable. You know, I think I’ve made two or three really comfortable chairs, ones that you want to sit in and just not move from and a lot that are OK and some that aren’t that good. I have to make all my chairs, regardless of what they look like, comfortable. And that’s not always an easy thing to do.”

John currently has chairs on order. He’s also working on restoring Cesar Chelor planes for a collector and, for another collector, he’s restoring a 1696 handsaw with the help of his friend Tom Curran. Also there’s a rare, small, Holtzapffel miter plane that needs attention. But what he most wants to do is build – and finish – chairs. John recalls one comment he saw in response to his book, from a professional finisher, who said, “When I saw this, I was initially appalled.”

John says, “I love that phrase. He was ‘initially appalled.’ The fact that I made someone initially appalled, I like! But I would also agree with him. He went on to say that now that he’s looked at the book, there are things he wants to try.”

While in the states during Covid, John thought a lot about the places he has loved throughout his life. In his head he’d re-walk the hills and lanes in Shropshire and mid-Wales, and spend imaginary time in the meadows around Winchester. 

“I would think about some of the things I have come across, seen and enjoyed,” he says. “I wanted to get that feeling, that flavor. I wanted to touch that. That’s really why I make those chairs.”

John says the finishing techniques he used on his chairs in the book and today are not an attempt to create fakes. 

“They’re not even copies of antiques,” he says. “They’re interpretations of ideas, ideas of how a chair and finish could be. And some of them are successful and some of them aren’t quite successful. I think the black one, the first one I did that seemed to flow through me, is very, very successful. I loved that. And the green one, the big green one. And there’s a red one on the next page that’s very good. And there are some good effects on the others. I try to get an effect like grading color, like when you see a sky in the evening and it’s changing. That is in my mind, as well as the look of worn furniture surfaces. You see that a lot in England during October and November. The light and the color and the amount of water in the atmosphere. The color and the sharpness— but also the mystery. I’m trying to get that. I’m trying to get a good depth of color. I’m trying to get texture, with the wood having refraction and depth. 

“I just wanted to find something to do,” he says. “That was really important to me. I wanted to find something that had value. And I think I found it. I don’t think I’ve always worked on it. I think I spent a lot of time paying bills. But now I want to pay bills with these chairs.

“Enthusiasm and encouragement. The following was said to me by a woman at a show in Upstate New York, and it still makes me smile and laugh. She sat in the North Walian four stick chair with a worn finish, looked up and said: Harmony for my cheeks. I said, That’s it.”

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Meet the Author: John Porritt (Part 1)

Posted on by Kara Uhl
John Porritt in his Upstate New York shop.

John Porritt, author of “The Belligerent Finisher,” has been designing and building furniture, restoring furniture and tools, as well as making chairs inspired by older Welsh stick chairs and English country Windsor chairs for more than four decades. 

Born in 1953 in a military hospital in Aldershot, a town in Hampshire, England, John was the youngest child of John and Myra Porritt. At the time, his father was teaching at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Growing up in an army family, John moved around a lot, eventually attending six different schools throughout his childhood.

“I’ve always felt slightly removed, not part of any group, an outsider through the years. And that’s OK. It opened my eyes to a lot of things, meeting different people and getting to know some of them. My mother was very supporting and accepting of my brother, sister and I. She was very creative. She understood line and form. My father’s credo was: ‘Be firm but fair’.”

John’s family growing up: His mum, Myra; father, John; older brother, Wilson; and sister, Pam. John is the little one on the right.

In 1957, the Gold Coast became Ghana, gaining independence from British rule. Prior to this, John’s father had been seconded from the British Army to help train the Ghanaian Army, so John’s family had moved to West Africa. 

“Some of my earliest memories are from the village of Teshi, outside of the capital Accra,” John says. “Company Degarti, originally from Liberia, would watch out for me in the garden, pointing out lurking snakes, including a very thin poisonous black one that looked like a boot lace. I  remember him picking me up to get bananas from the trees in the garden, cutting the pineapples growing down low, and us together digging up peanuts – which my mum would roast. Once, I saw Company sit down suddenly, take out his knife, cut into his heel, then quickly sucking at the wound and spitting out the poison from the snake bite. He did get better. What wonderful man with a great name – Company.

“I would see the Hausa men from the north, selling their beautiful carvings door to door, very tall and dark in their immaculate white robes. They moved so slowly, pacing themselves in the heat.

“I remember my family together on a golden, sandy beach, looking off in the distance to a beautiful white castle: Christiansborg Castle. My father wouldn’t take us there. Years later, I found out that it was a slavers’ castle, built for human beings to go directly into the boats to be sent to the slave markets.”

When John was 6 years old, they moved back to England. They lived on the 5th floor of a hotel in Portsmouth, Hampshire. 

“I started to go bald,” John says. “It was something called alopecia. My mom would take me to a hospital to have this stuff rubbed into my hair. They worked out that I was so used to being on the ground in the bungalows that living up high was very stressful for me, or, at least, that’s what the theory was.”

So John and his family moved to Romsey, Hampshire. A quiet boy at the time, John attended church school. The head teacher “…was a bit of a sadist,” he says, “who used to cane certain children regularly.” At just 10 years old, John walked out of school one day, angry that he was about to be caned yet again for something he did not do. Through school, John spent a lot of time in Romsey Abbey, built in the 10th century.

“I remember, at 10, being impressed with the light coming through the windows of the stained glass onto the stone, that soft sunlight and the effects it would make on the building,” he says. “And I loved singing in the choir.”

Broadlands, Lord Louis Mountbatten’s estate, was nearby, so Queen Elizabeth II would come twice a year and attend services in the abbey. During those services, John, a choir boy, would steal glances at the Queen – the head of the Church of England – sitting alone in her pew by the high altar instead of his tucked-away Southampton football program, which was his usual go-to. 

“I remember being completely impressed by the color of her coat,” he says. “Later, I found out that she was dressed by Hardy Amies, and he was known for the cut of his clothes. She had this beautiful blue that she would wear and it was just stunning. She looked wonderful.”

John attended three more schools before leaving at 15. 

“My favorite subjects were history, geography, English and running. Running for me was a chance to get out on my own, with my own thoughts. I was the school cross-country champion. But it was a small school. I was glad to finish school and get out into the world of the late ’60s. 

Although he was a skinny teen, John first found work as a builders’ laborer. In the mid-’70s, he was walking around West Kensington and got a job at Stokecroft Arts making simple pine beds – lots of sanding, gluing dowels and screws.

“It was run by a guy called Bernie,” John says. “Bernie was a great guy in that he gave a lot of people a chance. He had a lot of soul, a lot of heart. He came to England just before the war at the age of 10 on a Jewish Kindertransport from Germany. I remember he wouldn’t get pissed off, he’d be disappointed. ‘Come on, John, you can do better than this.’ He was a great guy. Bernie was a great guy.’”

John moved to Kent with his girlfriend at the time and took a six-month carpentry course at a government skill center in Sittingbourne, Kent. 

“I learned a lot,” he says. “I learned how to handle tools. I learned how to sharpen. The instructor there was a man named Peter Dense and he was excellent. Very small, very quiet. Authoritative but quiet. And for the first two days he gave me chisels and plane irons and told me to sharpen them and I’d sharpen them and bring them back and he’d say, ‘Do it again,’ and I did that for two days.”

Halfway through the course, John split up with his girlfriend, leaving him without a home. 

“I ended up living in somebody’s cupboard,” he says. “In hindsight, it was horrendous.”

“I remember my mum had said to me, ‘What are you going to do? Just find something you love doing. Find something that interests you. Find something to do and do it.’ And luckily, I did. I think about people like Bernie, Peter Dense and later John Price and I’m kind of humbled, really. Decent people who helped me out, great teachers.”

John also spent many of his younger years traveling. For a while, he worked in Germany as a shuttering carpenter, making forms for concrete. 

“I remember Germany in the mid-’70s as quite a place,” John says. “The gaps between the generations, the intensity of it all. At one stage I was working in Nuremberg. One evening I went to the area where the rallies had been held in the 1930s, now completely deserted, listening to Joan Armatrading on my cassette player and enjoying the sight and calm of the willow trees there, wondering about what had passed and all that had happened there.”

At one point John and his crew were sent to Munich, but the directions were incorrect. They ended up at a beer festival and the carpenters from London John was with decided to take advantage of the situation and get absolutely drunk. John decided to take advantage of the situation and visit the state art museum. 

“I was looking at the Blue Rider artists, which included Kandinsky, Franz Marc and August Macke,” he says. “In Germany, it’s Blaue Reiter. Before the first World War, they did a lot of pictures of animals in gorgeous colors and this guy, Franz Marc, did beautiful horses, stunning horses, which seemed to me to be symbolic of freedom and joy.”

John moved back to England and found a job with a company called A.J. Dunnings, working on an interesting site in Winchester complete with a stone barn from the 15th century. Early on John remembers the foreman asking him to rehang some sliding sash windows. John took the first window out, changed the cords, properly cleaned everything, sorted it all out and put it all back together. 

“It’s tricky stuff,” John says. “You’ve got to stretch the rope and get the weights properly balanced.” 

John showed the foreman his work.

“It’s a great job,” the foreman said. “Great job, you’ve done it really well. But there’s only one problem. You put the top sash inside, and the bottom one out. That will let the rain in.” 

John is a wonderful storyteller and most of his life’s stories contain lessons learned, some subtle, some not.

“What I had done was I had gotten completely absorbed in the details,” John says, when telling his sash-window story. “I had forgotten the overall idea, which I think is something that a lot of woodworkers do from time to time. And I think that’s quite an important lesson there.” 

A fellow carpenter, Joe, at this particular job called payday “Golden Wonder Day.”

“I didn’t get what that was about,” John says. “Turns out, Golden Wonder was a brand of peanuts so he was saying, we’d be getting paid peanuts. I like the banter you get with working people. I enjoy that a lot.”

John has worked all sorts of jobs in his life, with all sorts of people. He talks about working in a massive, cavernous room with high ceilings in, he thinks it was, Strasbourg, striking forms and then dodging them as they dropped, “an absolute nightmare,” he says. He talks about unloading a brick lorry where people would chuck bricks, five at a time. They were on the lorry and he was off it – he’d catch the bricks and stack them. One of the loaders once called him John and surprised, John asked him how he knew his name. 

“We call everyone we don’t know John,” the loader said.

John laughs, remembering.

John had worked as a day laborer with Jack Dee, who, at 16 years old, had a deadpan humor that everyone loved. Jack Dee became a nationally known comedian with his own television show, using that same deadpan humor he used on the job site.

And John remembers digging clay for a German potter in West Cork, Ireland, “an unbelievably beautiful area,” he says. It was 1971 and he and friend were hitchhiking through at the time. A man picked them up who turned out to be astonishingly drunk. Chaos broke out when John, sitting behind the man, was trying to get him to stop the car while the man was trying to reach for his shotgun. 

John has stories for days.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Read Part 2 next Sunday (March 12).

John Wilson (1939-2023), the Shaker Box King

Posted on by Lost Art Press
John Wilson outside The Home Shop in 2007.

John Wilson, who unlocked the mysteries of Shaker oval boxes for millions of woodworkers around the world, died on Friday, Jan. 27. He was 83.

Wilson of Charlotte, Michigan, began his career as an anthropology professor, but then became a home builder and professional woodworker whose main line of business was building Shaker oval boxes and supplying woodworkers with the training and raw materials for these boxes (especially the copper tacks that hold the bent bands together).

But Wilson’s career encompassed more than just the beguiling and beautiful boxes. He also wrote extensively about toolmaking and taught classes on a wide variety of subjects, from boatbuilding to workbench building.

John Wilson’s boxes on the cover of Popular Woodworking, August 2003.

The business at the center of it all, The Home Shop (aka ShakerOvalBox.com), offers all the supplies and information that woodworkers need to build the boxes. Wilson retired fully from business in December 2022, leaving Eric Pintar, his long-time employee and partner, in charge of the business.

“John took full retirement… in full confidence that we will carry on with The Home Shop, and I’m ready to live into that,” Pintar said.

Pintar worked for Wilson for 28 years, and began as a shop assistant there when he was 16. In 2004, Pintar became an equal partner with Wilson in The Home Shop. Since the start of the pandemic Pintar had taken the lead responsibility for the output of the Home Shop including the teaching of Shaker oval box classes. With Wilson’s passing he takes ownership of the Home Shop and will lead it into the future.

So the supply of Shaker box supplies is secure for years to come, Pintar said. Still Pintar is humbled by the role he is moving to fill and said he is saddened that it is under these circumstances.

From Professor to Woodworker

Wilson grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., and was allowed full use of his father’s hand-tool workshop. While he studied anthropology at university, he worked as a carpenter on the side. After graduating with a master’s degree, Wilson taught anthropology at Purdue University, Michigan State University and Albion College. Despite his best efforts, a doctoral dissertation eluded him, thus ending a career as a university professor. Wilson then went to work in home construction.

In 1977, Lansing Community College offered him a job teaching furniture design. There was a catch: The class began in two hours, according to a 2007 interview of Wilson by Kara Gebhart Uhl. On his way to class, Wilson checked out Ejner Handberg’s “Shop Drawings of Shaker Furniture and Woodenware, Vol. 1” (Berkshire House). That book, and the course, led Wilson to investigating the Shaker’s oval boxes and figuring out how to make them.

“To be able to take the methods used by the Shakers and share those with others is a very beautiful thing, and in the spirit of the Shakers,” Pintar said. “Before John (making these boxes) was mysterious. He brought the methods and materials to the public.”

Wilson began making the boxes to sell and taught others how to make them in classes all over the country. That led to him starting The Home Shop, a large workshop on his land that he built using mostly recycled materials. The Home Shop supplied makers of Shaker boxes everything they needed to build them, including the carefully sawn wooden bands, plans and – most importantly – the copper tacks.

One of the amazing tack machines at The Home Shop.

In 1991, the W.W. Cross Nail Co. – the last copper tack manufacturer – stopped making tacks. Wilson acquired their machinery and began making seven sizes of tacks and 1/2” copper shoe pegs. The noisy, ingenious machines crank out a pound of tacks in about 15 minutes. In the early 2007 interview, Wilson said he was making about 300 pounds of tacks a year.

Wilson insisted for years on keeping the personal touch with The Home Shop. It was years before they had a website. Orders were taken over the phone and shipped with a bill – the honor system.

The Home Shop also offered classes on toolmaking (planes, spokeshaves and travishers), joinery (hand-cut dovetails, mortise-and-tenons), plus sailboat building and paddle making.

John Wilson & John Brown

I first heard of Wilson by reading the column of Welsh chairmaker John Brown (aka JB) in Good Woodworking magazine. JB took his first trip to teach chairmaking in America in 1997 and taught at Drew Langsner’s school, Country Workshops in North Carolina, and at The Home Shop in Charlotte.

Wilson always used an efficient blend of machinery and hand tools to make furniture. JB, on the other hand, used only a band saw to rough out the pieces and then was passionate (probably an understatement) about using hand tools only for the remainder of the work.

During the class, the men famously butted heads. Though Wilson was hosting the class, he also was a student in it. So when Wilson got behind in his work in the class, he would try to catch up in the wee hours of the morning with the help of some power tools.

JB was furious.

“I received a proper dressing down such as a boot camp sergeant might give,” Wilson told Gebhart in 2007. “I stood attentive like a good solider, listening to a man deserving of respect because of his expertise and experience. I could appreciate his point of view, so passionately given, on the virtue of hand tools while blending that kernel of truth with the mix of tools I had just employed that morning.”

JB also confiscated a micrometer from one of the students and threw it in a lake. 

In the end it all turned out OK, and Wilson ended up making several of the chairs for his family: his wife, Sally, and children Molly and Will.

The “Little House” at right. The Home Shop at left.

Writing it Down

In the early 2000s, Wilson began writing magazine articles and books to help spread the word about Shaker oval boxes and toolmaking. He wrote multiple articles for Popular Woodworking Magazine, which is how I got to know him. Many of his articles are free for the reading here on The Home Shop’s website.

Plus he wrote and self-published four books. Three were on Shaker Oval Boxes plus “Making Wood Tools.” Like his business in general, Wilson made his books with a careful eye to quality with a personal touch – every book was autographed.

I made several visits to The Home Shop to help take photos for Wilson’s articles. I was always struck by how nearly everything there was made by him. I mean everything. He built the buildings, the kiln, the shop, the storage areas. Plus everything inside them. 

His work was always soft and humane. The workshop was flooded with light thanks to enormous skylights (salvaged from sliding doors). I got to stay in his so-called “Little House,” a 15′ x 15′ structure where he lived for 12 years. This building – built decades before the “tiny house” movement – was incredibly well-considered. It felt absolutely roomy and comfortable thanks to his planning and careful construction of every bit.

As a person, Wilson was remarkably generous with his knowledge and his time. He sent hand-written letters (always accompanied by a postcard for The Home Shop). And he has been generous to the craft. His work with oval boxes has launched the woodworking businesses of hundreds of people over the years, and he never sought credit or royalties or anything. He just seemed thrilled that other people enjoyed making the boxes as much as he did.

Thanks to Wilson, I’ve made a bunch of these oval boxes – they are incredible gifts to give. And I couldn’t have done it without him. 

So thanks John, for everything you gave us and more. You will be missed.

— Christopher Schwarz (photos by Al Parrish)

Meet the Author: Whitney Miller (Part 2)

Posted on by Kara Uhl

Read “Meet the Author: Whitney Miller (Part 1)” here.

Whitney at her Lost Art Press book release party, fall 2022.

Whitney Miller, author of “Henry Boyd’s Freedom Bed,” continued looking for a news reporter position while working at Walgreens from October to December 2014, and in December she was hired as Morning Show Associate Producer/Digital Content at Fox Television KRIV in Houston.

“I was a behind-the-scenes journalist so I would write stories,” she says. “And they would let me create videos on their Facebook page. I remember writing a reporter story for Facebook and they liked it so much they let another anchor read the story and aired it on television. I was like, ‘Well, if what I wrote and put together was good enough for somebody else to read, then I should be able to read it.’ I was only there for a year and then I got back on air in another market, which was the normal trajectory of how it should have been. But it was good because I got to see what a big market was like.”

In November 2015, Whitney was hired by KBTX, the CBS affiliate in Bryan/College Station, Texas.

“I loved it,” Whitney says. “I was finally back in the saddle, back where I was supposed to be. I was there less than a year and started anchoring. Then I became the weekend anchor for three years after that. In College Station I became a professional woman, because in that community, they really love their news people. Especially if you’re from Texas, they really embrace you. And I also learned how much I really liked to tell stories. I got to meet so many people who believed in the work I was doing.”

A Maker

Throughout her life Whitney has been the type of person who, if she sees something she likes, she tries to make it before she buys it.

“I think that was grown out of lack, not having enough money to get all the things,” she says. “When I was younger it was friendship bracelets and tie-dyed shirts – just things that everybody made, I tried to make.”

The internet broadened Whitney’s horizons. Online she was introduced to new ways of doing things and while living in College Station, she found a lot of ideas on Pinterest.

The farm table Whitney built with the help of the family owned business, Country Thang Design (pictured above).

“I wanted to decorate my apartment but I needed to do it on a budget,” she says. “So I would look up stuff and I’d be like, ‘Oh! I want to make this farmhouse table!’ I met a family owned business, Country Thang Design, who made farmhouse tables and they showed me how to make one. I remember feeling like, ‘I can do this.’”

The gold headboard Whitney made.

Whitney made her own headboard, and some headboards for friends. She learned how to sew and DIY T-shirts. And then, in 2017, her best friend bought her a Cricut Maker machine. 

Whitney putting her Cricut Maker to use.
Whitney’s decorated door in Cincinnati.

“I have been really crafty since then,” she says. “Every time I get access to a new kind of tool or knowledge, it just unlocks more creativity.”

Whitney sewed this skirt.

Whitney doesn’t call herself a seamstress though. And for the longest time, she has refused to call herself an artist. 


“It’s how I feel about journalism, I know a little bit about a lot,” she says. “Is a jack of all trades somebody who knows a little bit about everything? I’m like a jack of all trades. I like everything. I have tried everything but I have not mastered everything. I think to call yourself a seamstress, to call yourself an artist, you have to know everything about it. I think there’s some doubt there, I’m sure.”

But it’s not a negative feeling, she says. Rather, she has longer preferred to call herself a maker versus someone who is creative.

The rose Whitney would draw over and over again when she was younger.

“I feel like I’m changing that now, now that this book has been created. I would say I’m creative at this point. I had the ability to draw in the past. When I was a kid, I took classes but it was never like, ‘Oh, you’re such a talented artist.’ Back then once I learned a technique of some kind, like these roses, that’s all I would draw. It wasn’t like I was coming up with anything new.”

Now, with the release of “Henry Boyd’s Freedom Bed,” Whitney agrees she’s an author and an illustrator.

“Which is weird, yes, but now I am,” she says. “Now I agree. But in the process of making it, I was like, ‘Uh, but are we? But am I?’ Because the early drawings were trash. It was like, ‘What are those?’”

From The Queen City to The Big Easy

In November 2019, Whitney left College Station, Texas.

“Growth has to happen,” she says. “I got to the point where I mastered College Station. There wasn’t an opportunity to be promoted to the main anchor role. I just knew I either needed to get to a bigger market and continue reporting, or I needed to anchor somewhere. I started looking for jobs once my contract ended. Cincinnati was my next stop.”

Whitney at WCPO

At the time, Whitney, who was hired as a reporter at WCPO, says Cincinnati felt like a wonderful situation. What she did not foresee – nor did anyone foresee – was a pandemic.

“I just packed up my life and moved,” she says. “ I just knew I was about to live my ‘Sex and the City’ life,” she adds, laughing. “I envisioned myself walking down the street next to the stadium holding my cute little dog, Derwin, and some football player, doctor or lawyer was going to stop me and say, ‘Oh my God lets get married.’ None of that happened! None of that happened. And that was very disappointing. Instead, there was this whole pandemic and I sat in the house with Derwin instead!” she laughs.

Whitney at her new job as weekend news anchor at WWL-TV Channel 4 in New Orleans.

Whitney was a reporter for three years until she announced her departure and new job as a weekend news anchor at WWL-TV Channel 4 in New Orleans. 

“I didn’t pick New Orleans, I think New Orleans chose me,” she says.

For more than 10 years Whitney has been a reporter and at this point in her career, she’s ready to grow as an anchor. She entertained several markets but once New Orleans became an option, nothing else made sense, she says. 

“Part of that is the acceptance I feel in New Orleans. The people, the vibe, the culture is just so open. Especially coming from a place where I feel like it’s very closed, people in Cincinnati are tight and I feel like it takes years to be fully accepted there. I’ve made a lot of friends and met a lot of wonderful people in Ohio but that hospitality piece is just unmatched in the South. Nobody can beat that, especially New Orleans. It’s such a place of gathering and festiveness.”

Whitney will be living in the city, about a mile or two away from the French Quarter. Although she grew up in the suburbs and loves a good Target-Michaels-Jo-Anne’s situation, she enjoys the diversity and eclectic atmosphere city-life brings. 

“I’m so excited,” she says about the move. “I can’t wait. It’s literally, it’s a dream. It’s a dream.”

The Magic Mountain

Christopher Schwarz has long been interested in Henry Boyd. Suzanne Ellison, Lost Art Press’s intrepid researcher, began researching Boyd years ago, and discovered a rich and impressive story about an enslaved Black man who bought his freedom, invented a revolutionary bedstead, built a woodworking business that shipped beds all over the country and helped enslaved people escape to freedom.

Whitney took a class at Lost Art Press taught by Megan Fitzpatrick. She built a Dutch tool chest.

Meanwhile, Christopher wife, Lucy May, worked with Whitney Miller as a digital reporter at WCPO. (Lucy is now host of Cincinnati Edition on 91.7, WVXU.) Lucy introduced Whitney to Christopher, and Whitney took a class at Lost Art Press. It soon became clear that Whitney, with her backstory, passion for making and writing chops, was the perfect fit for writing a children’s book about Boyd’s life. Christopher asked and Whitney immediately agreed.

“For the longest time nothing would happen,” Whitney says. “It would just be one sentence on the page, no matter where I sat. If I went to a bookstore, if I went to a library, I couldn’t get out more than one sentence. I would read and read the research and I would try to come up with something and I would just think, ‘How are kids going to relate to this? How can I speak to kids so they will listen?’ And then I went to that mountain, the magic mountain. And the words just came out.”

Whitney has a friend who owns a retreat area in Whitwell, Tennessee, near Chattanooga called Bolt Farm Treehouse. Last summer they decided to meet and catch up. They originally planned to meet somewhere in the middle but after not being able to find a place, Whitney decided to drive and meet her friend in Tennessee. Along the way she saw fields and cabins – landscapes that looked like, in her mind, what the landscape might have looked like in Henry Boyd’s time. And that’s when the trip started to feel like it was meant to be.

“For me, the book writing process was very reaffirming because of how and where and which it all came out. Because it all came out at time in such a calm peaceful place just meant to me that it was meant to be. The reason I was on the mountain was not planned. The timing in which all the things occurred was not planned. Writing the book was not planned. None of it was planned. But when it happened it happened and it was so good.”

Something similar happened while illustrating the book. At first Whitney says she was frustrated and worried that she bit off more than she could chew. But then she put her journalist hat on and her maker hat on and researched – she figured out what she had to do. And then she found herself unexpectedly back at the magic mountain.

“It was another unplanned trip back,” she says. “And up there my creative juices started flowing so I was able to knock out a lot of pages and the timing was perfect.”

In August, Whitney began to feel the pressure of time. She had a big journalism convention coming up, weddings to attend, and her drawings weren’t done. The day she was flying out to her convention in Las Vegas, she had three more pages to draw. The flight was delayed. So, she began working on the pages. As she drew, the flight continued to be delayed. There was talk of cancellation. Whitney kept drawing. And just as she finished her last page, it was time to board the flight.

Don’t Be Afraid to Try New Things

Whitney recently read “Henry Boyd’s Freedom Bed” to kids at the Saturday Hoops program, held weekly at Lincoln Recreation Center in Cincinnati. Teenagers and parents were listening to it, equally engaged. As were little kids. And then a little girl said Henry looked like her dad. It’s happened several times now.

“I mean, I can’t even,” Whitney says. “That alone was enough for me, because you just don’t realize – when I think back to my own childhood, the books that stood out to me are the books that had people who look like me in them.”

Whitney recalls Addy Walker, a fictional character from the American Girl series, and books about Black inventors that her mom would give to her and her sister. 

“I don’t think I ever understood why, but when that little girl said, ‘Oh look, it’s Daddy!’ I thought, ‘Oh, this is why this is so necessary.’”

Whitney doesn’t like to do five or 10-year predictions because life has already taught her that you can’t predict what is going to happen. 

“I couldn’t tell you this book was going to happen,” she says, “I’m always just amazed at the plan God has for my life because I think he just laughs at mine. I just know that I will be successful. I see success in my future, period. There’s no way I can fail. Because even when I fail, it’s not failure. I don’t see stopping. Stopping doesn’t happen over here.”

Whitney has always been positive by nature, something she attributes to both her mom and dad. She says those who constantly try to bring positive people back down to earth live from a place of fear. 

“Being a realist and not having any hope can be detrimental,” she says. “If you don’t see freedom. You are a slave to your own mind. And I’m not that. And I will never be that. I know there’s no limit. It’s like infinity and beyond for me.”

That said, she differentiates being a realist from keeping it real. When speaking with younger generations, she sees that for some, it’s more difficult for them to cope with truths. So Whitney says she doesn’t sugarcoat. But she also doesn’t speak in absolutes. 

“Dreams”

“We live in such a time that anything can happen,” she says. “You can go viral tomorrow for some silly TikTok you did, and then somebody discovers, Oh, wait, there’s some substance to you because they were on your page just looking at the silly little thing you did. We live in such a world where opportunities come at the blink of an eye.”

Whitney also credits the divine.

“There’s no way that I sat next to Lucy, we talked about wood, she introduced me to her husband who is a woodworker, who writes freaking books, you know what I’m saying?” she says. “I take a class and then all of a sudden he says I should write a book. Oh, you think you can draw a book? There is no realism in that – there is no reality in that. That is some hocus pocus shit. That is, literally, Jesus. There is no other way. I was not thinking about trying to write a book. I didn’t plan this. And I don’t take it for granted that there are people who have stories they want to tell and who are really trying to figure out how to do it.” 

Fear, doubt and limiting thoughts, Whitney says, are so often what gets folks stuck.

“I just want people to not be afraid to try new things,” she says. “I think that’s what Henry Boyd did, out of necessity, and I think that’s what I did with my life, too. I figured out a job because I needed the money. I knew I wanted to be a journalist by any means necessary and I figured it out. You can’t be afraid to figure it out. That’s my lesson: Don’t be afraid to figure it out.”

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Meet the Author: Whitney Miller (Part 1)

Posted on by Kara Uhl
Whitney Miller, illustrated by herself

Whitney Miller, news anchor, author/illustrator of “Henry Boyd’s Freedom Bed” and presenter of the video “Make a Swedish Tool Chest,” grew up in Houston, Texas, with her mom, dad and younger sister. Her dad was a “computer doctor” who owned his own business, Millertech, and serviced computers for large companies. Her mom worked in insurance and financial services.

Whitney and her mom

“I just remember her smelling really good, coming home from work and going to work,” Whitney says. 

Whitney
Whitney, with her mom in the background

Whitney laughs, remembering for years telling everyone about how tight-knit her family was, like the family from “Leave It to Beaver.” And for years, they were. Her grandma, a nurse, lived with them for quite some time and took them to a nondenominational church, Christian Tabernacle, every Wednesday and Sunday. 

“I feel like that church was very formative of who I am, who I turned out to be,” Whitney says. “I felt like it was a very non-judgmental-type of church. It was very relaxed. I was always there and always involved.” 

Whitney was involved in choir, church plays, was a youth volunteer at church and attended a Christian school during her elementary years.

Whitney and her mom
Whitney and her sister
Whitney at camp

As a child, Whitney was encouraged by her mom in craft and play; she made sure to keep her girls busy. Every summer her mom would sign Whitney and her sister up for arts and crafts classes, and Whitney almost always chose an acting or drawing class.

“One summer my mom was like, ‘Y’all are not going to be bored this summer,’” Whitney says. “So we go to Hobby Lobby and she bought us this book that had 365 crafts to try, a huge book, and she was like, ‘Figure out what crafts you want to try, I’m going to buy all the materials and I don’t want to ever hear the word bored this whole summer long.’ So for two days we tried as many crafts as we could and then we stopped,” Whitney laughs. “But we always had this book that we could come back to and she was always giving us stuff that we could touch and try and do; I think that’s why I’ve always been curious to try different things.”

Whitney attended the Kitty Hawk Worldwide Convention through her involvement with ROTC.

Whitney switched from Christian school to public in middle school, and remained active in after-school activities. She enrolled in Leadership Officer Training Corps (LOTC, similar to ROTC). Whitney’s mom had been in the Army and the elective had a description for orienteering. Whitney loved the idea of a treasure hunt – using a map and compass to figure things out on her own. Turns out, the course didn’t actually do orienteering at all but the elective did teach her a lot about leadership. So she stuck with it, continuing with ROTC through high school.

The switch from Christian to public school was, in many ways, relatively easy, Whitney says, in part because her parents instilled the importance of self-esteem in both their daughters. In high school, Whitney’s parents divorced, something she didn’t necessarily see coming as a child. Although the divorce didn’t faze her much as a teenager, it was something she says she eventually faced later on, in college.

On a Hustle, Straight Through Grad School

When Whitney was 16 years old, she got her first job, outside of babysitting, at Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). 

“My mom used to call me the ‘snacker lady’ because they used to have these sandwiches called snackers,” Whitney says. “I got hired because this woman was like, ‘I like your smile – I want to hire you. And then she changed the billboard sign outside of KFC to ‘Hiring Smiles.’ It’s a little strange now to think about it,” she adds, laughing.

“I was a clown once. I was a clown,” Whitney says. “But for no reason at all I just felt like I needed the money. I don’t know what I was buying, but I needed money. Someone said, ‘You just have to dress up like this clown and go to kids’ parties.’ So, I dressed up like a clown and I went to one party. I don’t know how much money I got, maybe $50 or something like that, and I never did that shit again,” Whitney laughs. 

“I never did that shit again. These little children – they loved it! But never again! I don’t even know how I got there. Why did my mom let me do that? I was on a hustle. My friends used to say, ‘Oh, you’re a true Jamaican.’ Because I used to have all kinds of jobs.”

It’s a stereotype she says she didn’t mind leaning into because she loved the feeling of being responsible for herself.  “I had a lot of jobs. Especially in college – I had multiple jobs when I was going to school. I just liked to work.”

Whitney didn’t grow up wanting to be an author or news anchor. In high school she loved the TV show “CSI”; after learning about DNA in her biology class, she was sure she would be a forensic scientist.

“And then I would tell my friends I also wanted to be the female P. Diddy because I wanted to be a singer but I knew that singers don’t get as much money as the person who owns the record label so I decided I would own a record label and make my own music,” she says. “Obviously, I didn’t do any of that.”

What she did do was get a free ride to The Ohio State University (OSU) thanks to good grades and scholarships. When she got there she was asked what she wanted to major in – she had no clue.

Whitney at Ohio Stadium on OSU’s campus

“I hadn’t figured that part out,” she says. “A lot of people I was there with were doing communications and I thought, I like to talk.”

As a communications major she found that only a small number of students could join the journalism program. This inspired her and she got in.

“I was like, OK. I’m going to be a journalist,” she says. “And the minute I figured that out I was on it.”

Whitney was a Lantern staff writer while at OSU

Whitney interned at all four major news stations in Columbus while an OSU undergrad.

“You were literally not allowed to do that,” she says. “But I would go to my counselors and I would say, ‘You got to figure out a way I can do this one and that one – I want to do all of them. And I did that.”

Whitney shot her résumé tape on campus. It included a video of her and her friends chasing winter storms.

“And when President Obama became president I stood outside and said, ‘This is a historic day.’ The video of me doing that is hilarious because I look a mess,” she says. “I didn’t know what I was talking about. But I was so hungry to be a journalist. I just remember really, really wanting to do it by any means necessary. I later found out that tape was trash because nobody hired me from it.”

After Whitney graduated from OSU she moved to Cleveland, thinking her tape and Ohio connections would help her get a job in journalism. But they did not. So in 2010, she enrolled in a Master of Arts program in broadcast journalism at DePaul University in Chicago. 

“And that’s when I got a way better tape – and a way better understanding of broadcasting,” she says. “At Ohio State I was learning print journalism. I had all the journalistic ethics but I did not have the foundation for television in terms of delivery and on-camera presence. I was just winging it.”

Whitney loved DePaul’s hands-on broadcast journalism program. There she took classes on how to put a story together and she took an entire class dedicated to creating a tape she could use to look for future jobs.

Angels Filling in the Gap

Whitney graduated with an M.A. in broadcast journalism from DePaul in 2012. At the time, broadcast journalists simply had to go wherever they could to get a job. So she sent her tape everywhere. 

“My professor told me, ‘You just need to show up in these cities and put yourself in front of the news director so they know who they’re talking to and who they’re dealing with,’” Whitney says. “For example, I would call a station in Peoria, Illinois, and I would say, ‘Oh, I’m going to be in town visiting family.’ I had no money either. It was Jesus and friends who would send me $50 to get back to Chicago. I would literally just drive everywhere. I’d go in to these stations and they’d look at my tape and say, ‘Thank you for stopping by’ and I would just leave and nothing would come from it. At all. But I wouldn’t give up.  I just kept doing it.”

Toledo was the last city Whitney tried this in and although that news director didn’t offer her a job, he did critique her tape. 

“He was like, ‘You should move this here, that here, get rid of this,’ and when I got back to Chicago, I fixed my tape and I literally started sending it out again. I got an email immediately because of those changes from a news director in Anchorage Alaska.

After a Skype interview Whitney was offered a job. 

“I called my mom and I was like, ‘I’m moving to Alaska,’” Whitney says. “And she was like, ‘Um, what?’ You could tell that she did not really want me to go but I think she knew there was no stopping me. She was happy for me. She was happy that I was finally getting my dream job because I was living on my uncle’s couch at that point, having quit my job at a bank to search for a reporter gig. I didn’t have anything. I sold my car, packed up all my stuff and flew to Anchorage.”

Whitney says she was more excited than nervous. 

“When you’ve been searching for a job for a long time, you don’t care,” she says. “You just go and get started.” 

Whitney recently watched her old tapes from her time in Anchorage. 

“I was terrible then too,” she says, laughing. “Oh, girl, you could just see how green I was and how I think I’m doing what all news people do. I can see that in my face. I was searching for my voice, my identity as a journalist. But now I’m just me. Before I was definitely trying to be someone else.”

Whitney worked in Alaska for two years. While she says she had a good time and made some great connections, she did find it isolating at times, only visiting home once while she lived there. 

“And they didn’t have a Chipotle,” she adds, laughing. “They didn’t have a Chipotle! What? I got out of there. When my contract was over I was done.”

And then Whitney moved back to Houston.

“I thought I would get a job immediately because I was so good now!” she says. “I thought I was so good at being a journalist and I did not understand that the Houston market was too large and they would never hire someone on-air with only two years of experience.”

At this point, Whitney was living with her mom in a small apartment in Houston. 

“She was getting on my nerves and I was getting on her nerves,” Whitney says. “And I remember I went to Chick-Fil-A, and this is like a month in, and I give them my credit card and they’re like, ‘Um, you don’t have enough money to get this sandwich.’ But they gave it to me anyway because, you know, Chick-Fil-A is like Jesus, they gave me the sandwich and I sat in the car and I just cried and cried and cried. I just wanted a journalism job. It was there I remembered that same person who used to drive to Toledo, who used to drive to all those places. I told myself ‘I just gotta do what I gotta do.’ So I went and got a job at a call center.”

The call center was terrible, Whitney says. She was in training for two weeks. She remembers seeing roaches in the bathroom. 

“I would cry on the way to the training class because I was like, This is not my career! I would ask God ‘why do I have to come here?’” she says.

Around this time she walked into a Walgreens. A friend who used to work there encouraged Whitney to talk to the manager. So she did. She told the manager that she no longer wanted to work at the call center and she needed a job. He agreed to an interview and she showed him her news tapes from Alaska.

“And he was like, ‘No. You need to be on the news. You can’t work here.’ I said, ‘No, I literally can’t buy a chicken sandwich,’ Whitney says. ‘I need to work. Please let me work here.’ He doubled down and said, ‘No. You really can’t work here. You need to be on TV and I don’t want you to give that up.’ And I was like, ‘I will literally never give up trying to be on TV. I just need money to live.’”

The manager finally relented. Whitney applied to be an associate but he gave her an assistant manager position.

“I worked there and he would check in with me often, he’d say ‘What’s going on with you? As soon as you get a job with one of these TV stations, you can just go. You can quit,’” Whitney says.

“It has been that way my whole life. I just like to call them angels. These people who have dropped in to stand in whatever gap that occurs in my life. I know I am completely blessed and I don’t take it for granted. I just know.”

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

Read Part 2 here.