Registration opens tomorrow at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking (MASW) where I am teaching a weekend class in 2023 in making a staked stool.
This is a rare instance of me leaving the nest to teach. But I’m doing it for three reasons.
Marc readily agreed that all proceeds from the class, including students’ tuition and my instructor fee, will go to the Roger Cliffe Memorial Foundation, which funds scholarships for woodworking education.
Marc (and Kelly Mehler) were the first two schools that took a chance on me as an instructor. I was a terrible teacher at first. In fact, if you were in my first class at MASW I owe you a personal apology and probably a T-shirt. Yet Marc kept me on there for 10 more years.
This is Marc’s 30th year in business, and he asked many of his past instructors to come back to teach a class. How could I say no?
The class is Oct. 14-15, 2023. All the details are on the MASW website. Hope you will consider joining us.
This is New Street today. Boyd’s house would have been on the right.
Editor’s note: “Henry Boyd’s Freedom Bed” by Whitney LB Miller is the true story of an incredible 19th-century furniture maker who fought for his freedom, invented a renowned (and patented) bed and helped many enslaved people escape to freedom. For the last 25 years I have walked the same streets as Boyd and thought a lot about his neighborhood and his life.
Almost every morning I take a long walk – usually four or five miles – into a different district of Covington, Newport or Cincinnati. I especially love to go down the brick alleys that have been unchanged for 200 years (and are in better shape than the asphalt main roads).
But the most interesting days are when I visit Henry Boyd’s neighborhood, which is almost unrecognizable from when he lived there in the early 19th century. Though I am always looking for clues from his time.
Boyd lived on the east side of downtown Cincinnati. And starting about 1834 his address was on New Street. New Street definitely lives up to its name, even today. Everything on it is new. There are no houses or period buildings. It’s all just parking garages that service the big downtown firms, such as Procter & Gamble. The company’s world headquarters is just a couple blocks south.
St. Francis at the end of New Street. This would have been a frame building.
When I walk down New Street, I look for any landmark that Henry Boyd would recognize. There are a couple. First is St. Francis Xavier Church. Established in 1826, this church stands on Sycamore Street and looks down New Street. When Boyd left his house for work, this was likely the largest structure in his neighborhood.
The building would have looked different then. The current St. Francis is a huge masonry structure. The original one was a frame structure that was moved to this location on wheels.
The Deco structure in the center of the image is likely where Boyd’s factory was.
When Boyd went to work, he likely walked north up either Sycamore or Broadway streets to his factory at 8th and Broadway. This intersection is one of my favorites in town. After reading all Suzanne Ellison’s research on Boyd’s business it’s unclear exactly where his factory and other buildings were located, as it seems they were on both sides of Broadway. On one side of Broadway is my favorite building in the city, the Cincinnati Times Star Building. It’s an Art Deco masterpiece now used as a government building.
Some older buildings (on the right) on Broadway Street.
Across the street are a couple factory buildings that have been converted into trendy office buildings. One is from the early 20th century. The other is earlier, perhaps much earlier. Unlike New Street, this area has some very old buildings that Boyd might recognize if he were alive today. A stretch of buildings on Broadway look almost untouched from the early 19th century (you can tell by the lintels).
As I walk up and down these streets I always wonder if there was any business here he would have visited. And that always takes my mind to Arnold’s Bar & Grill. It’s at 210 8th Street East. It has been in operation since 1861. The buildings that make up Arnold’s date back to the 1830s and were a feed store and barbershop (and whorehouse).
Boyd most certainly would have walked by Arnold’s. It was only a block or so from his factory. But would he have been allowed in at the time? Unlikely. (Today Arnold’s is an inclusive gathering spot for people of all stripes and colors. We’ve had many beers there.)
The front of Arnold’s, which hasn’t changed much.
Most of Boyd’s neighborhood has been demolished to make way for an interstate, a casino and far too many surface parking lots that are virtually unused.
But I do take heart at times as I walk back to Covington and tread over Cincinnati’s public landing on the Ohio River. This area on the riverfront looks barren at times, but it has been the heart of the city’s riverfront since at least 1825. Boyd was here looking for work when he arrived as a free man in the city. And almost every day something still happens at the public landing. A steamboat arrives and disgorges passengers. A historic ship berths there for tours. The police launch a search for someone’s body. It’s an almost unchanged piece of flat land from the 19th century, sloping gently down into the Ohio River.
This is where Boyd began his life as a free man. And this is where I can close my eyes and really look for him.
James Krenov, the well-known furniture maker born in Russia, author of the hugely influential “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” for 21 years the lead instructor of what is now the Krenov School in Fort Bragg, Calif., and who died at 88 in 2009, was not always revered. When my late wife, Carolyn Grew-Sheridan, and I met with him in 1974, in a suburb outside Stockholm, Sweden, he had been rejected for a teaching position at the School for American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology and thought himself to be in exile. His wife, a native of Sweden, was supporting them as a high school teacher of economics. His professional world was a tiny basement with small machines and a bench where he made his signature handplanes.
While cleaning out several old boxes, I recently found notes from our trip to Scandinavia. Carolyn and I had taken a six-week backpacking and youth hosteling trip to visit woodworkers, museums and schools there. We had just finished a 14-month apprenticeship with Karl Seemuller and Andy Willner at the Peters Valley School of Crafts in New Jersey. Arrangements for that placement, which saved us huge tuition bills, had been made by Dan Jackson, a creative genius who died far too early.
On May 15, 1974, I wrote the following short notes without the benefit of a tape recorder:
A four-and-a-half-hour visit to a meticulously maintained shop. A chance to hear master cabinetmaker, James Krenov, formerly of Seattle, talk about wood, furniture and, most importantly, people. We made the appointment on the recommendation of the editor of FORM magazine, Kirstin Wickman.
I wrote that “he lives in a pleasant house 25 minutes outside the city. Huge high-rise complexes built for the commuter rail line surround his detached house and others in the area, but the overall feeling in May is of light and sunshine. He met us at the train and immediately showed himself to be on the defensive. He asked me why I was wearing hiking boots, ‘those heavy things.’ Well, I didn’t want to tell him that I used to own a pair of shoes like his Wallabies, but they hurt my feet. So I just said that my boots were comfortable for our traveling.
“This short, strong, grey-haired man then led us toward his house while our attempts to make conversation failed. But that didn’t stop him from talking. It simply meant that there was no exchange, at least for a while, until things warmed up. We were offered the hospitality of cake and coffee and a tour of his workshop. We found his basement space to be immaculate, with perfectly sharpened tools and handmade planes. Everything was in its assigned place. He had a few of his pieces there, including a clock with one hand.
“Krenov appeared to Carolyn and me to be working on a delicate scale with discipline and consistency. He made only minimal, preliminary sketches and did not believe that woodworkers have to know how to draw.
His opinion was that “they can respond to the wood. Too many students get lost in their drawings and find themselves only able to think on paper.”
During our conversations he apologized for his being antagonistic, but said that he didn’t know how people felt about him, or his methods and style of work. He was tired of being a curiosity. He was defensive. We heard (and he confirmed) that in Scandinavia young people were not interested in training to be cabinetmakers. New companies like IKEA were being created. (We brought home as a souvenir the first IKEA catalog). He felt that he himself needed only simple tools and machinery. He loved and treasured his wood collection.
He was not accepted for a teaching position at the School for American Crafts at RIT after teaching and auditioning there. He came to the conclusion that the school drove out the sensitive students, was trying to be everything to everyone and, as a result, was not serving its purpose. The curriculum was not congruent with his philosophy and techniques.
He was critical of other prominent furniture makers and not content within his own work. Krenov singled out Art Espenet Carpenter, founder of the Baulines Guild in the California Bay Area. “Beauty doesn’t come by the pound,” he said. In addition, I noted that he called Carpenter’s work “amateur dabbling” and regretted that Carpenter had been such a big influence on the West Coast.
He felt that Wendell Castle, also teaching at Rochester and who was becoming a towering presence in sculpture and woodworking, was ignorant about wood as a material and a bad teacher. “Castle made too many Wendell Castles,” he said. He emphasized that when teaching at RIT he wouldn’t even grade some of the student projects that were Castle-influenced. He accepted Castle as a sculptor but he thought that he was not responsive to the wood itself and that he should be working in another medium. This was in reference to Castle’s stack-laminated and carved work. (Krenov was unaware that Castle received an MFA in cast bronze sculpture.)
He was fond of my informal mentor at the Philadelphia University of the Arts, Dan Jackson. He thought that Jackson had a lot of sensitivity and ability. At the same time he said that the school encouraged too much originality and “razzmatazz.”
When talking about his own work he mentioned the importance of achieving “the singing drawer” in a cabinet. The fit of the drawer in the finished cabinet. He thought this was a crucial quality that needed be discussed and understood. For him a completed piece has to be good from every side and should not contain plywood. For a woodworker the “joy is in taking a piece completely through each step,” in contrast to industrial line production where the employee has to do the same thing over and over.
He thought that the quality of tools in Europe and the United States was declining (this was in the early 1970s) so he recommended Japanese saws, which were then new to us. In addition, he had a collection of older tools and plane irons. The specialty tool makers that we know today did not exist then.
It was his experience after being in many shows that in Scandinavia those awarding commissions did not often think of ordering a cabinet for a specific space. Usually such work went to weavers or painters. However, Krenov felt that in the United States a buying public for works in wood could be developed if the buyer was able to appreciate the cost of the time in the work.
For someone whose worldwide fame was still in front of him, but very close, we noticed how worried he was about how much longer he would be able to work. He worried about his strength and alertness, even though he was only 53 when we met him.
Unfortunately, we took no pictures of our visit with James Krenov. In the months that followed we finished our second summer as assistants in the Peters Valley wood studio At the same time, Carolyn, who had worked for three years after college as a book editor, attempted to organize Krenov’s thoughts and notes into a publishable format. Eventually she sent her files back to Krenov, who found a publisher for his best-selling “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook.” We started our Grew-Sheridan Studio in San Francisco. It seemed to us to be the cheapest city in the country in which to find working space. There was no “tech.”
Some notable Krenov quotes from the visit:
“Americans want to design a piece on Tuesday and have it ready on Saturday.”
“They want originality. There is none.”
“Craftsmanship has its own justification”.
“Craft must be able to offer something that factories cannot.”
“It is a fallacy to say that a craftsman can make a better joint than a factory.”
“There is a need to explore questions of value and aesthetics.”
“I enjoy teaching.”
“I don’t feel that the best craftsmen will survive but the most aggressive will.”
“I don’t like curves that are just part of a circle. Too boring.”
“Asymmetrical work should be subtle not forceful.”
“No tool is a magic key.”
We had been traveling to see “Scandinavian Design.” Krenov thought it was “living on its past laurels.” IKEA was just getting started. The future of studio furniture making was in the United States.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks…so yeah – I’m being a bit lazy with this week’s post. Today, we’ll take a look at a tiny collection of, well, a couple of tiny things and a few teaching aids.
Starting from the front left, we have calipers inspired by those in the Studley’s tool cabinet – a commemorative tool from Lost Art Press upon the release of “Virtuoso: The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley” at Handworks in 2013. We sold only 50 – so if you have a set, you’re one of the lucky few.
Behind that is the far-too-nice-to-throw-away wee box that Chris’s “Unturned Pencil” came in (the maker would no doubt appreciate your noticing the Robertson screws).
Then it’s on to the IBEX violin plane that someone told Chris he couldn’t live without. Turns out he could – but it looks cute on the shelf. Not as cute, however, as the Bern Billsberry teensy coffin smoother (for which we unfortunately seem to have lost the wedge).
Behind the small planes we have a few cutaway views of joints. The round one is inherited from Jennie Alexander, and shows the interlocking rungs that are a hallmark of her chairs (you can learn all about them in “Make a Chair from a Tree“). The rectangular ones are to show students that drawboring a mortise-and-tenon joint really does work (so many skeptics about pre-industrial woodworking technology!).
Plus a few larger tools – a Wayne Anderson sliding bevel gauge (it’s a gorgeous tool – and worth a closer look).
And finally, we have a scrub plane made by John Wilson, of Shaker box supplies fame. I seem to have inadvertently, uh, permanently borrowed it circa early December 2017. Oops.
– Fitz
p.s. This is the sixth post in the Covington Mechanical Library tour. To see the earlier ones, click on “Categories” on the right rail, and drop down to “Mechanical Library.” Or click here.
Writing “Workshop Wound Care,” a field manual that’s part of Lost Art Press’s pocket-book series, combined two things Dr. Jeffery Hill enjoys and loves: medicine and woodworking. Hill, an emergency room physician and active woodworker, organized this 184-page book so you can resolve common workshop injuries quickly. The book is knowledgeable yet also exceedingly accessible, which is important when you’re feeling a bit panicked. Hill writes as if he’s talking to you bedside, and his manner is one made up of no-nonsense intelligence and education with a bit of empathy and humor. That ease of talking to folks during emergencies big and small comes naturally to Hill – it’s a skill he’s been working on since he was 16.
Finding Mentors in a Small River Town Emergency Department
Hill was born in Madison, Indiana, a small town of about 12,000 people situated along the Ohio River between Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati. His mother was a school teacher who taught French (and Spanish in the bookends of her career). His father worked for the Indiana Department of Mental Health, first as a case worker, then as a district and regional manager.
Hill’s grandfather was a pretty successful carpenter and furniture maker, and Hill still owns a couple of the pieces he made, including a small school table that now has a place in his daughter’s room.
“It’s really nice,” Hill says. “He did a lot of work within the community, making things for churches, general carpentry, that sort of thing.”
Hill’s grandfather passed away when Hill was still fairly young.
Hill became interested in medicine as a teenager and in high school, he began volunteering in the emergency department (ED) of King’s Daughters’ Hospital and later working there as an orderly.
“The doctors I encountered there were very impactful,” he says. “I really became interested in medicine in general and picked it as my ultimate career path.”
Hill’s educational path is an interesting one. Emergency medicine (EM) residencies are relatively new in the broader field of medicine. University of Cincinnati’s (UC) EM residency, founded in 1970, is the oldest in the country. According to Hill, prior to EM residencies, a lot of doctors in communities were internal medicine or family medicine doctors who also worked in the ED but lacked in the specialized training necessary to deal with a wide range of emergent conditions.
Back to King’s Daughters’ Hospital: Among the many impactful physicians working in the ED at that time, Hill particularly remembers Dr. Joe Beaven and Dr. Barrett Bernard, who saw a teenager who had an interest in medicine. They talked him through cases, telling him what to pay attention to, how they were sequencing what they were doing, and showing him how to take care of a lot of patients at the same time.
“I still remember them drawing anatomy lessons on the bed sheets in ink to teach the patients what was happening to them,” Hill says. “I imagine it really pissed the hospital off,” he adds, laughing. But that kind of care and way of practice, which he witnessed as a teenager, really fed into Hill’s psyche as he embarked on his own medical degree. In addition to being valuable role models as clinicians, Beaven and Bernard were also role models as educators. The lessons Hill learned at King’s Daughters’ Hospital linger today, as he teaches his residents and as he wrote “Workshop Wound Care.”
A Clinician Educator
Hill knew he wanted to attend medical school; emergency medicine in particular called to him.
He attended Xavier University in Cincinnati from 2000 to 2004 where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Sciences. From 2004 to 2008 he attended U.C. College of Medicine and earned his Doctor of Medicine. He then stayed on at U.C. for his residency training, following which he became a Medical Education fellow, earning his Master of Medical Education from U.C. in 2014. Since graduating fellowship, he has been an assistant residency director in the department of emergency medicine at U.C., an associate professor of emergency medicine, and an attending physician in the emergency department.
As assistant residency director, Hill supervises the department’s weekly Grand Rounds conference, considered “the cornerstone of resident didactic education” with both residents and attending physicians present. These weekly sessions involve simulations, case presentations, and lectures. Hill also mentors the journal club and is the founder and one of the chief editors of the department’s education blog, Taming the SRU (SRU stands for Shock Resuscitation Unit and is colloquially pronounced as “shrew”).
“It’s a great outlet for the residents to try their hand at academic writing,” he says. “It covers common procedures and conditions and literature, and includes weekly summaries of our rounds. It’s an awesome educational tool and a durable collection of all the teaching we’ve done, the Grand Rounds since we started. So if you’re on shift and a student has a question, you can look up and find where we’ve covered it before.”
Much of Hill’s work in emergency medicine has been focused on education and improving the teaching experience.
Since, as he states, “students engage when they’re more ready to engage,” he has sought to find ways of teaching that are adaptable to the variable work hours of his learners.
Finding Balance in a Busy Life
“One of the great things about emergency medicine is the opportunity to wear a bunch of hats,” Hill says. “It keeps things fresh.”
On a typical day, Hill might start out wearing an academic hat, attending meetings and working on academic papers. And then he might switch to a clinician’s hat, working a 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift. And then he’ll switch to his household hat, taking care of things at home.
Hill says while the field is challenging, there are tricks to not burning out. One of those is understanding the task-switching nature of ED medicine and bringing that task-switching nature to his everyday life.
“That’s how I get things done, essentially,” he says.
Emergency medicine has also taught Hill how to better relate to people.
“I think that emergency medicine is very much a people-person type of field,” he says. “You would expect us to be extroverts and we’re not very extroverted. But the ER makes you rapidly establish a relationship with people.”
This way of working, having to facilitate relationships with strangers in an instant, has helped Hill read and understand people in ways he didn’t imagine. You gain a lot of empathy for people, he says. You see a lot of folks who are going through some hard times.”
Woodworking’s Longitudinal Focus
Hill’s interest in woodworking grew later in life.
“I always liked to do things with my hands,” he says.
He took a woodworking class in high school, which he says he really loved, but it wasn’t until his residency that he picked up tools again. He and his wife, who he met in high school (they have a son, 3, and daughter, 8, “and they’re both awesome,” Hill says) had their starter home (a beautiful century-old house) in Pleasant Ridge, just north of the Cincinnati metro area.
“It needed some renovations and so I had to figure out how to do some things,” he said.
First up was an inset bench in their kitchen to give the family a little more seating.
“It’s fine,” he says. “It’s not put together appropriately. I used whatever wood I could find at the hardwood store because I didn’t know any better.”
Hill says he was inspired, in part, by Christopher Schwarz’s “Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”
“If you have something in the world you need, it’s great to make it,” Hill says. “And I learned I was able to make things as exactly as I wanted them and needed them.”
That project led to other projects, learning more about woodworking and watching a lot of joints being made and cut with hand tools on YouTube. Hill bought a small library’s worth of books and read them within a span of a year. He created a Rolodex-like collection of home resources, in the form of books, articles and videos, he says, so that he could solve problems as he encountered them.
There is a reason “Workshop Wound Care” is straight-up problem-solving. He wrote the type of book he wanted to add to his Rolodex collection of resources in his home shop.
Hill also loves cooking and gardening. This year he grew cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce and all kinds of peppers. Together, these three things are his biggest hobbies, yet they all share a common similarity – they are all hobbies you can lose yourself in, he says – especially woodworking.
“Emergency medicine requires deep attention to detail but not quite as much as some other medicine specialties,” he says. “I focus intently on something for a short period of time, shift to something else, and then repeat that a hundred times a day. Woodworking requires a longitudinal focus. I basically stay there and work hours at a time without realizing time has passed. I’m completely focused on that and I completely let go. Gardening is less so. It’s pulling weeds. But I grow for myself. I enjoy the process of starting something off and seeing that it grows.”
Dr. Hill’s woodworking shop is split – his machine tools are in his garage and his hand tools are in his basement. His first big project was a Benchcrafted Split Top Roubo workbench. It was a multi-month-long process.
“I had a joiner but it was very small,” he says. “I basically used hand tools and handplanes to true all the surfaces before I put it through my planer. I tend to build things that are too big. It’s very refreshing to build things that are smaller.”
He has a long wish list of things to build, one of which he just recently crossed off – a beautiful stick chair. While working on it, he enjoyed the same problem-solving aspect of woodworking that he enjoys when working in the ED.
“In a lot of fields, a patient presents with a known problem,” he says. “But in emergency medicine, the problem is figuring something out with the tools you have. It’s very engaging and fun.”
How does he have time for it all? Balance.
“All that just comes from prioritizing your time and being efficient as much as possible,” he says. “And I try to get better at starting projects and finishing in a reasonable time frame. And just making the time for it.”
The Lessons of Life
Hill says that while working in the ED does teach you the good and the bad of life, it’s an honor to take care of people who are very ill.
“Life is nasty, brutish and short,” he says. “People have terrible things happen to them: cancer diagnoses, car accidents, trauma of some kind, through no fault of their own.”
At times he has to compartmentalize the things that happen at the ED. Doing so helps him better appreciate the time he has outside of work. But he also recognizes that you can’t be scared of life. He still drives on the road, he says, even though he knows – and sees the aftermath of – terrible car accidents that happen every day. And he still enjoys woodworking, even though machines are powerful and hand tools are sharp.
Hill recently posted a picture of his nearly finished stick chair, soaking in the evening light, on Instagram. He wrote about the finish he used – one coat of Real Milk Paint Co. Barn Red, one coat of Arabian Night and two coats of Peacock. He said, “Probably burnished a bit much before top coating with two coats of shop finish. At the end of the day I’m happy with the finish and learned some lessons for the next project.”
Hill shared pictures throughout his stick chair-building process. Progress shots, successes and minor setbacks, intermingled with pictures of produce from his garden, his kids – just life. It’s all learning. As a skilled educator, he understands that. Working in both his home shop and in the emergency department, he knows that sometimes, life can be easier with a manual, whether it’s an explanation drawn in pen on a bed sheet, a YouTube video or a little red reference book you can quickly grab if you’ve accidentally hammered your thumb. And that’s why he wrote the latter.
