A Little Green Table

As I have started Shagbarq everyone kept asking,” When you are going to tell your story?” well here is an attempt to do just that. Just as in everyone’s life there are little insignificant events in that forever shape the path you walk. As I reflect these are the events that have shaped my woodworking path.

When I look back it is hard to say when I started woodworking because in my mind, I guess I always have. If you ask my family, they will most likely say woodworking started with my Grandfather and a little green table. My Grandfather was in construction most of his life and during WWII he enlisted in the Army Corp of Engineers and served in Europe during the war. According to him his claim to fame during his service was not what he did in Europe but that he built the form for the concrete steps at the Pentagon. By the time I started forming memories of him he had retired to a little shop in his garage. In that garage as he built a judge’s bench for the local magistrate is where I built that little table. I was probably 9 or 10 at the time and it is not much of a table but from that moment my Grandfather named it Tom’s table. According to my father any time he needed a table he would cry out “Mother, get me Tom’s table”, why he called my grandmother “Mother” I will never know.

My second event can be attributed to my father, as a young child I was forever building or taking apart something. This was usually to the detriment of my father’s tools, lumber stock, and fasteners; enter Kodak salvage.  Imagine as a kid rolling up to a lumber scrap yard with a large trailer and then have your father simply say, “Fill It Up”. With a simple set of hand tools and a can full of old nails I now had all the things a child needs to construct an A-1 fort. As time went by the forts got bigger and better, but sometimes the neighborhood kids would come by and tear them down. According to my father when this occurred, I just grabbed my tools and with a little smirk rebuild. As he reflects back he thinks the neighborhood kids were actually doing me a favor.

Though the years I never strayed extremely far from construction, focusing mainly on remodeling and the later to the finish carpentry aspect of the business. As my career progressed from carpenter to foreman, I started building my own shop, this gave me freedom to explore other areas of carpentry and to develop my own style. Then one of life’s tragedies happened, I lost the entire shop to a fire. Not to sound cliché but out of the ashes started a new aspect of my woodworking. Thankfully I was insured and the policy allowed me to not only replace the equipment I had lost but change the style of some of the equipment I had lost, this was when I bought my first lathe.

A few years later after I rebuilt my shop, I became a construction superintendent specializing in custom home and large high-end remodels. This allowed me to take personal control over some of the more interesting aspects of the work and soon not only was I building the cabinetry projects, but I was getting paid for it. As that happened my own shop started being productive and not only was I able to sell and build custom cabinets my skills on the lathe started to improve. Eventually I found myself flooded with wooden bowls of all types, it was then I found out that you could only give so many away to family and friends. I turned to a fairly new artist co-op store located in my village and discovered that people were interested in my wooden bowls. As I was discovering different projects that I could sell at the co-op life changed again, this is when the housing bubble popped.

I found myself transitioning into a traveling superintendent, the work was still in the housing industry but in the commercial side of that industry. The new positioned offered more money, but the tradeoff was more pressure. Unfortunately, the method I used to relieve the pressure, my wood shop, was also gone because I was now on the road. Do not get me wrong being a traveling superintendent had its perks; I was able to experience different cities such as Pittsburgh and Orlando many others when I was not working. Life got a lot better when my soulmate and confident decided to join me on the road but still the pressures of the job and being away from friends and family took their toll. As Kristy and I traveled back north after the conclusion of the latest project we discussed the possibilities of finding a position that did not require travel. Little did we know that the decision was about to be made for us, we arrived north in the middle of January and by the end of January the nation was starting to shut down due to Covid-19. Almost all the construction projects that were scheduled to start had been canceled and that combined with our discussions as we drove back north another conversation started; not just with Kristy and I but also internally. Naturally, I turned to my shop not just to relax but also to think. But as I worked life gave me another one of those littles pushes as it had in the past, my lathe broke.

Now I knew I could not live without a lathe and I started researching new lathes and their new features. I quickly learned that my old lathe was a dinosaur. One of the largest issues that developed was that the new lathes weighed considerably more than my current lathe. Currently my shop was located upstairs in the barn, but the new lathe could not be located there due to the weight. At the same time, I had taken some completed projects down to the now not so little artists co-op and rediscovered that people where still interested in my work.  Now Kristy and I were faced with a decision, do we build a new shop downstairs in the barn or just simply fold everything up and find another construction job.  Just as other people in my life had given me a small push Kristy was about to give me another one. She simply said, “Your retirement plan has come early, now is the time to take your shot.”

Well to summarize, not only did we buy a new late and build a new shop, but we also learned how to build a website. It has been difficult, confusing, and exhausting but then it would not be worth doing unless it was. After what was to me a lifetime of use by my grandparents, that little table was returned to me. Over time it has been painted multiple times, reinforced with braces, and secured with screws by my family but it is still called Tom’s table. Maybe that table foretold my future and maybe not, but just like that table, life has painted me multiple times and my family has reinforced me with little nudges along the way. I guess it is safe to say that my journey to what we call Shagbarq all started with a little table.