Category: When I Was a Boy

Funk & Wagnall’s New Encyclopedia.  Not World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica; we couldn’t afford those. We bought ours in the late 1970s or early 1980s with points, stamps, or some such thing from shopping at Winn Dixie. It took us two or three years to get the whole set. I was constantly afraid that they would stop the promotion before we got them all. Each time we had enough points to get a new volume, Daddy and I would sit and read it cover to cover. That was what passed for entertainment when I was growing up. Apparently, Daddy and I were really bored, so we started quizzing each other about information in each volume just to see if the other had really read it all the way through.

In addition to the Funk and Wagnalls collection, we acquired a world atlas at some point during my childhood. Ever since then I’ve been fascinated with maps. As a kid I would often trace the roads of the U.S., dreaming of road trips far away from Rabun County.

Now, what with the Internet and Wikipedia and all, hard cover print encyclopedias have gone the way of the wood console television. Our set of encyclopedias  are still at Mama’s house in the specially built bookcase that Daddy made just to showcase our 1980s wealth of knowledge. I’m remodeling her house right now, and I’m trying to decide whether to pack them away. So far, I can’t bring myself to do it. A lot of work went into licking all those stamps. Maybe they’ll make a comeback one day. And I think we still have a console television somewhere. A black and white television at that. After all, we were the last family in America to get a color television, but that’s another story.

I owe my woodworking life to George Lucas. Yes, George Lucas. Or more specifically, I owe it to seeing the original Star Wars movie in 1977. While I look a boyish twenty-nine, I was actually five years old when the epic space opera hit the big screen. As an only child, I had enough toys to play with, and I had several Star Wars action figures bought at Harper’s Five and Dime. However, I really wanted a Star Wars playset. Specifically, I coveted the playset of the cantina in which Han Solo had the shoot-out. But, I grew up in Rabun County in the 1970s and 1980s. We were poor. Daddy has been a lifelong woodworker and I was always in the shop underfoot from the time I could walk. He did what any responsible parent back then would have done. He pointed at the scrap wood heap in the corner, handed me razor sharp hand tools and an electric jig saw and told me to build my own. Did I mention that I was five? Now we don’t let our kids outside without hand sanitizer and bubble wrap. Despite setting the stage for a trip to the emergency room, I made it through the project without any blood or smashed fingers.

I spent weeks working on that playset and ended up making a second one immediately afterword. I still have both. All of my friends who had the real store-bought one thought mine was the coolest thing ever. I believe they were just jealous that Daddy turned me loose with power tools while we were in kindergarten. It was like having Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor for a dad.

That early woodworking project planted the seed for a lifelong love of wood. A year or so later, I decided that I wanted to be a rock star and needed a guitar. Or at least a ukulele. Me and Daddy sat down and looked through the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and of course, he decided we couldn’t afford one. You guessed it… Build it yourself. I believe we got a book from the library and got ideas on proportions and made a Frankenstein ukulele type thing. Daddy used to make recurve hunting bows, and he braided different thickness pieces of bow string for the instrument strings. He helped me out and we had lots of fun building it. Too bad that I have the distinction of being the only person on his side of the family who has zero musical talent.

I have gone through a whole lifetime of trying new hobbies, but always kept woodworking. My skills progressed from the playset and ukulele to the point that I became a semi-professional woodworker and luthier. I’ve made too much furniture to count, and as a luthier I’ve made guitars, dulcimers, ukuleles, mandolins, banjos, and even a violin. Daddy is seventy-five years old and still in the shop with me when his legs let him stand for that long, and we have a whole list of projects we hope to build.  May the Force be with us.

Daddy has been a lifelong carpenter, and I basically grew up in the business, with him dragging me to the jobsites on school vacations and weekends beginning when I was around nine or ten. I started out just picking up scrap lumber and cleaning up around the site, but by age twelve he had me doing “a man’s work” with him. Luckily, he also paid me wages accordingly, so I had plenty of spending money.

Many, many characters worked with Daddy through the years. For a while Daddy worked with a legendary (and infamous) mountain man named Larry Whitmire. Larry was a true character, quick to laugh and one of the best pranksters who ever lived. We deer hunted with Larry and his buddies, and it was definitely an experience. A big guy with a long beard and shoulder length hair, Larry looked the part of a mountain man, and usually kept a Ruger .44 Magnum revolver within reach. I remember him once shooting his television with it due to a poor reception. Of course, he also once used the front bumper winch of his truck to winch the truck up into a tree just to see if it could be done, so the television incident was fairly tame.

Another guy who worked with Daddy and Larry was a character named Rodney Henslee. He looked like a Lynyrd Skynyrd roadie and drove a vomit green AMC Gremlin, but he had a heart of gold, occasionally taking me on motorcycle rides at breakneck speeds on gravel roads on his CB750.

Continue reading “Painted Into a Corner: Workin’ With T. Weller and Uncle Buck”