Daily News

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

This was my dad’s shop. He had the right side of the building. Here the plate glass windows are boarded up, but they looked out to toward the north and west. (The building faces west.)

A Father’s Day column:

THE CARPENTER

The saw’s teeth kept getting caught in the wood.

“Pull your arm straight back,” my dad told me.

The board wobbled; forty pounds of girl wasn’t enough to hold the piece of wood in place. Determination couldn’t overcome a lack of muscle and weight.

It was easy, of course, when Dad stood behind me, his left hand holding the board steady and his right hand on mine, guiding the saw.

He showed me how to start the cut by pulling the saw backward, toward me, slicing the edge first, following the straight pencil line I had drawn on the wood. He explained that a person has better control over the blade when pulling than pushing it.

Fathers, parents, are built-in role models. It’s an inescapable position. They may not think that we, as children, listen, but we do. We observe, we absorb, we learn.

My dad was a carpenter. When he graduated from high school in the mid 1940s, he built wooden truck beds for a business in Pawnee Rock. A few years later he opened his own shop and became a cabinet maker, doing custom woodworking for others.

The front windows once displayed a wooden farm that he built.

He had a woodshop on Pawnee Rock’s Main Street. This red brick building offered a large work space. Plate glass windows looked out toward the north and the west.

Dad worked numerous jobs during my childhood. He was a school bus driver, a relief rural mail carrier, and a sexton for several cemeteries. But his main job, his passion, was woodworking.

As a youngster, I spent a lot of time in his shop. I was often in Dad’s charge, which probably decreased his productivity level by about 50 percent.

While my mom was working and my brother was learning his addition facts, I hung out with Dad, inhaling the odor of turpentine and freshly cut sawdust.

I was grateful for that pervasive sawdust. It made me feel useful; my job was to sweep the wood shavings from the concrete floor.

Dad let me build things myself. I could use anything from his box of scrap lumber. I’d grab a saw or a hammer and nails and have at it.

When I wasn’t creating some odd thing, I watched Dad. On a bookcase he was building, he’d use a nail set and drive nails below the wood’s surface. He’d cover those holes with wood putty then sand them down.

Sanding was always on the agenda. Sometimes he used the electric sander, sometimes a sanding block, progressing from coarse paper to a fine grade. When he was done, the wood felt as smooth as the inside of my arm.

Work for him was in the details, making things look nice, meeting his own high expectations for each job. And if something didn’t go right, he’d say, “Oh, fiddlesticks.”

My dad was the woodworking project leader for 4-H and when I was a teenager I built a cedar chest. The county fair was in August, so the work was done in the heat of the summer.

I sanded that thing silly. On the larges pieces of cedar, I stirred up dust with the electric sander. On the small pieces I sat outside his shop in the shade using a block of wood wrapped in a piece of sandpaper.

Once the chest was put together, it was time for the finish. At dawn I’d walk the two blocks to Dad’s shop (he was already there) and I’d add a coat of varnish before the day’s heat turned the varnish to a mess of goo.

Each evening, I’d go back to the shop and sand the chest again with fine paper, preparing it for the next coat of varnish.

I still have that cedar chest. And I still have my dad. Plus a million memories.

Surely I was something of a pest, a girl who asked a hundred questions a day, but never did I get the impression that I was in the way.

In his shop, my dad showed me how to hammer a nail and how to saw a board. But the most important thing he showed me - was that I mattered.

***

Cheryl Unruh writes Flyover People, a column about Kansas topics, published every Tuesday in The Emporia Gazette. Copyright 2008 Cheryl Unruh.

Filed under: Kansans, columns, life on the ground on June 10th, 2008