Carver's skills keep
rare product in high demand
The
Myrtlewood Master
BY:GARRET JAROS
For the Headlight-Herald
GARIBALDI — When Richard Stanfill left a successful career as a junior executive at Freightliner Trucking and moved his wife and five daughters to Netarts — and no job — he says any doubt about an occupation never interfered with his vision for the future.
One visit to the log-strewn Netart’s beach was all the then-37-year-old, accustomed to managing millions of dollars of inventory and purchasing, needed for inspiration.
That was 35 years ago.
“I was sitting on the beach, and I was an inventory specialist and all the inventory was free,” recalls the 72-year-old master woodcarver, laughing. “So with free inventory, I stood a chance of making some money, didn’t I?
“And I was so well trained by such a great corporation that it didn’t make any difference what I did the rest of my life. I was going to be successful.”
Now, in a shop best described as a beaver’s Shangri-La, Stanfill demonstrates how to shave a last-of-its-kind myrtlewood bowl on his perfectly tuned 1920 Porter lathe. Wearing a bib of wood chips and a fedora, he works his homemade chisel against the flesh of a bowl with hands steady as a surgeon’s.
“Don’t mind
my shop,” he says with an all-encompassing wave at
the forest of wood around him. “I’m a wood man.
When you come in, I’m deep in wood. Most customers
who come in here say, ‘I’ve found the motherload.’”
His daughters phrase it a bit differently.
“My children say if I don’t get rid of all this wood before I die, they’ll dig me up and kill me. And they’re serious.
“But what a fun occupation, huh?”
Stanfill says he didn’t truly know what he was looking at that day on the Netarts beach because he knew nothing about wood. But that didn’t stop him from opening the Netarts Table Factory and learning everything there was to know about his new crop.
Now he can ID a tree from 100 yards and use words such as ribbon, flame, fiddleback, bird’seye and quilt to describe the finer qualities of wood.
“The highest-valued burl from a redwood tree is called lace,” he says with a gleam in his eyes. “When you see a full-lace redwood, you just say, ‘Wow!’ because it’s taken so many hundreds of years crushed under so much weight to make wood like no other.”
His daughters phrase it a bit differently.
“My children say if I don’t get rid of all this wood before I die, they’ll dig me up and kill me. And they’re serious.
“But what a fun occupation, huh?”
Stanfill says he didn’t truly know what he was looking at that day on the Netarts beach because he knew nothing about wood. But that didn’t stop him from opening the Netarts Table Factory and learning everything there was to know about his new crop.
Now he can ID a tree from 100 yards and use words such as ribbon, flame, fiddleback, bird’seye and quilt to describe the finer qualities of wood.
“The highest-valued burl from a redwood tree is called lace,” he says with a gleam in his eyes. “When you see a full-lace redwood, you just say, ‘Wow!’ because it’s taken so many hundreds of years crushed under so much weight to make wood like no other.”
BY:GARRET JAROS
For the Headlight-Herald
©Headlight-Herald
January 2, 2008
Richard
Stanfill shaves a myrtlewood bowl on his 1920
Porter lathe that he says is as steady today as he
day it was built. If pressed, Stanfill could turn
out 100 rough bowls in a day.
To the
uninitiated, burl is a dome-shaped growth on the
trunk of a tree that resembles a wart. The rich
grains of a tree are only enhanced in its burl.
A myrtlewood burl bowl generally remains fewer than 48 hours on Stanfill’s and wife Patricia’s showroom floor in Garibaldi. And competition to get the now-rare wood is fierce.
“The trouble with getting hold of a full-burl bowl is that foreign companies are paying 35 cents per pound, soaking wet,” he explains.
A myrtlewood burl bowl generally remains fewer than 48 hours on Stanfill’s and wife Patricia’s showroom floor in Garibaldi. And competition to get the now-rare wood is fierce.
“The trouble with getting hold of a full-burl bowl is that foreign companies are paying 35 cents per pound, soaking wet,” he explains.
BY:GARRET
JAROS PHOTOS FOR THE HEADLIGHT-HEARALD