Daddy had a Shopsmith
I never knew my birth father. My parents split before my first birthday. What followed was a sequence of prospective stepfathers, mom’s boyfriends, really, each of which I quickly dismissed as not being dad material. Invariably, soon after my unspoken choice, Mom decided they weren’t husband material either.
Then, when I was seven, a very different person entered our lives. He was tall and strong of intellect and character. Although he was only with us for a few years before he succumbed to leukemia, he was thereafter my Dad, and he provided the basis for the person that I wanted to be when I grew up.
By profession, he was an architect, but beneath all that, he was an incredible artist.
While I enjoyed seeing the output from all of his art, the one that hooked me was woodworking. He set up a small shop underneath our house, and populated it with a workbench, a reasonable assortment of hand tools, and one fascinating piece of woodworking machinery…a Shopsmith.
A Shopsmith, as I remember it from around 1954.
If you’re not familiar with it, think of a Shopsmith as the multitool of power tools. A basic frame and motor could be configured with a range of snap-on powertools, including a table saw, bandsaw, lathe, drill press, horizontal borer, disc sander, strip sander, over-table shaper, and under-table router, and more — all powered by the same motor. He could reconfigure it from one tool to another in a minute or two. I was hooked.
He allowed me to watch, but I was told that I could not touch the system until I was twelve and, at that point, he would teach me how to use it. Unfortunately, he passed in my 11th year, but by then my love for woodworking was ingrained, and as soon as I could, I began building-out my shop, and have been spending spare time there for more than sixty years. Initially, my skills were drawn from what I remember from watching him, but in later years, I began to build on that experience by watching videos and reading “How-to” books on furniture making, and so much more.
Today, when I’m confronted by a problem, I still fall back on the old solution
WWDD— What Would Dad Do?