When I was writing my last blog, I asked my dad what his first important tool was, but I guess I already knew the answer. When he was young he would watch his grandfather using big sharp hand planes and bulky machines when making furniture and coffins but what really appealed to my dad was watching Grandpa Orren whittle the dowels with which the furniture was held together. He would sit on a rickety chair in the corner of his workshop holding a stick of wood between his knees and, just with his pocket knife, deftly shave off slices until it was shaped like a perfect cylinder. The quiet, lengthy process fascinated little Wayne. From then on he couldn't wait until he was old enough to get his hands on his own pocket knife.
My dad's first pocket knife was one he found in the trash, one Grandpa Orren had discarded after breaking off one of its folding blades and sharpening the others so many times they resembled shiny flat toothpicks. When he pulled the knife from the trash it had one working blade and a hefty maroon handle. The worn Remington logo stamped into the steel of the blade was still slightly visible. The hinge squeaked as he pulled the knife blade in and out of its handle casing but he was thrilled to have his very own knife.
There is a small building behind my Granny's house. It sits on a slight bank, the open end faces the higher, graveled driveway and the lower closed end faces the branch. Inside the shed, when my Granny still lived there, were blocks of coal stacked into a pile, wood of all shapes and sizes, ones my dad had whittled off when making a guitar, scraps of building materials, and stacks of splintered firewood. To me, that woodshed was stock full of possibilities. I couldn't wait to dig around and find something magical. In Rugby everything is magical if you want it to be, you just have to imagine it. I only had books and two TV channels, around there making your own fun was a necessity. Before me, that woodshed housed my dad's imagination as well. With his new (to him) pocket knife he would choose the perfect stick and whittle for hours on end, eventually perfecting chains from a solid piece of pine, forming a perfect sphere rolling inside a four sided rectangular walnut box. When he was older and his skills as sharp as his blade, he even whittled tiny guitars from leftover scraps from a full size instrument, complete with correctly scalloped X braces and tuners that turned. Apparently doing that is about as difficult as just making a full size one, so that practice was short lived.
Something that is difficult for me to imagine, especially with the current political climate, is that my dad took his knife to school with him. While other kids hid comic books in the crack of their math workbook, my dad whittled under his desk. One thing that made him popular with the other kids in school was that he would help preserve his peer's pencils. Like everything else in Rugby, a store-bought item was to be cherished, reused when possible, and kept safe. Most families could only afford to buy one pencil at the beginning of the school year and students were expected to keep theirs as long as possible. Sharpening a pencil in the sharpener attached to the wall of the schoolroom ground away so much wood the pencils would be shaved to a nub in no time, not to mention the longer point the sharpener made broke easily requiring further attention by the sharpener. My dad would shave a lower angle into the sides of kid's pencils to preserve them longer and make a better point than the sharpener did. He also helped ward against theft by carving everyone's name into the side of their pencil.
I'm not sure I can remember a time when there wasn't a little Old Timer or Case knife in my dad's pocket. When I would ask for change for a candy from Osborne's store, or to scratch off a lottery ticket, he would dutifully reach into his pocket and hold its contents for me to choose from. I always had to sift through his shiny, claw-shaped guitar picks and a pocket knife to get to the coins I was after. His pockets are ones that are actually used, holding the contents of his day, whereas mine are typically bare except when they occasionally house a Burt's Bees lip balm that almost always ends up melted in the dryer.
When we would take walks in the woods behind Granny's house, stepping around cow pies as we wound our way along a cow path, Daddy would find things to show me or make for me. Sometimes he would make me a whistle from a maple sapling. He would choose a branch about the diameter of an index finger, and with his knife, cut it at an angle from the tree, then whittle a small notch into the bark. Just a few inches lower, he would run the knife edge all the way around the stick. If the stick was struck with the butt of the knife all the way around just so, the woody layer of bark would slide off of the stick. Once the top of the stick was exposed, my dad would carve a deeper notch where his original notch had been, whittle a flat edge from the notch to the angled top of the stick, then replace the ring of bark to cover his alterations. Forcing air through the top of the stick, over the flattened sapwood and out through the notch would create quite the screech which obviously filled five year old me with glee. The whistles he made would sound high or low depending on how big around and long they were. I liked the pencil sized ones as they had a high strong pitch when I blew into the end. Aside from being able to cut errant threads, plastic tag holders and open packages with ease, the best thing about having a dad who always had a knife in his pocket is that there was always a possibility he would make me something magical no matter where we were or what resources were available. Actually, that might just be my dad.
Another thing made with Wayne's pocket knife that fascinated me growing up was the hooey stick. It is a simple toy, using a small straight branch or pencil, with notches whittled out of the sides and a little propeller nailed into the end. Running a pencil or similarly shaped stick across the notches would cause the propeller to spin. That in itself is really cool, but when my dad would say Hooey! magically the propeller would reverse in it's rotation and spin the other way. I would stand mesmerized, especially when the Hooey stick would listen to me and reverse when I called out it's name. The wonder and excitement that others show for the Hooey stick is my dad's favorite part, I am sure. He can't get enough when people stand perplexed when that little propeller listens to them. While I now know there is a bit of a secret to go along with its magic, I will leave that behind the curtain for now and just sit here with those warm memories of watching the Hooey stick go.
Maybe I am not as skilled with a knife as my dad, but I am learning. I can make an ok Hooey stick, perhaps a bit more obstinate than my dad's and only listening some of the time when I request it to reverse, but maybe like guitar building, it is in my blood, and it just took a little longer for it to come to fruition than it did for my dad. I prefer my little gold plane for shaping a neck where he prefers his knife, but I am coming to appreciate the slow diligence required for wielding the tiny tool, it just comes less naturally to me. The magic I created with those cast aside pieces of wood in Granny's shed were more...let's say imagination based, since nobody ever gave me a knife willingly after an ill fated brownie recovery mission where I stabbed one into my thumb requiring hours and hours of tendon and nerve reconstruction surgery, a multitude of stitches, not to mention the months of rehab and three permanent scars. Even though my dad was able to tangibly create his magic and I simply imagined mine, the cycle is spinning, the magic of Rugby still flowing. My pocket knife has pink polka dots though.
