A Boat Story Part II Woodbury,

I used more Bondo on this project than I would have liked, even though I love the smell of Bondo in the morning (It smells like Victory!) The back side of the flooring material had relief grooves every 8 in. or so, which worked to my benefit when bending it, but which had to be filled before I could fiberglass. Then after glassing it, there were voids here and there that needed to be filled, then sanded again, then I used an automotive sandable primer, then more bondo, then another coat of resin. I'm sorry to say I don't have pictures of that phase of the project, but the pictures I took early in the project were part of my self motivation regimen; I would take new pictures into work every couple of days to show the slackers at work what I was doing at home. By this point, I was in so deep that i needed no other motivation than the approaching deadline I had set for myself (Apr.1) This being my wife Judy's birthday, as well as the time when the stripers show up in the Delaware, My intention was to name the boat Judy April (cause April's her middle name as well). My last boat, which I didn't build, was named Emma Nevada, my daughter's poetical name, and I got some grief from her about not calling this one Emma Nevada II. Tough luck, little girl. As it became apparent that i was to miss that deadline, April Fool became a more obvious choice for a name. Ultimately, and for reasons you can probably guess, the boat was named April May.

Anyway, once I was satisfied with the surface of the outside, it was time to paint. I ordered some expensive copper laden marine bottom paint for the bottom, but I was having a hard time choosing a paint for the sides that would be durable and waterproof enough. I considered automotive paint, but it's very pricey, and is another two part product, and I wasn't real keen on trying that out for the first time on this boat. On a trip to the Farm store (still love going to the farm store) I found the aisle of Tractor and Implement paint. It's oil based, which is increasingly hard to find anywhere, and obviously intended to be durable, since what gets more abuse and exposure that tractors and implements? The color I chose was John Deere Green, but when I got it home, I decided it was a little mossier than I was looking for, so I doctored it with black pigment, resulting in just the forest greeny color I was looking for.

Then it was time to turn it over, and see what we had.

Not Bad. A couple coats of marine spar varnish on everything

Regretfully, I have no pictures of building the fore deck, the kind of hood that you can see in the finish pictures. It involved making two curved frame members, then laying on of the same flooring material I used on the sides. The original plan has no gunwales (pronounced gunnels), which is the capping on the sides of the boat, and I wanted some on mine. I had made the tops of the side supports wider than in the plans, just for this reason; to give me something to screw the gunwales to. At the front, around the deck area, I used brass screws with brass finish washers, but on the rearward part, I countersunk the screws and plugged the holes with oak plugs. Because of the curve of the boat, I had to use 1x8 oak on the sides in order to make the 3"wide gunwales using only 2 pieces per side. I laid the 1x8 in place and traced the contour of the side, then cut it on the bandsaw, and finished it with my trusty#20. Then I just followed the curve with a divider, and cut out the other side.

I was now in the "cook until done" phase of the project. There wasn't much in the plans that would help me now. Since I had cut out the stern early in the project, there was a problem where my gunwales met the stern. I tapered the sides of the boat down a bit toward the rear so that they were 3/4 below the top of the stern. I had cut out the support brackets shown in the plans, because they were a nice graceful ogee shape, and I kind of liked it. I joined these to my gunwales, and then mortised the stern to accomodate them, then sanded everything again and put on a couple more coats of marine spar.

p>The seat supports are just 1x2 oak routed round on two edges and screwed into the side suppoirts, pretty much like in the plans. The seats are made from 12" oak stair treads. For the floor decking, I found some 5/8 x 1 1/2 pressure trated material at my local home despot, stained it with deck stain. Put on the Hardware, and this baby was ready to go.

The Sawmill Down Jersey (Bayville)

Years ago, I was working at the old Sheraton Hotel at 17th and JFK, and one of my coworkers was a big old maintenance man named Bill McC. Bill was a jovial giant, not an intellectual one, and was prone to using the same jokes endlessly, which sometimes, and in his case, has the effect of making them funnier each time they're repeated. Every time someone would enter the lunch room, Bill would cry out ' Look at the head on that!' and everyone would laugh, but no one louder than Bill himself. He had a jailhouse tattoo on his right forearm that said "BOB" in crude letters. He made no attempt to hide it, but I never heard anyone ask him about it.
One of Bill's previous jobs was as a guard at the old Eastern State Penitentury, and was there when Willie Sutton was incarcerated there. Mr. Sutton was probably the most celebrated bank robber of the 20th centuary, and a crackerjack escape artist to boot. He escaped from Eastern State while Bill was a guard there, and he told me they picked Willie up in a bar on Fairmount Ave. a couple blocks away, sitting there sipping cold ones, waiting for them to show up. Eastern State was supposed to be escape-proof. Willie had just wanted to show them that it wasn't.
But Willie Sutton's most famous quote was in response to an interviewer who asked why he kept robbing banks. "That's where the money is,"he replied.

So it is that if you make things out of wood, sooner or later, because of price or quantity, or to find an exotic species, you will end up at a sawmill. That's where the wood is.

In my case, I was looking for Holly, which is plentiful on the stump in South Jersey, but almost unavailable in lumber form. I'd heard of it's remarkable light, even color, and its workability. I don't remember what project I had in mind when I was looking for it, maybe to make a miniature model of the HOLLYWOOD sign out of it, just to make a pun in wood. I remembered passing a sign that said "Sawmill' on Rt 47, on one of many trips to the shore. Most of the time I would take Rt 347, the new bypass, but often would take old 47 past the state prison in Bayville, because it's actually shorter, and much more scenic.
So one Saturday morning, I talked my son Travis into going down there to see what we could find out about the sawmill, and the availability of holly.
We turned off Rt 47, just past the prison and just past the "Sawmill sign, onto a narrower road or driveway, which gradually got even narrower, and eventually gave way to gravel paving, and then to dirt. Soon it had become two dirt ruts, with foliage closing in to the point where it was brushing both sides of the truck. Off to one side sat a derelict London double-decker bus, whose origins and arrival in this place we would puzzle over years later. But we saw a clearing up ahead, and since we couldn't possibly turn around at that point, we pushed on.

When we got to the clearing, and got out of the truck, it took a couple minutes for our eyes and our minds to adjust to what we saw. There was a saw, the type you see in old cartoons, where the villian ties the damsel to a log, and a huge (in this case, 6 foot) saw blade slices dangerously close. It looked to be a hundred years old, but had obviously been kept in working order. There were piles of logs, not recently cut, and dozens of junk cars. Two tiny children ran barefoot onto, under and into the cars, involved in some game of their own device, until one of them noticed us and ran into a trailer calling for"Daddy!"

But before Daddy came out, all we could do is stare in astonishment at what stood behind the trailer. It appeared to be an 80 or 90 foot boat, built of steel plates, and, most remarkably, with a gap in the middle, creating what was in fact two boats, one with a stem, and one with a stern, connected by some type of apparatus and rods and such. A huge banner was draped across the whole thing that read "The John Birch Society.

The John Birch Society was created at the height of the Cold War, a paranoid anti-Communist group whose mission was to warn the underinformed masses of America that the Communists were a secret brotherhood of some sort, whose goal was to steal everyone's refridgerator. I thought it had probably ceased to exist after the people of the Soviet Union threw the Communists out of power in a bloodless revolution in the polling booths, thus tarnishing some of their conspiratorial luster. Apparently not with this bunch.

When "Daddy" came out of the trailer, he asked us our business in a thick Australian accent. When I told him, he answered' Oy blieve Oy've got some 'olly 'ere," and proceded to jump, barefoot, mind you, over the junk cars, over piles of logs, like a demented wood sprite, until he finally called out from the distance, "Right here! Yessir!"
When he climbed back, I asked him about price, and he said I would have to ask the owner about that, he just worked there. The owner was away.

It was the ownwer's ship, he told us. He planned to sail it around the world spreading his message of fear and suspicion. Its unusual construction was due to its design as a wave powered, self charging electrical ship, run by batteries that would be charged by the wave motion rocking the two halves, moving the generators that were attached to the connecting arms. There were only two problems that I could see: that a ride on that boat would be a trip to hell, sure to give the saltiest dog on the sea a case of the heaves. Also, laws of physics being what they are (immutable and stuff) it's unlikely that you could generate more power from the waves than it would take to overpwer them.

So we left, both quite satisfied by the adventure, and we reminisce often, to refresh our memories of one of the most surreal mornings either of us has had.
I spoke to the owner by phone the next week, he gave me prices that i thought were too high, or else quantities that I couldn't imagine using. Fifteen years later, the sign for the sawmill is still there. I don't know whether the sawmill is, or the people, but I know for sure that the boat is still there, maybe in overgrown brush, but there was no way to get it out...the area was landlocked, and no truck big enough could get back there to pull it out. But I've heard of no Communist enclaves forming in the pines of South Jersey, so its effectivemess as a propaganda tool is beyond dispute.>

Time Travel

I've had the good fortune to have spent much of my professional career working in historic restoration on private homes and museum houses, and besides the enjoyable nature of the work itself, it's satisfying to feel that your work will continue to be preserved, having become part of the historic fabric of the building.

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But my favorite benefit of doing this type of work is the sense of communication with earlier carpenters across time. There's a lot of investigation, sometimes formal and sometimes casual, that is always a feature of historic restoration. You can observe the processes of earlier workmen through the marks on the wood, signatures behind trim, and other evidence that they have left of problems that needed to be addressed and the solutions they came up with, and with that growing familiarity comes a sense of being there with them.

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On one occasion, which was not even an historic job, I removed some trim in a house on Delancey St., and found the carpenter's name and the date; Nov 19, 1963. I wished I could talk to him to warn him that in three days, JFK would be assassinated, but if he could get the authorities to detain Jack Ruby for a week, he could possibly prevent 50 years of conspiracy theory.

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We like to feel that there's a sense of permanence to the things we build, but the earlier carpenters seemed to know that someone would be along later to tear down or take apart their work. In several circa 1900 homes in the Philadelphia area, for instance, I've found a brand new Indian head penny under a leg of trim, that was surely the last piece put up on the house, and must have been a tradition, just as I'm sure that only carpenters, then and now, were aware of the practice.

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On an c.1840 house at 15th and Pine, I took down a damaged plaster ceiling, and a stack of religious leaflets and magazines came down on my head, My apologies to the well meaning tradesman who left them there 150 years earlier for the purpose of my salvation, but even that didn't give me religion.

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A few blocks away, I opened another ceiling to put in a skylight, and something caught my eye when I stuck my head up above the plaster. It was a small parcel, exactly the shape and size of a stack of bills, wrapped in newspaper, and tied up neatly with a string. Well, everyone who works on old houses has thought about, and heard stories about, finding a stash of money, and that's what was going through my head as I carefully and painstakingly untied and unwrapped the fragile parcel. Several minutes later, somewhere, there was a headstone shaking from the laughter of a long buried plasterer, because what I learned about his day was that there were no bathroom facilities available to him on the job, so he did his business on a newspaper, wrapped it up and tied it with string, and tossed it up where no one would find it, at least for a long, long time.

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When I was working on the old bank in Salem that I wrote about, I removed a piece of baseboard behind where the teller counters had been, and found a quarter from 1869. I couldn’t help but imagine how frantically the teller who dropped it had searched for it, possibly staying late, looking everywhere on his hands and knees. It was probably a half day’s pay back then, and if he managed to keep his job, he probably looked for it every day. Maybe after a couple of years he would still find his eyes roaming around the perimeter of the room when business was slow at the counter. I validated his honesty about a hundred years too late to benefit him.

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So I always try to sign my work somewhere where only a carpenter of the future will find it. Something like :

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Nevin Fahs

Installed this door and trim Aug 4, 2009

Weather was warm and clear

Do you know who Sarah Palin was?

Catsup

Unemployment gives you time to do things you've never had time to do, whether you like it or not. I was laid off this spring for the first time in 25 years (thanks, W.) So my garden this year is the best I've ever had, because I had the time to prepare the soil, cultivate and weed like never before, and basically fuss over it. The result has been a tomato harvest that I can barely keep up with, having eaten and given away as many as I could. Sadly, you only get to taste a real tomato in July, the rest of the year we eat things that resemble a tomato, but lack that burst of aroma when you cut it and the explosion of flavor when you taste it. To have to throw them away was more than I could bear.

So yesterday, inspired by a reference to homemade catsup, I decided to make some. It took all day, though not all my attention. Starting with 10 pounds of tomatoes, I ended up with one pint of admittedly very delicious catsup, that is as different from the bottled variety as a July tomato is from a February one.

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The City of Salem,where I worked on the building I previously wrote about, was once a thriving little city of 9,000 happy people, thanks to catsup. That part of South Jersey was famous back in the day for two things; tomatoes and glass, and both enterpises thrived there because of the nature of the soil. Sandy soil being good for tomato growing, and the high silica content of the native sand being optimal for glassmaking.

Salem benefitted from this when Heinz built a catsup factory there, and Anchor glass built a bottle factory next door to make bottles for the catsup.

Then, the factories closed, about 20 years ago. The only remaining business of any size there is the nuclear plant, one of the oldest and cited as one of the most dangerous, for that reason, in the country.

Among some of the residents there is still a strong sense of civic pride, particularly pride in Salem's history. It is one of the oldest in the area, as old as Philadelphia. The Salem oak, which shades the graves of Quakers long gone at the Meeting House, is estimated to be 600 years old, with branches as big as regular trees.

The historic community and the city itself went to the trouble and expense to fund the job my company did, and there is no shortage of volunteers to staff the visitors' center they have in place there. And those volunteers will talk for as long as you want to listen about Salem's storied past. Like how, in 1820, Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson stood on the courthouse steps, and ate a tomato in front of an amazed crowd to prove that they were not poisonous, as had been the common belief.

But since the two plants closed, unemployment in Salem has hovered around 30%. For 20 years.

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When I was working in the attic of the municipal building one day, a siren started sounding, low and slow at first, and reaching a cresendo that had the rafters humming and vibrating to the point that I concluded that the siren must be on the roof above me. Holding my ears so they wouldn't start bleeding, I scampered downstairs and outside. Looking up to the roof, I could see nothing, but the noise was deafening. Looking at Main St., all I saw was the usual assortment of depressed, disheartened and disabled Salem residents, shuffling about on errands of no purpose other than to give them a feeling of purpose. None of them seemed to even hear the siren, much less be alarmed by it.

I hurried over to the nearby coffee shop, where I'd gotten on speaking terms with the woman who ran it. This is no easy feat in this part of Jersey, where people won't admit to recognizing you until the 4th or 5th time you've introduced yourself.

She told me the siren was at the nuclear plant, 3/4 of a mile away. I asked her what it meant, and she told me they test it every once in a while. It had to go off for a continuous 3 minutes for it to be an actual alert, and this one had only lasted...2minutes and 50 seconds, maybe?

So that explained why the people on the street had shown no reaction. But I was left with a disturbing question;

Would they do anything different after three minutes? Having stuck with Salem this long, where would they go?

Salem reminds me of a proud old woman, living in a hovel, eating crackers and cat food, who puts on her one remaining dress to go to church every Sunday. She takes a couple aspirin for her arthritis and takes her hat out of the hatbox she keeps it in to keep it pristine. Then she puts it on her high held head and walks out the door, to show the world she's just fine and dandy, thank you.

Woodbury Train Station Part I

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My first encounter with Woodbury, NJ was while I was employed by Theo. Nickles, Construction, doing the exterior rehabilitation of the Hunter-Lawrence House, which serves as the museum for the Gloucester County Historical Society.

The Hunter-Lawrence House, Woodbury

(One of its former inhabitants was James Lawrence, who famously cried "Don't give up the ship" from the deck of the U.S.S. Chesapeake in the War of 1812). We repaired the cornice brackets, the gingerbread around the 3rd floor window, the shutters, etc, and while working there, I started to fall in love with this little town; a year or so later, Judy and Travis and I moved moved here. Our other two kids were born here.
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Six years later, I took a job with Restoration Carpentry, Co. and by total coincidence, one of the first jobs I did for them was the rehabilitation of the Woodbury train station. For the duration of the job there, I had a 3 minute commute, which is as good as it gets, when you hate commuting.

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G.G. Green is a major figure in Woodbury history, and he commuted from coast to coast at one point, by rail.

He had moved to Woodbury in 1872, at the age of 30, and bottled and sold Patented medicines such as Green's August Flower" and "Dr. Boschee's German Syrup," becoming a millionaire in a few short years. In an attempt to bring culture to the humble residents of Woodbury, he built them an Opera house. The opera never caught on here, however, the Opera house itself still stands on Broad St. Having been through various incarnations, it awaits redemption and restoration through some miracle of public funding, barely staving off the forces of reclamation and redevelopment. Just this week, there were some developments, but the danger in turning the rights over to a private entity is the danger of expense overruns leading to eventual condemnation Stay tuned:

http://www.nj.com/gloucester/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1249966515228950.xml&coll=8
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G.G. Green travelled to California, and fell in love with the young culture there, as well as with the native architecture. His son built a house on the lakes in Woodbury, that, if not designed by the famous Arts and Crafts architects Greene and Greene (Coincidental names, eh?) was certainly heavily influenced by them, the closest approximation I've seen on the East Coast.

Green's son's house

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G.G. himself built the Hotel Green in Pasadena.

The Hotel Green
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So G.G. began going back and forth between Cali and Woodbury, and to make the travel as comfortable as possible, he had a private railroad car constructed, fully appointed with the comforts of home. Local legend is that when G.G.was in Woodbury, local residents were welcome to board the railcar, and marvel at its luxuries, while it was parked at a siding of the Woodbury Train Staion. The gatehouse to Green's Woodbury home is within spitting distance of the station, and although big enough and ornate enough for a large, pretentious family, merely guarded the driveway.

G.G. Green's carriage house

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What remains of the original mansion is rumored to be in the center of the Catholic school built on the site, swallowed up, but preservred, although I haven't been able to confirm that.
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When we arrived to work on the station, it had been out of service as a staion for 20 years or so, and had been minimally maintained by Conrail, whose workers had once used it as a yard office and break room, but had stopped using it even in that diminished capacity. The roof sagged and leaked, windows were broken and long painted shut, and the structure on the first floor was in danger of collapse from fatigue, rot, and water damage. The roof line of the platform aprom was as wavy as spagetti. Its condition only hinted at the glory days when G.G. Green parked his car there, or when it was one of the quaint stops of the Cape May line, carrying Philadelphians and others to the shore every summer.

To Be Continued

Woodbury Train Station Part II

Having become a local history buff after moving to Woodbury, I was really honored to be working on the Train Station. Not only did G.G. Green's endeavors, both financial and personal, find their epicenter here, but it was the site of whistle stops by by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, W.H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson (both as Gov. of NJ, and as Presidential candidate) and many others

It was the site of an historic train wreck, in 1904, that had farmers and their families coming to town for weeks to view the wreckage. The wreck happened just past the station, which cand be seen in the upper right of the photo.

The train station richly deserved restoration, and credit must be given to the Woodbury Old City Restoration Comittee (WORC), whose efforts led to the matching grant funding from the NJ Historic Trust, that made the project possible, and to Shirley Sharkey, whose alliterative name was a source of endless fascination to my metronomically named daughter, Emma Nevada. Shirley acted as liason between the committee and the construction crew, and always impressed us with her efficiency and charm, as well as her dedication to the project.

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Our first order of business was structural stabilization. Some rafters needed to be replaced, some needed to be braced, others sistered, in order to straighten the roof and prepare it for the considerable weight of the new slate roof. The slating itself was performed by a local roofing company, pro bono, as I recall, which was a very generous contribution.

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The first floor was most in need of structual repairs. Slogging about in muck, we dug footings for the posts that would support a new main beam down the center, then sistered or replaced all of the floor joists.

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The bottom two courses of clapboards were carefully removed, and a new pressure-treated sill was installed around the whole perimeter. Any wall studs which had rotted were cut back to where they were healthy, and a new cripple securely attached. The new sill plate was atached to the new joists, making the entire structure of the main building integral and sound. This would prove to be invaluble later on, as you will see.

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The station is constructed in what is known as the Eastern Stick Style, and the posts going around the platform and apron, though they don't look like much, support a considerable amount of weight.

They had settled unevenly, and the part of the job that Don K.(the other carpenter on the job) and I were dreading was the digging of the individual footings tthat had been specified by the architect: 30" wide 4 foot deep, with sonotube and a rebar cage in each. Well, it was actually the digging we were dreading, the rest was a breeze.

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One day this big guy wandered up, looking much like Lurch from the Addam Family, and asked if we had any work for him. We looked at each other, and then at him, and said, "Well, we need some holes dug," To which he said"

"I know how to work a shovel."

in a voice that matched his appearance. So we said "leave us your name and number" and he wrote out on a piece of paper what looked to us like Don Husker. His name was actually "Hasher" but I call him Husker to this day, because Don K. and I were so excited by the idea of someone else digging the holes, that for days, our cries of "Husker DU!" could be heard by curious passersby.

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After clearing his hiring with the office, Husker showed up the next day. We saw him coming down the street a block and a half away, swinging what appeared to be a child's lunch box in his hand, that turned out o be a small Igloo cooler. We showed him what we needed, gave him a shovel and a pick, and went back to our work inside. 20 minutes later, he came inside and asked, "Where d'ya want the next one?" Skeptical, we went outside to show him what we REALLY needed, and found a perfect hole, perfectly centered, that looked like someone had magically extracted a 55 gallon drum from the spot.

Woodbury Train Station Part III

Woodbury Train Station, Pt. III08/14/2009


Life is Balance.


For all the great things about living in Woodbury are balanced by the entrenched beaurocracy that exists in the Building code office, and the Water Department, where incompetance and aversion to serving public interest are rewarded with promotion, and sheer stupidity and hostility toward the citizenry seem to be main job qualifications.
Whether with malice aforethought, or from gross negligence, three weeks after the train station was completed, workers from the water department turned on the fire hydrant across the street full blast, and then went to lunch for an hour and a half. By the time they came back, an estimated 100,000 gals of water were pumped into he basement of the station, collapsing 8 feet of foundation wall. In a display of how incompetance turns to evil, the City's position was that the work Restoration Carpentry did was somehow responsible. However, the engineers and adjusters who examined it basically laughed at them, and said the only reason they still HAD a station was because of the work we had done.
Because even with a chunk of the foundation missing, the station had not moved or settled, even a fraction of an inch.

We had completed the interior restoration after doing all the structural work, creating a meeting space for WORC, and a welcome center. Two restaraunts have come and gone since then, and unfortunately neither could make a go of what seems like a great location.
However, there is talk once again of bringing light rail service to this part of South Jersey. It is likely at this point that such a rail line would use existing track lines,and stations where possible.
So hopefully, one day soon, I'll stand on the platform of the station I helped to resurrect, and catch a train into Philadelphia.
And I'll be as excited as G.G. Green must have been when his velvet draped living room on wheels headed out for the first time to cross the Great Expanse.