My son James and I building together: What could be better than doing what you love with someone you love?
THE BUILDER
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Growing up in small town Wyoming, with five brothers and sisters, I have always been a builder of things. My parents had been raised on farms and, like most people we knew, were “do-it-yourselfers“ long before anyone thought DIY was anything special; it was just the way things got done. I learned a lot by trial and error—my siblings and I can laugh about some of our experiments, particularly those involving the family home—but along the way, I gained confidence, a variety of skills and a love of woodworking and projects.
When I moved to the beautiful coastal town of Point Reyes Station, California in 1981 it probably surprised no one in my family that, after a couple of years in the kitchen of a small French restaurant, I returned to woodworking. I owned a furniture and cabinet making shop, the Point Reyes Cabinet & Furniture Company there for ten years, starting in a garage as most people do and eventually moving into a 3,000 square foot shop with a couple of full time employees. Working throughout Marin County and San Francisco, we built a wide variety of custom cabinets and furniture for homes and businesses.
I later established a company called Watermark Exhibits in San Rafael, California building traveling exhibitions for companies marketing at trade shows. That work eventually led me into work with museums, initially natural history museums and visitors centers and ultimately morphed into project management and a career planning exhibitions for hands on science museums. In the late 1990’s I worked briefly at the California Academy of Sciences on a short lived project before being hired as project manager by an Oakland based design company, Gyroscope, contracted to design and contract the exhibitions for a new science museum to be called Exploration Place in Wichita Kansas. That project lasted three years and at that point I was very fortunate to be hired by Joe Ansel of Ansel Associates, Inc. Joe had worked for many years at the Exploratorium, working closely with Frank Oppenheimer and was part of the team that built that institution and the hands-on science center movement worldwide. He was the consultant for the exhibits we developed for Exploration Place and I’d worked closely with him, particularly in the last six months as we installed the exhibitions.
When Exploration Place opened in April of 2000, Joe hired me to work for him on a project he had just landed in Wolfsburg, Germany. There was no building when we started, no architect, no budget and no plan; only a site and one man with a vision, Dr. Wolfgang Guthardt, who was in charge of it all. While our primary role was to develop the content and plan, design, contract and install the exhibitions, we were involved in nearly every aspect of the project, from the competition to select the architect to hiring the staff to operate the museum. The five years I spent on this project, which ultimately became known as Phaeno, changed my life and was a highlight in my museum career but not the end of it.
Not long after we completed our work in Germany, we landed a very fun and interesting three year project in Alaska to develop a small science center, The Imaginarium, within the Anchorage Art Museum. And along the way we also consulted and worked on a number of other projects; one in the UK, another in Turkey and others in the United States.
I loved the work I was involved in while working with Joe at Ansel Associates and it was a dream job: Joe Ansel hired me and then he gave me the freedom to figure out what I needed to do. He trusted me and believed in me, probably more than I deserved at first. He was a mentor: he guided me, taught me, advised me, counseled me and, honestly, he put up with me. He treated me with respect and introduced me as a colleague, though my knowledge and experience in the field was vastly less than his. Soon after joining his firm, we traveled together to Europe to meet the client in what was the first of the 45 or so trips I made to Europe while on the project.
While working for Joe I had opportunities to meet and work with many very smart creative people in m any different fields, in a number of different states and several countries. I visited Science Centers all over Europe and the United States. I attended conferences. The work was varied and nearly always interesting, certainly challenging, seldom the same one day to the next, and I was always learning something. And, at the same time, I did miss the process of building things myself. My career path had moved me out of the shop, away from working with my hands and building real things and had me mostly at a desk in front of a computer managing budgets and schedules and contracting other people to build things.
I started playing the guitar at age 40 after a few years of attending a week long summer arts and music camp with my family. I found I enjoyed it and occasionally I took my guitar along on a business trip, but of course carrying a guitar really complicates travel so I decided to try the mandolin, given it's small size and portability. Knowing nothing about mandolins I bought a very inexpensive imported A Style. After playing it for a while without a whole lot of satisfaction I was told by my teacher that if I wanted to play and sound better I really needed a better instrument, and he handed me his to try. Wow! Night and day. I started looking for a new mandolin. Then one day while browsing in the now defunct “Fifth String” instrument shop in Berkeley I came across a book called “Constructing a Bluegrass Mandolin” by Roger H. Siminoff. I bought it and took it home to read and eventually I decided that I would give it a try.
And, with that I slowly embarked on a new journey; returning to craft and working with my hands, back to the shop, back to the pleasure and satisfaction of making something real and touchable and pleasing to the eye and to the ear! I find that building mandolins combines the most engaging and interesting elements of my career: woodworking and design and quite a little bit of science—oh yes, and MUSIC!!
There is no better feeling and few things as satisfying as hearing the voice of an instrument you have created—unless it is seeing and hearing that instrument in the hands of someone who knows how to make it sing!