Blind Woodworkers Build With a Sense of Adventure
After all the measuring and cutting and gluing and sanding, there’s never been a piece of wood that didn’t benefit from a light chuckling.
Or so you’d think, listening to the guys standing on three sides of a large square worktable in the Braille Institute wood shop.
Bill Holman, a gray-haired and sturdy one-time CHP officer who lost most of his eyesight in 1939, lifts his voice above the sound of a table saw and power sander whining and buzzing in the background. “They call me Bill because I was born around the first of the month.”
He tightens a clamp on what will be a butcher block. Lines of white glue ooze out between strips of light wood and dark wood. Then he pounds the work with a mallet to make the pieces level.
“Stop making so much noise,” says Harold Shoopman. He’ll be 81 on Aug. 1 and has been totally blind since he was 68. He’s making a nearly completed wooden frame, which he waves in the general direction of a friendly chuckle coming from Lee Katz, across the workbench.
“Talk to this feller,” he says. “He’s tickled to death if anyone wants to talk to him.”
Katz, short and dapper, is running his hand over a small end table he is repairing. He says he has a little sight in his left eye and travels by RTD from his home in Carson to the Braille Institute at 741 N. Vermont Ave. in the Los Feliz-Silver Lake area. “Takes me 2 1/2 hours. Now you know I’m nuts, right?”
Naturally, there is a chuckle.
For those whose sight is dimmed, all the sensory accessories of working with wood are intensified, the students say. The scent of it. The various scents of various woods. The feel of wood--to “run it through the planer and make it smooth as a baby’s behind,” Holman says. “This is my pleasure down here.”
Wood is alive, forgiving, audibly responsive. The sound of a good cut is as unmistakable as the thunk of a home run springing off a bat.
With the smile of a new mother, Katz speaks of creating a shape, controlling it. “Makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something,” he says. He enjoys “the joy of seeing it done and taking it home.”
The two-hour woodworking class is held at the institute every morning and afternoon each weekday with a limit of seven students in each class.
“In a typical class, two or three will be total,” says the instructor, Ray Lopez, meaning totally blind. Most of the students have a small amount of sight, usually the ability to distinguish light and dark. Holman, for example, is able to select the woods he uses for his butcher blocks.
Limited to 2 Classes a Week
The students are limited to no more than two classes each week. “Some of them would come every day if they could,” Lopez says.
The students’ comments about the class confirm that it is a treasured source of small delights.
Most of the students are retired. Blindness is “typically an older person’s disease,” Lopez says. But today’s group is as varied as the causes of blindness.
Alfred Jordan, 25, is the youngest. He says: “I got shot in the head in a pizza place. That was when I was 19.”
Merrill Woods, 42, and Luis Durini, 30, both have new careers planned out.
Woods, who has a wife and four children, was a cook when he lost his sight in an accident at the restaurant where he worked. He says, “I was total for six years; now I’m partial.”
Sawdust powders his long brown fingers as he sands an oak bowl and outlines his game plan. He has been studying food services and by fall hopes to work in a cafeteria or run a snack concession at a government building.
Luis Durini’s sight “is similar to tunnel vision,” he says. He is an electronics major at Los Angeles City College.
Women woodworking students at Braille are scarce. Durini says with a smile, “They don’t like the dust.”
The classes are free and so are the basic supplies such as sandpaper and nails, but class members pay for the wood they use.
A volunteer helps out at most of the sessions. Bob Castle of Glendale, for instance, has been volunteering in the wood shop twice a week for nine years after retiring 11 years ago from the job of Montrose postmaster.
Majored in Sculpture
Instructor Lopez, 37, majored in sculpture at Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design and has taught woodworking at Braille for about nine years. The students’ faces glow when they speak of him.
Sagacious and soft-spoken, light of foot in the spacious, fragrant wood shop, Lopez evokes the image of a woodsman in another sense and from another age. He moves quietly from person to person, from worktable to worktable, from machine to machine: table saw, radial arm saw, drill press, jointer, router, planer, lathe.
The mere idea of power tools is alarming to some people. The idea of the blind using power tools can affect the psyche like the shriek of a dull blade ripping warped wood.
Lopez concedes dispassionately: “It can get nerve-wracking. There is always the possibility of injury and things because of the capacity of the tools and the students.” He gives a minuscule shrug. “There’s some hazard to anything. Crossing a street. Woodworking has its hazards that you kinda have to work with.
“We’ve had a couple of accidents. And they’ve been the most experienced people. There have been more accidents with the volunteers.”
The level of apprehension varies among the students--as it does among his sighted ones, says Lopez, who also teaches a college woodworking class.
Shoopman says he never gets nervous, explaining, “I had a paint shop. I’ve been around tools all my life. Tools to me are like knives and forks to someone else.”
‘Still Nervous’
Katz says: “I’m still nervous about using them. But that’s good. Then you’re not too smart with them.”
None of the power tools is adapted for use by the blind, Lopez says. “We just show them how to use it without sight.”
Basically, that simply means using the tool the way it’s supposed to be used, which sighted people often do not.
For example, standing next to the table saw, he says: “A sighted person should work the same as a blind person on this tool.” He indicates the guards and fences on the machine, advocates using push sticks, warns against pulling away a piece of wood from the back of the blade.
Either the instructor or the volunteer likes to “take a look at the setup” before a machine is started, he says. The only power tools not available to the students are the band saw and the jigsaw, which depend on free-form cutting in any case and thus would need a sighted operator.
Students who don’t want to use the power tools can work with hand tools. The same results can be accomplished “if you’re willing to take the time and develop the skill,” Lopez says.
Braille Tape Measure
The only tools adapted for special use are the rulers. A Braille tape measure, bearing the customary raised dots, is “pretty good for gross measurement” in rough construction, he says. But “as your furniture gets smaller, the accuracy has to get larger. About a sixteenth of an inch off is all you can get away with.”
An unusual ruler fills the bill in fine work, what those in the trade call finish carpentry. A rod with 16 threads per inch clicks each time it is moved in its casing. Thus, you can both calculate the measure by ear and feel the raised ridges.
Storage of the hand tools also compensates for lack of sight. A raised black cutout of each tool is glued on the inside of the cupboards so that each tool’s place can be located by touch. And there they hang: scores of hammers and chisels, calipers and pliers, files and screwdrivers, punches and awls, gouges and knives and clamps and brushes.
“I’ve visited a lot of facilities all over the country,” says woodworking student Peter Link, who works for the Blinded Veterans Assn., “and this is probably the best in the country, as far as equipment goes.”
Learned Finish Carpentry
Link, the grandfather of three and with two of his own four children still living at home, says: “I’d done rough carpentry. But I learned all my finish carpentry here.” He is working on a computer cabinet.
What he likes best about the wood shop, he says, is “making my own furniture the way I like it.”
In the background, the machines comfortingly whine and buzz. Here and there in the large room, somebody speaks. Somebody laughs.
Told he could pass for 62, the 81-year-old Shoopman considers the point and deadpans judiciously, “I’ll try it.”
“Watch out for this guy,” Shoopman says of Katz, who has offered that he used to be a furniture salesman before he became a furniture maker. “He’ll sell you the table.”
“I’m trying,” Katz says.