Harvest Festival: A Bounty of Homey Arts and Crafts

Just in time for Christmas: brooms with faces.

And walking sticks and Victorian boxes and chain-saw sculptures and spun-metal bowls and handmade ceramic tiles, sweaters and jewelry.

All under the roof of one of the more unlikely places in the country for such homey items and the folk who produce them: the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Touring Crafts Show

Today and Sunday, as well as next Friday, Saturday and Sunday, nearly 1,000 artisans and crafts people, all appearing in historical costume, will be hawking their wares at 350 booths at the Convention Center as part of the 17th annual Harvest Festival, billed as America’s largest fine arts and crafts bazaar. (The festival will move to the Long Beach Convention Center Oct. 13-15 and to the Anaheim Convention Center Oct. 27-29).

A touring show--it appears in 17 cities this fall, mostly in the West, the Midwest and the North--the Harvest Festival is a showcase of handiwork that is rare, unusual, historical and in some cases unique. While some artisans’ products can be found in boutiques or large department stores, many of the participants are as homespun as their work, living a sort of gypsy life while touring with the festival. Others may use their skills as a means of overcoming a physical disability, and still others practice a skill that may be all but lost in modern America.

Thurman Scheumack qualifies on all counts. A native of Texas, Scheumack today lives with his wife and four children in the Ozarks in Mountain View, Ark., where he produces what may be the most unique brooms in the country--when he and his entire family aren’t on tour with the Harvest Festival.

Enthralled with what he called “the wealth of historical crafts and music and folklore associated with the Ozark Mountains,” Scheumack, a stonemason, began doing an occasional bit of blacksmithing, knife making and woodcarving. In 1981, however, his work was cut short when he broke his neck in a motorcycle accident. Refusing conventional therapy, he began to use his craft to regain mobility.

Brooms for Therapy

“One of the old-timers up where we live, he said: ‘Listen, I can give you all the upper-body therapy you need. Come on up and start making brooms with me.’ ”

He did, learning to fashion the brooms from local materials: sassafras wood and broom corn. And, over time, he regained nearly all of his upper-body mobility.

A new wrinkle to the business was added, Scheumack said, after he “watched some old Disney cartoons, where the brooms would dance across the floor.” He began to model his own brooms on those cartoon-like designs--coupled with Scandinavian folklore--and began to produce brooms with fanciful carved faces and heads in the handles.

“There’s always been so many superstitions and folklore surrounding brooms,” said Scheumack. “And people really respond to it. It’s just turned our lives around, really.”

Scheumack and his family have been Harvest Festival regulars for five years, a circumstance that festival president and co-founder Warren Cook said isn’t uncommon.

“We have lots of people who come with us, and a number of them have done every last one of (the festival tour stops),” he said. A few, he added, have been with the festival for all of its 17 years.

The festival began, in a way, as a gourmet food festival in San Francisco put on by Cook and his partner, Stephen Kyle.

“We had a fantastic response as far as crowds,” Cook said, “but we had a heck of a time selling booths to corporations. We had to wear the coat and tie and go through the bureaucracy. That wasn’t for us.”

They decided to try their hand at staging a crafts fair inside an exhibition hall rather than outside, as many such fairs were doing at the time. And, Cook said, “the crafts people loved the idea.”

Chucked Corporate Life

Today the exhibitors are selected from a field of about 1,400 crafts people and artisans who submit photos of their work or actual samples in person, he said. And many of them have given up much more conventional corporate-style careers to follow the show.

“Lots and lots of people have done that,” Cook said. “They’re putting in twice as much time as they used to, but they can live where they want to and go where they want and set their own hours. And they’re making good livings for the most part.”

Like Mike Guthrie. A former employee of a hearing-aid firm in Chicago (he repaired them), Guthrie moved to San Diego two years ago after deciding to abandon the world of more traditional work. He became fascinated with carousel and rocking horses and became apprenticed briefly to a man who carved such items.

“I really wanted to do something like that,” he said, “but to do it today and make a living out of it was something else. But I really didn’t have the knack for it. They were doing really nice carousel horses.”

Impoverished and living out of his van, Guthrie took to making rocking horses out of scrap wood from shipping pallets, a practice he said is well grounded in American history.

Early Efforts Laughed At

“I’d read that the first rocking horses were made out of shipping crates,” he said. “It was like a father would go out of a factory in the alley and find old packing crates to make the horses and children’s toys.”

At first, he said, local store owners and others he tried to sell the horses to would laugh at them and say they were primitive and crude. “But it was American folk art.”

Eventually, he said, that fact became recognized locally and sales of the horses began to rise.

“It’s taken off for me now,” Guthrie said. “It’s still hard work, but I believe in what I’m doing.”

Other artisans’ items have found their way into fairly exalted positions. When she quit her job in sales and furniture design for the Broadway department stores after contracting multiple sclerosis, Joyce Mullinax of Woodland Hills decided 10 years ago to display her poetry on boxes made of chipwood and decorated with silk, ribbons and dried flowers in the Victorian or country French style. Today she has sold thousands of them, a few finding their way into the rooms of celebrities and presidents’ wives; one even made it into the home of the Prince and Princess of Wales as a wedding gift.

When she first took her boxes to a local art show, said Mullinax (who sells them under the business name of the Joy Lane Co.), “people told me they liked my verses, and that’s all I needed to know.”

Today, she said, she designs craft castles as well and has published her verses in a book called “Mind Castles.”

‘Started as a Hobby’

Like Scheumack, Mullinax said her business “started as a hobby. I don’t think anyone thought it would evolve to this. Now we have people who have been buying from us for 10 years and can remember the first box they bought.”

The festival is not only an exhibition of wares. Throughout each day, entertainment on the convention center floor will include jugglers, acrobats, bluegrass and country musical acts, musical comedians, marionette shows, folk dancers, storytellers, jazz groups and Dixieland bands.

The food chores are handled by Harvest Catering, an association of cooks who prepare regional specialties especially for the Harvest Festival. The Harvest Festival Food Co. also offers such prepared foods as various mustards, barbecue sauces, salad dressings and marinades, almond butter, jams, jellies and chocolate sauce.

A portion of the proceeds from the festival will be donated to Second Harvest, a nonprofit national network of 200 food banks.

The festival is held today from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Next Friday, the hours are noon to 9 p.m. The hours for Saturday and Sunday are the same as opening weekend.

Admission is $5.50 for adults and $2.50 for children 6 to 11. Children under 6 will be admitted free.