ANAHEIM : Fair Brings Old Ways Back to Life

A small group of history students sat in a semicircle at Brookhurst Junior High, listening intently to the soft, soothing sounds of American Indian music coming from the flutist’s cedar-wood instrument.

“This song comes from a long time ago,” said R. Carlos Nakai, a Navajo-Ute, explaining that the next song was about the environment. “It reminds us that we’re not separate from it.”

Across the corridor, Tom Jones, a professional cowboy, was showing another class of seventh- and eighth-graders his authentic cowboy wares.

“Everything here is identical to what it was 110 years ago,” Jones said, pointing to the saddle, lasso and even the drab, red boots on his feet.

Throughout the week, the two demonstrated their crafts to help teach students about preserving a culture--one that predates the Industrial Revolution and modern technology, when art and utility went hand-in-hand.

It was all part of last week’s Old Ways Fair, the second annual weeklong event organized by Brookhurst woodworking teacher Jim Beach. Along with Jones and Nakai, the students heard from Don Weber, a furniture maker who creates all his pieces from nature and by hand.

Known as the Artful Bodger, Weber talked to students as he sat at his shaving horse where he chiseled away at a piece of wood that would become part of a chair in the 200-year-old English Windsor style.

The shaving horse--like all of Weber’s tools and machines--is one he made himself and runs only with as much power as his feet can pump or his arm can churn.

“They’re all done on this,” he told the students, showing how his handmade lathe grooves holes in the chair pegs. “There’s no other power in them.”

The Mendocino resident told the class he goes to the woods of Kentucky to chop elm and other trees he uses to make the chairs, but only logs what he needs for the craft.

“I’m not denuding the forest, I only take what I can use,” he said.

At the other end of campus, Jones, the cowboy from Tombstone, Ariz., decided to snap the crowd to attention. He put down his lasso, picked up his brown snake-like rope, and whirled it around his head until it cracked.

Students bolted upright in their seats, laughing nervously.

While the rest of the students left for lunch, eighth-grader Eric Oden, 14, stayed behind at Weber’s workstation. He tried his hand at some of the tools.

“There’s not that much to it,” said Oden, who had attended Beach’s class the year before. “It’s fun working with your hands.”