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What I Watched Last Night

By Scott Buckner

For years, I thought that one of this country’s major exports to Third World nations was championship T-shirts printed for losing sports teams. This is how we end up with all those photos of children from countries ravaged by war, cyclones, or abject poverty who will grow up believing the Chicago Bears won Super Bowl XLI. But thanks to last Saturday afternoon’s segment of The Woodwright’s Shop on Chicago’s WYCC-TV/Channel 20, I learned that an even more humanitarian American export is technology that hasn’t been used since George Armstrong Custer was recruited to make Montana the happiest place on earth by killing every Native American in sight.
Every weekend, Woodwright and cheerful host Roy Underhill celebrate the world of hand tools and construction methods using those tools popular among our settler ancestors when they weren’t too busy with other popular activities of the day, like dropping dead from cholera. Basically, Roy and Woodwright is what Norm Abrams and This Old House would be if nobody ever bothered to discover electricity. Sure, Roy looks Howdy Doody-ish in his tweed cabbie hat and suspenders. Sure, some of his guests can be a lot like those socially off-kilter railroad buffs able to recite the arrival and departure schedule for every train in the history of the Monon Railroad. But believe me, when the planet is a smoking cinder on Armageddon Day and the rest of us are worrying about how we’re going to survive without cell phones and Internet porn, Roy’s going to be the only guy around able to build a two-seat outhouse without even using nails.


Saturday’s Woodwright took us on a splinter-studded field trip to Tillers International near Kalamazoo, Michigan. That’s where a fellow named Chuck was overseeing a line of fellows on shaving horses hand-shaping yokes for baby oxen much like elves in Santa’s workshop. These fellows are accomplished at making other Santa’s-workshop wooden stuff by hand too, like butter churns, hay rakes, and some of the most attractive riding crops you’ll ever see made entirely out of hickory. I couldn’t help but imagine the mountain of mail-order cash this place might make if it catered its hickory riding crop business to recreational S&M’ers and professional dominatrixes everywhere bored long ago with plain old leather crops.
Meanwhile, incredibly old blacksmith Herb was overseeing hottie student blacksmith Shannon’s progress hammering hand-forged iron rings at the anvil, and an earthy-crunchy woman named Dolcie in a very wide-brimmed hat was showing Roy how to drive two oxen yoked side-by-side. This involved commanding “come” and “ho” for starting and stopping, and “gee” and “haw” for turning right and left. Dolcie was armed with a whip, but I think it was reserved for whenever the ho refuses to come. Or do anything else she’s damn well told to do.
(Woodwright trivia: “Ox” refers not to a specific breed of animal, but rather any critter which has been yoked. Bulls are used most often, but if you yoked a pair of bison or cats or evil ex-wives together and managed to get them to plow a field, you’d have a team of oxen just the same.)
Next up was a jet-lagged fellow named Dave who spent the previous three weeks in Uganda washing his clothes in a bucket and teaching cattle farmers how to plant better cattle feed. Mostly, Dave showed off a few of the more useful Tillers creations popular among Third Worlders, like the scythe, the wooden wheelbarrow, the hand-cranked fodder chopper, and – curiously enough from a guy left to live out of a bucket – the hand-cranked washing machine. In the background, I thought I saw a box of those kiddie guns made out of a hunk of wood with a springy clothespin glued to the top that shoots rubber bands, but the camera cut away too soon for me to be sure.
At the start of the show, Underhill introduced us to the founder of Tillers: a fellow named Dick, who hatched the idea while in the Peace Corps – an organization built in 1961 upon the adage, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man how to fish and you feed him for life.” Yet almost 50 years later, the Peace Corps has yet to teach a single person in the blazing African desert how to make ice to keep his butter from turning into rancid slop an hour after he spent three months building a stupid churn.
Exporting low-tech knowhow to sustain life and community out of nothing despite natural disaster or relentless privation may be truer to Peace Corps doctrine, but still, you’d think the most humanitarian thing we could do for electricity-strapped Third Worlders would be to load a dozen armadas of rusty tramp steamers to the gills with the bazillion tons of obsolete hand tools cluttering up America’s basements and rural flea markets. Saturday’s program didn’t mention exactly what Third Worlders are supposed do for tools to build things like timber-frame sheep sheds held together with dovetail bracing once the missionaries from Tiller International show them how to do it, but the organization seems to spend a chunk of its resources doing it.
In the end though, it’s good that we have fine folks like Tillers International and Roy Underhill’s Woodwright curating our endangered woody traditions. Otherwise, nobody would know how to hand-tool a canoe out of a big log. So a big tip of the hat goes out to Woodwright Roy and Tiller Dick for being there to pick up the slack.

See what else we’ve been watching! Submissions welcome.

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Posted on September 9, 2008