His days are filled with a sweet-faced yellow lab named Killer, good music, bad TV reception, beachcombing, clam digging, and furniture making. John, 30, is an artist and craftsman. The furniture he makes only 20 tables or cabinets a year sell for as much as $2,000 and he has orders for the next year and a half. John seems surprised at his success and the word-of-mouth reputation he has gained. "I don’t know," he says, shuffling his shoes on the wood shavings that carpet his cavernous shop. "This all just seemed to evolve. I like the activity. I like the wood and what I can do with it, the milling, the matching of grain, the dovetailing." The work is what matters to John, not the money and not the finished piece of furniture except that it be as perfect as he can make it.

Good at wood shop
John grew up in Auburn and what he remembers most about that time is following his older brother, Terry, around. Terry was constantly building tree houses and go-carts, he says, so he started doing the same thing.

John says he was only a so-so student until he hit art and wood shop classes in Auburn High School and then, suddenly, getting an "A" was easy. After graduation he enrolled in Green River Community College and stayed there in various design and vocational woodworking shops off and on for almost five years, doing independent study. It was then that he started reading Buckminster Fuller, geometrician, educator, architect-designer. "I didn’t understand any of it in the beginning," he says. "I just read it over and over. Sometimes I’d read all night, fall asleep, and then start over on the same stuff the next night."

He also studied the work of such furniture-making masters as Sam Maloof of California, James Krenov of Sweden, and George Nakashima, a Seattle man who now lives on the East Coast. What he learned from them is the basis of his design today Shaker-style furnitre with clean lines and solid, bilt-for-a-lifetime constrction. "What the Shakers did with wood was marvelos. Their style wold be hard to improve upon except for modern glue, modern machinery." John has taken every piece of machinery in his shop apart and put it back together to be sure he knows exactly how it works on his wood.

Like the Shakers, John sees dowels and dovetailing rather than nails or screws. And his cstomers get a lifetime garantee. He uses a variety of woods rosewood, walnt, red oak, mahogany, alder, Western maple, and Western willow. He doesnt have a favorite. Each takes the same kind of Steiner patience. And repetition is part of the craft. John points to a china cabinet. "There are 24 solid planks in that cabinet. Each plank goes throgh the milling machine 16 times." That piece, and another he is working on at the same time, will each sell for $1,500.

By Marge Cocker