Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning can be a hazardous voyage for me.

It happens nearly every time I try to neaten things up. I launch into the cleanup project under full sail only to find myself run aground on Memory Lane, shipwrecked upon the rocky shoals of the past.

The most recent spring cleaning of our basement is a good example. I was making tremendous headway when I paused to consider the fate of a large wooden box. Should I simply chuck the entire box and assign its unknown contents to oblivion? I opted to paw through it first to see if it held anything of value.

A mistake.

The early decisions were easy. I have always thought that the term “artificial Christmas tree” was an oxymoron, so goodbye synthetic tannenbaum! I then hit a major snag in the form of a lath basket hauled up from the grungy depths of the box.

My gosh! I had totally forgotten about that basket! I dimly recall rescuing it some years ago from my grandparents’ old house which sits slowly moldering out in my grove.

The basket held clothes and other items Grandma Nelson had saved. In order to examine its contents, I dumped the basket out onto the basement floor. Its newspaper liner was dated April, 1961 -- exactly half a century ago! It suddenly became imperative that I study this time capsule.

The clothing Grandma had saved was rotted to rags, but other items were worthy of scrutiny, including a hardcover book titled “Tom Swift and his Sky Racer.” If that title sounds quaint, there’s a good reason: the tome bears a copyright date of 1911.

Apparently, Tom Swift was a teenaged genius, adventurer and inventor extraordinaire. The book breathlessly relates the tale of Tom and his homebuilt “aeroplane”, which, judging by the book’s lone illustration, was constructed from plans drawn up by Leonardo da Vinci.

Another extremely interesting item is a 1961 Sears catalogue, which contains everything the modern consumer could ever want.

Sears offered baby chicks, Smith-Corona electric portable typewriters, and those jiggle-inducing belt massagers. A “huge 23-inch TV” was priced at $200. Monochrome, of course; the widespread broadcast of color TV signals was still a few years off.

Also sold by Sears was a “Famous Enfield .303 Rifle, Pride of the British Army” for the princely sum of $11.88. Rebuilt automatic transmissions started at $99.95, about the same as a new Kenmore wringer washer. A pair of ladies shoes cost $3.33, while foundation garments that resembled self-propelled underwater weaponry could be purchased for 87 cents.

The basket next yielded an item that really grabbed my attention: a Successful Farming magazine that was dated August, 1957! Just two months before my birth! My recollections of that time are somewhat dim, so I thumbed through the publication to see what sort of world had welcomed me.

Among the top traits that stood out was the large number of articles and ads that were aimed at the homemaker -- a reminder that this was an era before farming had transmogrified into Agribusiness.

There were numerous ads for such things as mounted corn pickers, although one blurb was peddling equine liniment. It seems that not everyone had yet made the jump to mechanical horsepower.

One ad featured an image of a 1957 Chevrolet station wagon. Normally, a station wagon would be considered stodgy, but the ‘57 Chevy model somehow managed to look cool.

Amidst the cookie recipes and the ads for spark plugs and Kool-Aid and Terramycin is a full-page advertisement touting an exciting new innovation called “atomic-electric power.” Wonder how that whole thing worked out?

A bank statement from December of 1945 reveals that Grandpa had nearly $500 in his checking account, a sizeable sum for that time. Also in the basket was Grandpa’s husking hook. Its leather straps are still in pretty good condition, and slipping it on reminded me just how huge Grandpa’s hands were. I am definitely hanging onto that husking hook.

A letter from Grandma’s cousin Pauline in Jewell, Iowa is dated February 4, 1908. In the first third of the letter, the writer divulges that she regrets having not written sooner and that she’s now finally getting around to it. The second third is commentary on the chilliness of the weather, and how are you folks, and we’re just fine down here. The third section of the letter bemoans the fact that writer is now out of space and that she had best close.

Not real riveting stuff, which just goes to show that they weren’t all wordy Wordsworths back then.

My wife eventually called down the basement stairwell to see how things were going.

“You’d better call the rescue team!” I replied. “It’s happened again! I’ve become marooned in the past!”

Mandolin Man

Drive onto Larry Groon’s farmyard northeast of Arlington and you won’t see much out of the ordinary. The farmstead sports the typical assortment of outbuildings, along with a majestic farmhouse.

But step inside Larry’s workshop and things begin to take a turn for the unusual. The unremarkable array of woodworking tools share space with an extraordinary assortment of stringed musical instruments. Here hangs a banjo; there sits a stylish mandolin. A shelf holds a partially assembled guitar.

All of which were built by Larry.

“My son Steve and I milked 60 cows in a stanchion barn until it burned down in 2000,” said Larry, who will be 72 this year. “We talked about getting back into dairying, but eventually decided against it.”

Larry and Steve rebuilt the milk house, which Larry now uses as a woodworking shop. Larry has since constructed numerous pieces of furniture for his wife, Joan.

About 5 years ago Larry began to toy with the idea of building a stringed musical instrument.

“I’ve always wanted to do art, but lacked the skill,” says Larry. “I thought that maybe building something musical would satisfy my artistic impulses.”

Larry found plans for a mountain banjo in the pages of a Popular Mechanics magazine.

“It’s the sort of banjo they would traditionally build as a first instrument for a kid in the Appalachians,” says Larry. “I followed the plans to the letter. But the neck is out of proportion to the body, so it sounds out of tune when you play the high notes.”

Undaunted, Larry next purchased plans for building a mandolin.

“I figured that a mandolin is small and would take less time to build than something like a guitar. But I soon learned that building a mandolin is fussy work.”

Larry recalls how he felt when he first installed the strings on his first mandolin.

“I was so nervous, my hands were shaking,” he says. “I finally had to leave it and come back later.”

But the results of his hours of fussy work exceeded his expectations.

“It sounded good. Certainly I made some mistakes on that first mandolin, but that’s how you learn.”

Larry denies possessing any special musical abilities or artistic skill.

“I’m a three-chord wonder; I can play three chords and wonder how I can even do that. I learned that constructing stringed instruments is mostly engineering and that if done well, engineering can become a thing of beauty. Building mandolins is my way of creating art.”

As Larry built more mandolins -- he has now produced a total of 19 -- his skills grew. He gleaned advice from an Internet forum for luthiers, and the UPS truck began to bring exotic wood from across the globe to the Groon farm.

“I like to use local wood whenever possible,” says Larry. “I’ve made instruments from a felled ash tree that grew on our farm and have used black walnut that I bought from a guy at Milbank.”

Larry was soon hankering for new challenges. He began to construct guitars and has built ten so far. He just put the finishing touches on his first hollow neck lap steel guitar and recently completed an Irish bouzouki made from native ash.

Larry has added some of his own tweaks to his purchased mandolin pattern. So it has been with his guitars.

“Our daughter Linda likes to play music and we got started talking one day about designing our own guitar. After a good bit of debate, we came up with something that we thought would work.”

A twinkle in his eye, Larry unfolds a large sheet of paper that has a guitar outline drawn upon it. Flipping the paper over reveals that it’s actually the outer layer of a seed corn sack.

Like all farmers, Larry improvises whenever possible. For instance, he uses a homemade rig built of scrap iron to heat the wood that will be formed into the sides of his instruments. Beef bone is used in the bridges of his guitars.

“Bone is traditional, plus most agree that it produces a superior sound,” says Larry.

Asked how many hours it takes to build an instrument, Larry replies, “About a month.”

The musical instruments produced in Larry’s workshop are a wonder to behold, with intricate inlays and a silky smooth finish. Art has truly been achieved through engineering.

Larry has now reached the point where he has begun to instruct others in the craft of lutherie.

“I would like nothing better if more people came to my shop so I can pass on what I have learned,” he says.

Asked if this is a hobby or a passion, Larry replies, “Neither. It’s a gift from God. He just waited until this time of my life to give it to me!”