My Father: Born in 1875 - Lived to 102
My father was born in Pennsylvania, June 2, 1875. When he was very young his family moved to Ohio. So that's where he grew up, in Ohio. And he passed away in 1978, so he was 102!
He became a very fine cabinetmaker. In 1906 he came to California. The earthquake had happened in San Francisco and there was a lot of work to be done for reconstruction. And the, later, he came to Pasadena. He had an artistic temperament and was not always easy to get along with. He would be so absorbed in what he was doing that everything else was sort of on the sidelines. He was an amazing man. Along with fine carpentry, he also built boats. That was because he knew how to bend wood, which you have to know in boat building - they groove the wood and bend it.
He always was handy with his hands and he probably worked for somebody back in Ohio that allowed him to learn these things. Instead of having kitchen cabinets brought in and hung he would go out to a site and build them. So they were custom made, which I thought was the normal thing to do. As I grew up, I didn't realize you went out a bought the whole set of cabinets, I thought they were always custom made.
He did furniture reproductions, too. He made a lot of staircases in the mansions of Pasadena. There were a lot of hand-turned finials, which are the posts that go up and down staircases; he did a lot of those. I know he did them in Scripps Hall. I'm pretty sure it’s still standing, along with many others.
