Bringing Life
to Wood
by Greg
Moore
Glenn Carter
I love making silly stuff, whimsical stuff,” said
woodworker Glenn Carter.
“I just don’t march to anybody
else’s drum, I guess.”
It takes only a quick stroll through Carter’s Deer Creek home to have a visitor vigorously nodding his or her head in agreement. Just inside the entrance door, a four-foot-long, painted jaguar hangs from a tree limb, its tongue lolling out lasciviously. At the kitchen counter is a row of stools depicting the hind ends, legs and feet of a duck, a zebra, a giraffe, a lizard and a tiger. A restored 1922 carousel horse graces a short hallway leading to Carter’s bedroom.
“Artists, they don’t make any money,” Carter admits.
“But to do what you love and make a living at it, that’s just the ultimate, I think. I couldn’t imagine being a life insurance salesman.”
Not much chance of that. Carter, 62, has known exactly what he wanted to do since the age of 6—put wood together. His fascination with wooden objects was further fueled when, growing up in Butte, Montana, he discovered the local carousel.
“I lived on that merry-go-round. I learned about it and read about it.”
Carter began his working career as a recording engineer. He wasn’t happy. So he abandoned his effort to have a normal career and went back to what he loved. He earned a master’s degree in art at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. and then taught art for 15 years at Chabot College in Hayward, Calif. Through it all he maintained a woodworking studio.
Carter’s enthusiasm hasn’t waned. He acts as if, after completing his thousands of pieces, he can barely wait to start the next one.
“Don’t do it partially and say, ‘That’s good enough.’ Why put your energy into something if it’s not all the way?”
Many of his pieces, he said, are inspired by vague ideas suggested by clients.
“Once they say that idea, then, man, the wheels start turning. I’ve had more fun than people should.”
Prior to moving to the Sun Valley area 17 years ago, Carter was building neon sculptures.
“I was going to be in those art history books. I was going to be the guy to make a difference in neon sculpture. When I came here, I just couldn’t think those thoughts anymore.”
He went back to his animals. His first carousel horse sits in The Kneadery, a restaurant in Ketchum. His butler, Manners, stands outside Boss Tweeds clothing store. Carter’s current project is building six giraffes, cheetahs and zebras for a café in Japan.
Though his imagination has ranged across the prairies and through the Amazon jungle, Carter’s love remains with the carousel animals. His greatest pride is two intricately carved carousel horses, into each of which he poured about 600 hours of his time. One sold for $17,000.
“I made those for myself, but then somebody wanted them more than I did.”
Carter admires the old-time masters of the craft—the
Germans and Russians who created what he calls the Golden Age of carousels in the early 1900s. Some of his carousel animals, he said, are replicas of the originals, and some are his own creations.
At some point in the building process, he said, “There’s a time with those animals when their hearts start to beat. That’s when you know it’s going to be a success.”
Business, he said, is like a roller coaster—sometimes it pours in, sometimes the phone stops ringing. Though he has a Web site (5,600 hits since Jan. 1, 2000), most of his business is word of mouth—“the most sincere form of advertising.”
Carter said he has no plans to ever quit.
“How could you?” he asks rhetorically.
And a good thing that is for the far-flung recipients of his creations.
On the other hand, if Carter ever does quit and decides to become a life insurance salesman, the policies he writes will no doubt revolutionize the industry.
Doug Tedrow
Somewhere on the far end of the woodworking spectrum from Glenn Carter’s animals lies the lodgepole-and-willow work of Ketchum furniture builder Doug Tedrow, owner, with his wife, Janis, of Wood River Rustics.
The Tedrows’ work has been included in four coffee-table books on Adirondack and western furniture, as well as in numerous magazines. They have won awards in each of the three years that they exhibited at the Western Design conference in Cody, Wyoming.
Their output to date of 125 pieces includes cupboards, hutches, fireplaces, buffets, desks and stairways. Their design goal, Doug Tedrow said, is “rustic elegance.”
“A lot of people who build log furniture tend to do the same things over and over,” he said. “I like to do new things. I want to be known for original creations, not a particular style.”
His pieces are nothing if not original. One hutch contains images or parts of seven animals. Pull out a drawer and a string causes a knocker inside a tortoise shell to create a noise like a rattlesnake.
Tedrow lives with one foot in the past. He is a connoisseur of antiques and drives a 1956 Willys truck, which appeared with a wired-on Maine license plate in an L.L. Bean catalogue after a photo shoot at Galena Lodge, 24 miles north of Sun Valley. Antique furniture, Tedrow believes, “just has more character than the clean, straight lines of modern furniture.”
Whenever he can, Tedrow incorporates into his furniture “funky old things, when they don’t look hokey.” He has, for example, made drawer handles from the pine cone weights of antique cuckoo clocks.
“I like my pieces to look 100 years old,” Tedrow said. And he means that literally—not just that his furniture should have the lines of old pieces, but that a viewer should be able to crawl under one, inspect it as closely as he likes and come away convinced that it was built around 1900 and in continuous use since. Pull a drawer out of the desk in Tedrow’s office and you find it supported not on modern draw slides, or even freshly milled wood, but on old bottle caps. Part of the desktop is bordered with battered leather fringe.
His shop is a model of Victorian clutter and a testimonial to his motto: “You can’t have enough stuff.” That stuff includes 42 animal heads or antlers mounted on the walls, a cedar-strip canoe hanging from the ceiling, stuffed ducks, a cigar-store Indian bust, a horse skull with a unicorn-type horn, a saddle, cowboy hats and cowboy posters. All that fits around the stuff he actually uses for his furniture—rows and rows of lodgepoles, willow sticks on ceiling racks and a corner blacksmith shop.
Tedrow grew up in Southern California, but has had an almost lifelong acquaintance with the Wood River Valley. His parents bought a cabin on Trail Creek in 1952 and began bringing him here in 1954 at the age of 6. His current line of work was inspired both by the antiques in his father’s collection and by the old log cabins he saw here as a child.
Tedrow majored in art at the University of Utah in the 1970s, but before he got into building rustic furniture full-time, he spent 30 years working as a carpenter.
“I took all the knowledge about how to join things and connect things, took that to logs and sticks. There’s always a challenge in how to connect things and make it look good.”
Tedrow got his furniture business going out of a garage in Southern California. His most successful pieces were log-and-stucco Santa Fe style. But, he said, “once people saw the idea, they started to mass produce it.”
The Tedrows moved to the Wood River Valley in 1994 and have been building rustic furniture ever since. Business has been good, about half coming from photographs of their work in coffee table books and magazines, some from galleries and quite a bit just from word of mouth.
Anything he sells, Tedrow said, he builds to last centuries.
“I think I’m making heirlooms here,” he said.