Structural Engineering

Dad built so many items for our home – partially due to the economic constraints of our oversized family, but mostly because he loved being a ‘do-it-your-selfer’. Dad would look over whatever Mom was currently admiring in a magazine picture and figure out how to make it for a fraction of the cost. It was a mission and a challenge! Each project began with a Saturday morning trip to the lumberyard. We would be there for hours, Dad searching for items on his list and calculating costs; us killing time wandering around the sawdust covered floors, inhaling the sweet smell of cut lumber and looking for the vending machines. They always had a row of them tucked into some corner near a doorway luring us with their colorful packages filled with stale Tom’s peanut bars, cheese cracker snacks, beer nuts, Chuckles candy and other delectable items. He’d give us pennies for the gumball machine and like juvenile gamblers we’d try our luck – hoping for a jackpot to come through the chute. On this particular Saturday we were shopping for redwood for outdoor armchairs that Dad had decided to make after seeing them in a Sunset magazine. Ours were designed to accommodate square vinyl covered foam cushions that we had purchased at the Akron discount store. These plastic cushions were water and soil proof, perfect for a large family with grimy little kids. We sat on them when watching TV, stacked them on top of one another for thrones and forts, used them as landing pads for indoor sporting events, or lined them in twos or threes for makeshift mattresses during sleepovers - the slippery vinyl units inevitably sliding apart by morning to leave us in a tangle of blankets, pillows, and cushions on the hard floor. Being cheap and plentiful, they became the key element in the chair design, their yellow and orange 60’s colors stylishly complimenting the redwood frames. Dad had opted for ¼” plywood as the supporting surface for the seat cushions, figuring that would keep the structure light and thus easy to move around. The plywood was set into narrow slots in the side rails of the seat frame. Unfortunately over time, weathering caused the plywood to shrink and warp, popping out of the slots when too much weight was applied to them. Seeing the grownups suddenly finding themselves in a near fetal position with their knees up under their chins was a source of great amusement for the younger kids, whose lighter payload made them immune from such catastrophes. But Dad was a problem solver and design tweaking after test flights was a naturally occurring part of his job. Undaunted by this minor setback, he seized upon some old tire inner tubes, (a supply of which no household in those days was without) cut strips from them and stapled the straps across the chair bottom in place of the plywood. The result was enhanced security and far greater comfort. No longer suffering the shock and surprise of splintering crashes, the occupant would sink incrementally in an almost genteel fashion as the aging rubber tore through the staples one by one, relaxed in the knowledge that escape could be made before disaster struck.
Now when I open the door of my shop and step onto the sawdust covered floor, the aroma of lumberyard imbued with Dad’s spirit fuels my efforts, bracing me for whatever daily obstacles my work may encounter.

Happy Birthday Dad - Roger Westvig 1/24/1919 - 9/27/1997

Snapshots

Taking photographs and making pictures has always been a part of my existence. I can still feel myself squinting as a child in the summer sun while Dad took our family portraits, gussied up in our church clothes, sweaty and itchy and feeling as though we had already suffered through enough with being at church all morning in scratchy starchy finery when we could have been playing. Each Christmas time he would take home movies of us hanging up our stockings for Santa, the hot glare of his camera lights burning our retinas while the fireplace was cooking our backsides. My parents both grew up with fathers who were camera buffs, so documenting their lives with snapshots was as much a part of their daily routine as eating and sleeping. Like his father, Dad took photographs too and even made his own prints, first with a makeshift enlarger fashioned out of an old cocktail shaker and later on in a cramped darkroom he built in our basement. Though unconcerned with the technicalities of how the camera worked, Mom was well aware of the magic it could generate. To her, photographs were tangible ‘hard copies’ of time and place and face that you could keep. She selected and preserved them in our family photo albums as devotedly as any medieval monk, knowing that they were her legacy as well as our history. The albums served to trigger memories and tales from the past – our past. Time after time, we would flip through their pages remembering the people and events held fast in them. After my parents’ deaths, the most cherished and difficult items to divide up were the photos. I took custody of them, duplicating each image multiple times so everyone would have a set. Recently I have been creating albums online for our now distant family to enjoy and share anew. Digitalized images are easy to enlarge for aging eyes, revealing details overlooked in those little snapshots we got back from the drugstore and pasted in books or kept in wallets. I have used photos as reference materials for reminiscing, writing and painting ever since grade school, improving my drawing skills by rendering the images over the years when live models were illusive and weather hampered attempts to paint nature in ‘plein air’. The photo was always there, holding still for hours, days, years, while I worked. The living subjects may have grown up, grown old, grown apart, but their images in the photographs are unchanging, captured in time and place for eternity.