Tobias: Hi Bill. Thank you for taking time out of your increasingly busy schedule to chat to us. Please could you tell us a bit about yourself, what is/was your career and a little about your family and how you became a woodworker.

William: I have been making high end reproduction furniture for 40 years. After graduating from Haverford College (in PA) with majors in music and biology, I thought I wanted to get my doctorate in molecular biology. After the first 12 rather miserable months spent with test tubes in the lab, I learned a lot about myself. Firstly, that I needed to be a generalist academically. Secondly, having been a tinkerer, growing as a musician, and possessing an artistic bent since toddlerhood, I realized that I absolutely needed to work creatively with my hands. I had a very strong sense that I wanted to work with wood and not any other media.

So I took a few years off, working at my dad’s tree nursery hoeing fields and digging trees and working in my brother’s landscaping crew. At the time (early 1980’s), there was almost nothing available in the way of woodworking classes. Having minimal funds, I sat down and wrote letters to furniture makers throughout the US, enquiring about working as an apprentice. No-one would take me!

I was however, very fortunate in convincing (“begging” is a more accurate description) a local Pennsylvania cabinetmaker, E. Townsend Moore, to let me into his shop. He had been a curator at DuPont’s Wintertur, outside Wilmington, DE and had learned his craft from a long line of Chester County period furniture makers. “Townie” Moore’s mentor was Thomas Treate Hogg, a well known Chester County reproduction furniture maker in the 1940’s -60’s. I worked 60 hours a week as a landscaper, but was at Townie Moore’s shop near Media, PA, every weekend. Because he saw the seriousness of my interest and he also did not have anyone to pass his skills on to, he really took me under his wing and gave me a lot of his valuable time. In return, as I had no money to offer, I did an extremely thorough cleaning of his shop after every work session, for which he was quite grateful. 

Townie Moore was a wonderfully generous and patient teacher and I was an eager student who learned fast. After about a year, I was pretty much able to look at any photo of a period furniture piece and make what I saw.

What I found was that many professionals were just not all that happy!  Making a living as an artisan is very hard work and many of the folk were not doing what they really wanted to, but were instead fixing broken chairs and repairing shabby Victorian dressers.

While I was out hoeing the fields in the hot sun at work one day, I decided that I’d apply to medical school and gain a more secure career, whilst pursuing furniture making on the side, any way I could. I already had a strong background in biology and chemistry at Haverford and I was also doing volunteer work with brain-injured patients at the Bryn Mawr Rehabilitation facility in Malvern, PA.

It took many years and about 10 different workshops for me to get things going properly. I have memories of using one of those toxic fume spewing “Ready Heaters” in my sub-zero garage in Watertown (far upstate) NY, where it was so cold that I had to wear gloves in the shop for many years.

To cut the story short, I went on to become an anesthesiologist and continued to be a passionate student of period furniture making.   I simply used every opportunity to gain more skills and I kept learning about woodworking through the years. Over some 35 years, I slowly acquired a full shop of third-hand tools. My passion for furniture making and carving has continued to increase over the years.