The Family Craftsman

My husband George recently built a table of antique year old heart pine reclaimed from the ceiling of an abandoned cotton mill in Enoree, SC. The mill was the sole employer in that small community for more than a century. A friend of ours delivered a load of rough pine boards and beams, blackened with decades of grime and tufted with cotton lint, and asked George to transform them into a coffee table for her brother. After George pulled handmade nails and spikes, planed and joined the planks, the rich red veins of the wood were exposed as clearly as the day when the trees were cut and milled at the site of construction.

George is teaching himself woodworking and intends to become a craftsman, evidenced by the growing collection of woodworking tools and machinery in our garage.

He’s made several small pieces for his students in the Family Learning GED program. These include stands for the family fish tank, a coffee table for a family room, and several small work tables sized for a child and parent to play together. His adult students dropped out of high school to marry early, have children early, and go to work early – like many of the generations who preceded them in the mill-based economy that once sustained the South.

They now hope to earn their GEDs so they can find better jobs or continue their educations, but, more than anything else, they hope to break the cycle of school failure before their own children become the newest family members to be entrapped. They bring their infants and preschool children to an early childhood classroom next door to his. Each day the parents, children, and teaching staff meet for lunch and for parent/child activities which help prepare the children and their parents to meet the challenges of the long years of schooling that lie ahead.

George’s tools at work include math textbooks and a guitar, test prep problems and play dough, resources on opening family businesses and picture books. Like teachers everywhere today, he must measure progress by student practice test scores. But he also notes with delight the child who took his first steps or spoke his first words during the day.

Recently one of his families took their two year old son to see Santa. He asked for “Georges” for Christmas.