The right tools for the job

OK, I admit it: on further reflection, maybe I am a little weird. Maybe. But it's part of my charm, as Miss Amy so kindly points out in the comments. Despite my rather lame remarks to the contrary in a previous post, I had to at least consider the possibility when I found this article in my notes today: "The Peerless Tool Chest of H. O. Studley," by Lon Schleining of Fine Woodworking magazine. I'd made a note of it to remind myself to keep looking for the poster that Taunton Press published a while back. It was a limited edition, and out of print. I kept hoping maybe I'd find one on eBay or something. But it's back in print! Yay! So there's something to be said for procrastination, I guess. Now if only there were more room on my walls.

I saw this very tool chest in person, at the Smithsonian Institution's Piano 300 exhibit in 2000-01. I was there with a bunch of piano technicians, who were in town for their national meeting (ahem, I was a member of the Piano Technicians Guild at the time, if you want to know the truth -- I really was holding out on you guys). Anyway, the guild chapter that hosted the meeting had also arranged for us to be bussed over to see the exhibit, after hours. Imagine it: nobody in the whole place but the geekiest of piano geeks.

The pianos of course, were fascinating, as were the composers' manuscripts & early editions and so on. But my absolute favorite item in the whole exhibit was the tool chest of one H. O. Studley. It was behind glass, unfortunately. Fortunately for the museum, I guess, or I would have fondled those tools all night, and I'm not just trying to be funny. At any rate, after spending a respectable amount of time looking at the pianos in the exhibit, I spent the rest of the evening quite literally on my knees looking at Mr. Studley's tool chest. I'd never seen such incredible beauty and efficiency! The way the tools all fit together! The way he had a tool for everything! In every size! And the way he'd utilized every bit of space, and decorated it all with scraps of piano materials: exotic woods, ivory, mother of pearl, ohhh god. And a special, designated place for every single item!!

My friends had to drag me out of there when the museum closed.

The tool chest is mentioned briefly in the Piano 300 exhibit notes, under "miscellany," but it is not pictured there. It is, however, featured rather prominently in another Smithsonian exhibit, at the National Museum of American History, entitled "Tool Chests: Symbol and Servant." It looks like the exhibit is no longer there, but I'd sure like to have seen the rest of these items, like this beautifully-used shoeshine kit from the 1950s.

One thing about tools, though. Women don't have them -- or, more accurately, when we do, we don't have the same relationship to them that men seem to. Our "tool kits" tend to consist of consumable products that are supposed to make us look or feel more, you know, "attractive" or acceptable -- or stuff that we use to enhance or "improve" our appearance: makeup, clothes, accessories (and yeah, I know lots of women who keep their makeup and so on in tool chests from the hardware store; and I've seen plenty of closets with organizational schemes that rival Mr. Studley's).

Or we have kitchen gear and/or household cleaning implements and products and that sort of thing (or some women do, apparently -- and yes, the vacuum cleaner is, technically, a power tool, as is the blender). But while these items may constitute "tools" in a sense, they are not generally considered essential to our livelihood in the way that the tool chests in the exhibit were to their owners (or if you want to make the case that they are, I guess that makes us either whores or chambermaids).

Those of us who engage in certain "feminine" hobbies like knitting or sewing accumulate a lot of gear, but these things are hardly ever how we make our living, and only rarely do we organize them in a portable form like the toolboxes on display -- it's more likely to be a room or a corner of the guest room or the dry part of the basement or something like that. More comparable, I think, to a man's 'workshop' than to these tool chests.

The Tool Chest exhibit notes acknowledge this gender disparity very briefly:

"Stereotyping by sex starts early in life. This toy tool chest declares carpentry to be boys' work."

Indeed, the only item in this exhibit that clearly belonged to a female is this lovely needleworker's cabinet from the 1850s, with the accompanying note that "[w]omen and men alike take pride in the tools they use."

Yes, well. Yall know whom to blame for that sort of thing.

Before I digress further into patriarchy-blaming, however, I want to point out this upholsterer's chest from the exhibit. It reminds me of my grandfather's signpainting tool kit. Battered, efficient, not too fancy. My grandfather's was customized, like this one, and like Mr. Studley's. Only he was not given to luxurious extravagances like Mr. Studley. He was certainly no Freemason.

His kit had drawers made from SPAM™ cans and sardine tins on one side, with its own hand-made Dixie Cup™ dispenser (there was another in his workshop). He used the Dixie Cups™ to mix paint in, and when they started selling the kind with the wax coating, rather than the old-fashioned paper kind, he went around and bought as many cartons of the old kind as he could find. He felt strongly that the wax contaminated the paint, and I believe him. There were still a few cartons left in the house when he died.

There was a small hot-pot to melt the gelatin capsules to make the glue used to adhere the gold leaf to the window. And little cans and/or baby food jars of black and red and yellow paint (refilled from the larger, more economical cans at home, naturally). And a perfectly fascinating hemisphere of blue chalk, and a chalky blue string.

Oh, and the brushes, in every size, in these shallow wooden drawers, and a spot with a little glass bottle that had a tiny cork in it, full of olive oil to dip the brush in after it had been cleaned. There was even a little cage-like contraption he'd rigged to keep the bottle from tipping. I think it might have been made from strips cut from a SPAM™ can. Remember the kind with the key on top, that you used the key to peel a strip of metal away to separate the top from the bottom of the can? He used those strips, unwound from the little key, and washed. I think sardine tins opened like that too, back in the day.

My granddad loved SPAM,™ bless his heart.

There was also a section in a corner of the tool kit that just fit a small coffee can, in which he stored the pieces of fluffy cotton that he used to buff the loose gold off of gold-leafed lettering. He'd hold the can up against the window just below each letter to catch the larger bits as they floated off. Bits of gold leaf don't take up very much space, so I don't know if he occasionally emptied that coffee can into a larger receptacle, but I do know he saved up all the pieces of cotton, so there must have been one somewhere. He put silver leaf and platinum leaf in the same container as the gold, on account of they have different melting temperatures, so they could all be separated later, when the time came to melt it all down.

When he retired, he took all those pieces of cotton (50 or 60 years' worth, I'm guessing) and all those flakes of precious metal leaf, and had them melted down. I hope he hadn't planned to retire on the proceeds, because it was well under an ounce. That stuff is thin -- as in a couple of molecules thin.

I don't know what ever happened to that old tool kit. I don't even have a photo of it. Sure wish I did.

[Update: I corrected some typos and fixed a broken link. I also called my dad and asked him whatever had happened to that tool kit. He said, with a bit more bitterness in his voice than I expected, that he'd thrown it in a dumpster in Prescott, AZ about 14 years ago, right around the time he turned 50. After he finally admitted to himself that he really didn't like painting signs, wasn't especially good at it, and didn't want to do it any more, or even try. I suspect, from the rest of our chat, that there were some, you know, "father issues" resolved when he tossed that old kit out as well. It saddens me to know that it's gone, but I guess I can see where he was coming from. He's a much happier man nowadays. It's good, sometimes, to throw the past in a dumpster and walk away from it. I had no idea he'd hated it quite that much.]