Category: The Arts

A stick and a knife are tools of their trade

Story by Tina Tidmore
Photos by Michael Callahan

Walking stick, cane, hiking pole and pilgrim’s staff: just a few of the terms that refer to the humble weight-supporter often associated with disability, the elderly and ancient Biblical characters walking through a desert. At least two St. Clair County woodworkers add creativity to the sticks they find in the woods, giving them eye-appeal in addition to a practical use.

Marvin Little, a retired insurance adjuster, takes a simple approach in his creations. His focus is on using a variety of woods and a variety of handles. He retains the bark and enhances the natural beauty of the stick.

Little’s interest in making canes started when he moved into a new home 15 years ago. While walking through the woods, he noticed some small trees and branches that would make good walking sticks. He has learned many of his techniques through online cane-making clubs where ideas are shared.

His own sharing sparked interest from another would-be cane maker. Cook Springs resident Jackie Stevens, who retired from the banking industry, remembers her interest starting when Little regularly brought his canes to the old St. Clair Federal Savings and Loan in Pell City to show the employees.

Little tried to get her involved in the Logan Martin Woodcarvers group, but she regularly declined. Finally in 2006, “I went to a meeting and became hooked,” Stevens said. Then, with a few unprepared, seasoned sticks Little gave her, she started creating her own canes.

Using a knife, Stevens actually carves shapes and figures into the sticks, including one she worked on of two snakes this summer.

Both Little and Stevens said a love for working with wood was passed down to them in their families. “I enjoy making something with my hands,” Little said. “It’s always a challenge to make something pretty and useful out of wood.”

“I even love the smell of wood,” Stevens said.

Little’s approach is not only to provide something attractive and unique, he likes knowing he is making something with practical use that is helpful to people.

But Stevens’ focus is on adding to her personal wood-carving collection or creating artistic pieces for decoration or display. She has given some as gifts or done commissioned pieces. They are strong enough to be useful, but that’s not her main focus.

Because their canes have different primary purposes, they have different price ranges. He sells his canes at local festivals and is careful not to invest too much time or supplies into them. “You have to make something that will sell at the venue where you want to sell it,” Little said. So his price points are $18 to $28, which generally amounts to enough to cover his expenses. He’s not making any profit or even paying for his time.

Similarly, Stevens isn’t in it for the money, even though she’s sold one at $60 and others up to $400. She started her cane-carving while seeking a stress-reliever. “My shop is the only place that I can completely lose myself with no worries or fears and lose all track of time,” said Stevens. “To me, the entire process from harvesting the wood to applying the final finish is rewarding.”

But she avoids turning it into a job. “I want it to be my idea, my style, no demands,” Stevens said. “I bowed out of the real world and come into my fantasy world.”

In 2006, when Stevens first attended the Logan Martin Woodcarvers, she was the only woman. But now others are involved, and they have taken up carving dolls. “The biggest thing is the friends I’ve gained in the group,” Stevens said.

Cane-making Process

Making a walking cane starts, obviously, with the stick. Marvin Little, who lives just north of Pell City, has used sassafras, hickory, oak, bamboo, sourwood, cedar and many other species. “A lot of it I don’t know what it is because I cut it in the winter when there aren’t any leaves,” Little said.

Some are branches, but most of the walking canes started as trunks of young trees. Little often turns the root ball into the cane handle. Broken limbs lying on the ground cannot be used because they are weakened by bugs. “It has to be something that feels good in your hand,” Little said.

Both Little and Jackie Stevens say “twisties” are highly favored. They are trees that have been twisted into a cork-screw form by vines. “If I find a good twisty in the woods, I’ve got to have it,” Stevens said.

Both Little and Stevens have friends offering them sticks and other wood. “I hate to see wood discarded,” Little said.

The harvested stick must be allowed to season for a year. Then, Little cleans off loose bark. It’s at that point that he decides what he will make with that stick. Some need to be straightened using water and a clamp. Sanding and painting are next. Then he puts on the handles and adds the protective clear coat.

In addition to the joy of creating something attractive, there is the challenge of doing so within the limitations and features each piece of wood has. “The wood has to talk to me,” Stevens said in reference to what she decides to do with it.

Much of the character of a walking cane is in the handle. Little has used a variety of items to create decorative handles, including doorknobs, deer hoofs and elk horns. Even a golf ball has been turned into a cane handle.

The most unusual request Little received was to create a wood-carved human skull as a cane handle. He has been asked to do canes shaped like snakes. But he has refused. Why? Simple. “I don’t like snakes,” he said.

To be functional and stable, the top of the cane must be in the same plane as the bottom, even if the middle is twisted. Also, the height of the cane needs to come up to the person’s wrist. Shorter or longer and it will not provide the stable support needed.

A cane Stevens is most proud of is one that used material from the former Avondale Mills in St. Clair County. “I made this cane in the memory of my Big Daddy McCullough, who worked in the mill all his life,” Stevens said. As the Mill was being dismantled, she asked for some of the remnant material.

She got some wooden thread spools and a 1902 sprinkler head that she made into a cane that she treasures. “I took several of these old spools of various colors, stacked them on each other and ran a quarter–inch thread rod the length of the cane and then put the sprinkler head on top,” Stevens said.

She has agreed to have her canes included in an exhibit at Heritage Hall Museum. Little plans to be selling his canes at this fall’s Homestead Hollow.

But beyond that, they do it just for the joy found in creating a work of art with a knife and a stick.

Theater group is uniquely Springville

Story by Jane Newton Henry
Photos by Brandie Felice, Judy Shults
and Janet McBroom

It’s a true story that reads like the opening scene of a classic Broadway musical: June Morgan Mack returns home to Springville in 1976 with her college diploma, only to find that her summer job has fallen through. She talks with her neighbor, Archie Jones, about the problem, and he says, “Why don’t you do a show?”

So that’s what she did. She wrote a children’s musical titled, “Circus Magic,” and found about 25 people to produce and appear in the play. They built sets, made costumes, rehearsed and did one performance at Springville High School, now Springville Middle School. “Everybody got a charge out of it, so we decided to do it again the next year,” she said.

That production marked the beginning of Springville Children’s Theater. For five summers, Mack wrote and directed children’s musicals.  Thirty seven years later, the theater group in the St. Clair County town of about 4,000 people, is still going strong.

She credits the “incredibly talented” people of Springville for keeping the effort going.  In addition, the group’s unique operating philosophy has played a major role in its success.

Extraordinary talent

“When we started the theater group, there were so many talented people right here in Springville — all these incredible people who were singing in church choirs,” Mack said. “Since then, I’ve been in many other states and have done many other things, but I would still say that the talent in Springville is extraordinary.”

Mack recalled the performances in “Circus Magic.”  Twelve-year old Shawn Cushen worked as the stage manager and played the male lead in the play. Penny Burgess played opposite him. “They were terrific in the play. And they were brilliant kids. They were making all A’s in school, but to memorize all of those pages of the script and then to stand up and spit out their lines with gusto – that was something no one knew they could do.”

A unique philosophy

Our guiding principle is to cast every person who auditions, she said. “We believe that if it’s fun and interesting for people, and they learn a lot and are proud of themselves, the show takes care of itself.”

By 1981, the grown-ups wanted to do larger-scale shows requiring casts of all ages, Mack said.  That year, the group chose “Oklahoma!,” and it became the first in a long line of Broadway musicals that the newly named Springville Community Theater would produce.

“’Oklahoma!’ was expandable,” she said.  “We could put all the kids in it we could find, which is a big deal for us.”

The group has a particular interest in bringing first-timers to the stage – especially children. “We believe that a community theater not only fosters a positive community spirit, but builds confidence and forges lifetime friendships.”

The theater also plays an educational role. Mack explained that during the organization’s early years, there wasn’t any other live theater in the area, and children were growing up without it.

“They didn’t know the classical musical-theater literature, and that’s one reason I’ve been so dedicated to doing the classics,” she said. “We will do Rogers and Hammerstein forever.”

After the production of “Oklahoma!,” the theater has produced classic Broadway musicals every few years.  They performed “Oklahoma!” a second time in 2010, which was performed outdoors at nearby Homestead Hollow, and just this month, they performed South Pacific again — 30 years after their first production of that show.

June Mack

Mack, who founded the Springville theater group and has directed most of the shows, says that preparing for a production is difficult. “It’s not just for fun. It’s disciplined,” she said. “I’m regimented about people knowing their lines before I even see them.

“It’s hard work, but that raises the bar and makes people take it more seriously. People will always step up to the challenge. I expect great things; they surprise themselves — that’s how it works. So I keep upping the challenge; that’s my job.  As long as I can keep doing that, they will keep surpassing their expectations.”

She credits the people of Springville with helping her learn her craft. “They taught me to direct,” Mack said. “I am so grateful for the patience and devotion of these people for all of these years.

“We’ve hit obstacles and said, ‘That’s it. The show’s gonna be shut down. It’s never gonna work.’ But you give these people 30 minutes to regroup and think, and we’ll move forward again.”

Since Mack’s first summer with Springville Children’s Theater, she has worked on more than 50 theater productions and 70 films. In addition to her bachelor’s degree in composition for musical theater from Hollins College, she received master’s degrees in film and education from Florida State and Harvard University. Her films have garnered 22 international awards and have been seen on national television and at screenings here and in other countries.  She is a professor of film at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Expect to hear about auditions for another summer musical in Springville in a couple more years. If you would like to get involved in Springville Community Theater, contact Mack at (205) 467-3105 or jmack@uab.edu.

Editor’s Note: If you have been involved in a production of Springville Children’s Theater or Springville Community Theater and have film or video footage from a show or shows, contact June Mack at (205) 467-3105 or jmack@uab.edu. She is collecting footage to have it digitally archived.

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Springville home to art gallery of national note

Story by Mike Bolton
Photos by Jerry Martin

As college kids in love tend to do, Dean Black and Sharon Williams would hold hands on the front porch of the old house that Black called home in his college days and talk of marriage and exactly how their lives would play out.

What their friends and family chalked up to as a cute couple with big dreams was actually a game plan for the couple who in 1980 became Mr. and Mrs. Dean Black. It was a game plan that has come to fruition with Blackwood Gallery in Springville.
“We’d sit at that old house near Auburn and talk about how we’d have an art gallery one day and I’d draw and Dean would make the frames for my artwork,” Sharon Black said in their gallery on US 11 in Springville. “That was our goal in 1977, and that is how it has played out.”

Today, Blackwood Gallery houses the couple’s work as well as the works of more than 40 other craftsmen. Visitors are often surprised to find bronze work, blown glass, leaded glass, handmade furniture and other woodworking treasures from Alabama’s top craftsmen in a place like Springville.

But it was the only location they ever considered for their gallery, both say. Traditional places where you might expect to find an art gallery, like Mountain Brook, lacked that laid-back atmosphere that is so important to both. Besides, many larger cities tend to frown on people riding their horses to work these days.

“I grew up in Hueytown on a lake with horses, and Dean lived in Homewood, but he spent a lot of time in Springville around his grandparents’ summer getaway that had a lake and horses,” Sharon said. “When we built the gallery here, in addition to Dean’s woodworking shop he built in the back part of the gallery, he built a stable where we could put the horses when we rode them to work.”

For all their dreams of one day owning a gallery, surely the couple could never have envisioned the success Dean would find in the field of woodworking. In his college days, his woodworking consisted of building custom gun stocks at what he called Deano’s Gun Shop, an out-building at the home he rented in Society Hill.

In those days, being accepted into the prestigious Alabama Designer Craftsmen group and constructing many breathtaking pieces for the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Birmingham Botanical Gardens was even too much for him to imagine.

Chances are you might have seen his work and not even known it.

“I did the columns for the Asian murals at the Birmingham Museum of Art and that opened a lot of doors for me,” he said. “I came back and built the bell stand at the museum from wood that they presented me from the 1939 World’s Fair. I followed that by building the bases for the samurai helmet collection.”

In 1996, the Birmingham Museum of Art had a coup as it became one of a handful of cities in the U.S. to land the traveling Qin collection. The artifacts from the tomb of Qin Shihauangdi, who established the first empire called China, are hailed as one of the most awe-inspiring collections in the world. The collection was taken from a burial site the size of Manhattan and included full-size horses and protecting warriors made from terracotta.

Black was chosen to do much of the accompanying woodwork that supported the treasures. That woodwork was seen by thousands of visitors from across the U.S.

The museum is home to one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Wedgwood pottery in the world and the only collection of its kind in the United States. Black was chosen over other craftsmen to build the supporting woodwork for that, too. He also did the delicate woodwork in the museum’s Korean Room.

As word of his skills spread, Black was also chosen to construct the Tori, a large gate at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens.

Today, Black says he’s amazed at how word of his work has spread and at the inquiries he receives from across the country. His work has ranged from columns for a hunting lodge belonging to dog-racing magnate Milton McGregor to crosses and offering tables from large churches across the U.S.

All of the work is done in his shop in the back of his gallery in Springville.

“I have equipment that can do pieces substantially larger than many people can do,” he said. “It has opened doors for many of these larger projects.”

Black says he has made some inroads into one project that he really hopes never comes to be. An Auburn graduate and devout Auburn fan, he has offered to build museum-quality pieces for the school free-of-charge from the wood from trees at Toomer’s Corner should they not survive the poisoning.

“I love Auburn, but I haven’t been as diligent as I should have been in sending my money down there,” he said. “This would be a way that I could give something back. I just hope it never comes to that.”

Black said he is a firm believer that small things steer people along the paths of life and if not for a woman and her dog, there probably wouldn’t be a Blackwood Gallery today.

“I grew up an Alabama fan, but I wanted to be a veterinarian,” he said. “I went to Auburn to become a veterinarian and took all the pre-vet classes.

“I was working with a vet down there, and a woman brought in a large sheep dog that had been hit by a car. The vet did everything he could but couldn’t save the dog. He told me that I needed to watch how he handled it because it would be something I would have to do frequently in my career.

“We had this little window in the office, and I watched through the window as he told the woman and kids. I was looking at the back of his head as he was facing them. I saw him shake his head, and I saw them burst into tears.

“I knew I could handle the gory stuff, but I wasn’t prepared for that. I knew in that instant that I couldn’t be a vet. I went in and told my professors that I wasn’t even going to take the final exams because I was changing my major. I lost more than a year’s work but I changed to marketing.

“I will always be glad that I did.”