The Luthier:  In His Own Write
I have been making things since I was allowed to use my fathers tools in the early fifties.We had free access to our basement with tools and a supply of wood. My father's philosophy was to just let us go at it. I don't remember him showing me how to use tools. To me they were self explanatory. We made boats, daggers, swords and other implements of warfare that were necessary to take part in the great works of literature that were being read to us or later we were reading ourselves. We joined King Arthur and Old Shatterhand and Winetou from the writings of Karl May. We lived in an idyllic garden oasis, a dead end street that was the astronomical observatory of the Leiden University in the Netherlands. It bordered on the botanical gardens of the university, and we roamed it freely and illegally.       In sixth grade in a one room school, I was introduced to "proper" wood working. We had school on Saturday mornings and that time was reserved for the handcrafts. Our first project was to make a dowel by sawing a square stick out of a board, plane it to be eight sided, shave off the ridges with a piece of glass and then sand it till it was round.
	We grew up on recordings of folk music, the Almanac singers, the Weavers and various family members. For me a special time was when my Aunt Peggy lived with us for a year while she was taking classes at the university. She would come around at bedtime with her banjo and sing us each a song. Music became important for me. Especially during High school it gave life meaning and a balance. I had never done well with spelling and writing and I repeated several grades. I started playing folk guitar after a couple of years of classical guitar. In this time I also became acquainted with the singing and playing of Jean Ritchie.       In the end I dropped out of high school in Holland after working for a summer at Camp Killooleet in Hancock,Vermont, running the craftshop. I came back to the US and worked in the machine shop of the physics department of Yale University. I received on-the-job training. I learned to work to very close tolerances and to know where accuracy mattered and where "close enough" was a good measurement. After a year and a half and another summer at Camp Killooleet, I decided to go to college.
Over the years I kept making things for myself . If I wanted something my first thought would be, can I make it myself? When I got to Goddard college I planned my studies around crafts and education. In my second semester I took a musical instrument building seminar. I went off on my own and built five dulcimers. It never occurred to me that some instruction might be a useful thing, save time and shorten the learning curve. After all, I had looked at many dulcimers and new what I wanted. My instruments have "grown and matured" over the years, but my A-model dulcimer still bears a strong resemblance to my first hourglass shaped dulcimer built in 1968.
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