Bill--
     Thanks for sharing your interesting  bio.  You now have a lot of  
sympathy and/or empathy WRT losing the tool chest to the thief whose  
boat sank.  We can only hope that the thief himself suffered the same  
fate.
     But one mystery remains.  You wrote:

> In 1956, the three of us collaborated on a rather ornate workbench
> which, sadly, saw its demise in 2001.

     How, prey tell, can a workbench just up and see it's demise?
         Tom Holloway,
lauching a carpentry project to partition off the woodshop from the  
horse stalls turned into storage bins (certain Bay Area Galoots will  
appreciate the reference).

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