Unlike some of the luckier of you, I don't come from a long line 
of woodworkers.  Dad had an office job, so we didn't have much 
beyond a screwdriver and hammer around the house.  I can 
remember when I was about 18 in 1972 (that should date me) I 
decided to build some speaker enclosures for my VW bus.  The 
girl I was then dating, whose dad owned a lumberyard, kind of 
sneered at my excuse for workmanship.  Ah well ...

Fast forward to New Year's 1997, when my wife (certainly not the 
girl with the lumberyard dad!) and I buy a 1909 Craftsman 
bungalow in South Pasadena, California.  My parents visit over 
the holidays and gasp.  The place is beyond being a fixer -- 
it's a near total dump.  Thankfully, we know a contractor who 
does great work at amazingly low rates, and he and his 
assistants spend three months working miracles on the house.  
But when the dust settles there are still a few undone jobs -- a 
couple of missing stick-and-panel doors, junky '50s cabinetry 
begging to be replaced, empty spaces in the living room where a 
Morris chair knockoff would go nicely.  I start watching 
woodworking and home improvement shows (which, in my cable 
franchise, is limited to Norm, This Old House and Hometime) and 
lurking in rec.woodworking.

By Christmas 1997 I have a couple of (cough) power tools (well, 
these things aren't to be discussed on Oldtools, I'm sure, but 
just to make a full confession, a Jet 10" contractor saw and a 
Porter-Cable 690 router).  Eventually I actually plug them in 
and start them up.  "These make a lot of noise," I remark to 
myself.  I then start noticing posts on rec.ww about old-
fashioned tools.  I have a couple of chisels I need to sharpen, 
so I read the stuff on Scary Sharp and go out and buy a bunch of 
sandpaper.  I consider the cost of a 12-1/2" power planer and 6" 
power jointer vs. a few hand planes.  Before I realize it I can 
feel a nascent galootism coming over me.

Having lashed together a very basic router table, my next 
projects include more shop miscellany (a bench, outfeed tables, 
etc, etc) and projects for the house (I figure I'll build skills 
with basic projects like cubbyholes for my 3-year-old son's 
bedroom, then tackle moderate projects like simple cabinetry and 
interior doors, and then finally in a few months make a stab at 
furniture.

As coincidence would have it, I work at the same small business 
as Paddy O'Deen (well, sort of small -- at 6,000 employees it's 
not one of the bigger NASA centers), but had never run into him 
in person.  Career-wise, I spent about a decade as a newspaper 
science writer before switching sides and becoming one of the 
people who write the press packets.

Ironically, I was doing a little research on my family tree a 
few months ago and learned that there was a little woodworking 
in the blood after all.  Turns out that one great-grandfather 
was a house carpenter in the late 1800s, while another was a 
cabinetmaker in the same time period.  Now, if he had only 
willed me his set of tools ...

Frank O'Donnell
South Pasadena, CA
fod@n...