THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
Oral History Office
SUBJECT: Wood Carving
INTERVIEW WITH: Rod Johnson (Tape 1 of 1)
DATE: 8 March 1999
PLACE: 301 Norwood, Georgetown, Tx 78628
INTERVIEWER: Laurie Gudzikowski
TAPE 1, SIDE 1
G: Okay, this is Laurie Gudzikowski and I'm talking to Rod Johnson in his home in Austin [Georgetown]. Rod, I want you to tell me a little bit about your dad and yourself and your wood carving.
J: Well, my dad passed away about ten years ago, but he carved most of his life. Based on his, the stories I've heard, his parents were immigrants to Texas from Sweden. 1893 is when his father came and 18...1902 is when my grandmother came. And he talked about...they always talked about this old uncle in Sweden that never immigrated, but he was one of these, sort of a loner - never married, sat and made crazy things - you know, carved in wood. Which I find out later is pretty typical of that particular region of Sweden, Smolan, which is a heavily wooded, poorly...poor agriculture, so I know why they came Texas looking for the land. But my dad talked about, as a kid, they didn't have any toys - he was born in 1905, so you know, that's early times. And he said, "We made our own toys back then out of Rod Johnson 2
blocks of wood and what-have-you. And then the airplanes
J: came along and we made toy airplanes." But he seriously started carving in 1935 based on an article that was in Popular Science Magazine, July of 1935, written by E.G. Tangeman. Now I've got a reference on that in one of Tangeman's books on that article. And they offered as a kit: a knife, and a little block of wood marked on...a pattern marked on it, on a piece of paper that showed some instructions. And so that was his big breakthrough, was to finally make a contact with somewhat official or legitimate wood carving. Everything that he'd ever done before, which is typically, with a pocketknife and so forth... I have that knife and I have that very first carving that he did in 1935. And then he carved up through the late '30s and early '40s, and I never did ask him why he quit then - before the Second World War ended. But I grew up with that and watched him, you know, with that knife and - there's ten figures here...no, there's eight figures here that he did in that period of time. And he got a lot of pleasure out of that, I can remember that. Sitting, you know, before the days of television - during the war years we didn't go any place; I was just a kid, born in '35 also. And back in 1972, you know, Sunday afternoon we got to reminiscing about these carvings and, you know, did he still have them. Well, he'd sent several of them to his sister up in Michigan, so these Rod Johnson 3
original, you know, eight carvings, about four of them, I think, sat with, well, my aunt's up in Michigan. She had
J: sent them back. And maybe that's what triggered it off, that she was returning those carvings and, you know, I asked my dad, "Well, wouldn't you like to do that again? You know, let's try it again, I've got an interest." And I was in an engineering world and high-stress jobs and what-have-you and thought of it as something for stress management. And so he and I - I can't remember exactly how we got started again. But he knew about pocketknives and had this one old knife but we finally made...got a book and finally found some decent wood in Austin, basswood, which we'd read and had heard is the kind of wood you want to use for carving. Linden is the proper name of that wood; basswood is a slang term for, from what we've read, that the early fishing lures up in Wisconsin were made out of linden and that's how it got the slang term basswood. And so after that, and from 1972 on I think what I've got here represents about eighty of his carvings that he did - much later in life - and really enjoyed it. He and I had, you know, from '72 - he died in '89 - had seventeen years together, carving, and I...most of these carvings of his, I furnished the wood because I found a good supplier of basswood from up in Iowa. And so he always had new ideas about what he wanted to do. And you can see in his work that it was Rod Johnson 4
always somewhat caricature and somewhat to be humorous, and the characters of the local area here - the farming and ranching of Williamson County. Mine tend to be
J: somewhat different than my dad's in that I've got a different interest in the...in what you're producing for a carving - it tends to be Western in form and of a Swedish heritage. We got to return to Sweden. My wife took my parents to Sweden in 1980 and, you know, stayed five days on a typical tour through Norway and back through France and what-have-you. And my dad said, "We've got to go back, you know, five days in Sweden wasn't enough." So we went back in '82; I went with my mother and dad then. And we tried to find some wood carvings, and there's very little of it left over there of this old heritage. You find wood carving but it's very modernistic sort of thing, you know, very stylistic.
G: The Swedish?
J: The Swedish style, you know. But we did find...we had ...we had some cousins over there, distant cousins. My dad still had two first cousins over there which helped us locate some old-timers, you know, my dad's age, that still did some of this old traditional hand carving in that region. There's a particular region of Sweden that is known for it and that's Smolan, which is...it's like Arkansas is to the U.S., it's just heavily wooded, rocky, poor land; Rod Johnson 5
these people had to survive there for all these thousands of years. And I've read that in history, particularly, and it was tough to survive the winters and grow enough food and what-have-you to even live over there. So I can understand J: why the immigrants heard about coming here and particularly to Texas, where my grandfather came, for the land that was available to them. And he, in seven years got enough together to buy a farm here, a cottonland farm, which is still in the family, and my... Well, in this trip back to Sweden, we did find one museum there of a very traditional old Swedish woodcarver and bought several books, but they're all in Swedish and I can't read or speak Swedish. Well, my dad could both read and speak Swedish so he would translate to me a lot of this story of this particular old woodcarver. So that was a real stimulus, to go back to Sweden where he'd only heard about it and never had seen the land where his parents came from and the farm that his father came off of. So his varies from - well, I don't know - from cowboys to the old Swedish characters, to ...he, he and I both had a thing about - we liked the faces and the profiles and the noses and the look of the face that ... Uh, I guess I learned that from him too, of studying people. I've joked about it but, you know, you sit in church and look at somebody's profile in a pew right in front of you and categorize faces like that - about the noseRod Johnson 6
and the mouth and the lips and the ears, of locations and sizes and what-have-you. So...and then there's four of them sitting over here that my dad struggled with during the '80s, and that's of President Reagan. These were photographs - he used the photographs that were on the cover J: of...I subscribed to Newsweek Magazine, I always brought the old issues to him and that's where he...where these four Reagan busts came from, and he never was satisfied with the four. I don't even know what order they're in, but he never got Reagan to look like Reagan, he didn't think. But he attempted, at least, to do that.
G: Well, tell me the story about the bedbug trap.
J: Well, there's this cylindrical thing that looks a little bit like a rolling pin but it's got holes drilled in it and it's hollow, and it's got two corks stuck in the ends. So it's a cylinder with two corks, full of holes. And we went to a small home-type museum over in that part of Sweden and - this was all, you know, talked in Swedish about ...this guy brought this thing out from under, in a closet or something, and was telling my dad this story of this device. It was a Swedish invention from 1700 or so, about. This is a Swedish bedbug trap and you'd sleep with it; and the way my dad translated the story - that in the mornings you'd fling the cover back and let the light come in and the bedbugs would look for a dark place, so they'd crawl into Rod Johnson 7
this cylinder through these holes and you'd have them all trapped in there and you could pull off the corks on each end and blow them off into the fire. When I heard the story it was in Swedish, so I don't understand Swedish - I didn't get the story. So when we got in the car and were leaving, my dad said you've got to...let me tell you about this story J: this guy just told me - he never knew whether he believed the guy or not - the guy said it straight-faced. Now I think my dad still had some possibilities that it was a put-on, but it probably was and it was probably a Swedish invention - bedbugs were bad back in those times.
G: You've got your dad's very first pieces. Do you have your very first pieces?
J: I've got one little - I don't have it right here - it's a little donkey that I did. And the only wood that he had and that I had when I was a kid was apple boxes and the ends of apple boxes was about three-quarter inch thick, and so we could glue up to and get an inch-and-a-half. Well, this donkey I've got, little donkey, is done out of the thickness of an apple box.
G: And you did that when you were a kid?
J: Yeah, yeah. And my daughter's got a cowboy boot that I did when I was a kid like that.
G: But when you started later working with your dad on it, do you have an early piece from that time? Rod Johnson 8
J: Well, this...this is sort of the first cowboy that I ever did. And I'm not very proud; I can look at it now and say, "That's some terrible carving." But it is the first cowboy, done from a pattern from the carvers out in the Ozarks. So it's got that...it doesn't have the Texas look about it; it's got more of the caricature.
G: Sort of Southern looking.
J: I don't know. Yeah. Many of these cowboys that I have are from in the '80s. What I've zeroed in now pretty much on are smaller figures that. These bigger ones, this first cowboy is what? - roughly nine inches tall or so and it's a little bit large for holding. Where these smaller figures are a little bit easier to hold on to and easier to work on.
G: Now you've done quite...you do quite a lot of demonstrating at festivals...
J: Yeah.
G: Fairs, how long have you been doing that, Rod?
J: Well, I started at Folklife Festival in 1987 or '88, I can't remember which year it was, but there was over...you probably know her, Nancy Lou Webster from Elgin - treenware.
G: Yeah, treenware.
J: Had talked to JoAnn, so that's...we were at a festival in Bastrop, the YesterFest, and JoAnn came up and that's how the conversation started. So it was either '87 or '88 was my first time. And the reason JoAnn wanted me was that she Rod Johnson 9
had just run off the guy that'd been carving the wooden flowers, and I knew how to do the wooden flowers; so that's how I got first into Folklife. And that's...you know, I did those for five or six years until Herman Davis...
G: ...took over.
J: ...took over that task of doing the wooden flowers at Folklife. And the other fairly major festival is the Sam Houston Folk Festival out in Huntsville. And that's really J: a museum type festival out there, fairly serious, a lot of costuming, and there's an association out there - I don't know if you know Pat Nolan...
G: No, I don't and...
J: Really, really a fine guy.
G: Sounds like a place to go.
J: Yeah. I...Toni and I are going again. That'll be in just a month, and they bring in on that Friday - it's a Friday, Saturday, Sunday - five thousand school kids on that Friday and that's pretty much too many kids. You can't cope with that many kids - jumping off a bus and running all over the grounds. And, you know, I'm not that sure they get that much out of it. But I do some school programs, some authorized...was nominated and approved by the Texas Commission for the Arts to do school programs.
G: So you're one of the arts...
J: Art in Residence.Rod Johnson 10
G: In Residence.
J: I've never taken a Residency myself, but I work through Pat Jasper and the Texas Folk Life Resources.
G: Is that mostly around in Georgetown and Houston?
J: Yeah. But I'm going in just two weeks or, oh, a week from now, to Hurst, Texas. There's a school district up there, an elementary school, that's bringing a number of us in like that. And what I've learned to do and found effective is to do a face carving in potatoes, with the
J: kids.
G: Ah. I bet they...
J: Third and fourth graders and I've developed some...I bought some of these heavy duty plastic knives, and I've cut them off so they're little stubby, so they don't break the blades.
G: Uh-huh. [inaudible]...woodcarvers' knife?
J: Yeah. And they've got a rounded point on them. So in about forty-five, you know, minutes to an hour with third graders you can get...you can generally get most of them to carve a face, and they're just thrilled with it, you know. I'm sure the teacher in the next class has to...
G: ...deal with it.
J: ...deal with those kids all fired up, and they all want to take them home to mother, you know.
G: There are dried potato faces all over Texas. Rod Johnson 11
...[inaudible].
J: Well, I don't know how long they last. I've never brought any home to see how long...
G: I'd love to see you do that sometime. You'll have to come down to the Institute some day.
J: Yeah. No, that's something with the kids that I really think is effective.
G: Yeah, that sounds like a terrific...[inaudible].
J: You see a lot of variation in the kids on what they can do, but you can see some, you know, light turning on or
J: something - I didn't know I could do that, you know, sort of thing.
G: Yeah.
J: And then I've done, you know, school programs, just presentation type things and that brings in the issue of these toys that I've done. I've done a number of toys, I don't know...
G: Tell me about the toys.
J: Well, that started with...
G: They're wonderful.
J: That started with Folklife about, you know, seven or eight years ago. And JoAnn talked about doing something for the kids on Sunday. And the first one I did was this toy here, which is out of a history book, and the corn is all gone off of this one but it's that pecking chicken toy Rod Johnson 12
that's been very effective with the kids, because parents and grandparents said they had something like this when they were kids. This one is out of a history book of - from Sweden - that E.J. Tangeman found this toy in Sweden, he thinks about 1910 or so it was made. And it's a carved one. And you can still buy them Swedish-made, but it's all machine-made.
G: Ah.
J: Not a bit of it's hand-carved.
G: You have to come to Texas to get the hand-carved ones.
J: Yeah. But this is what started at Folklife, and from J: that another toy similar, and it is a couple of bears. It's that same principle of strings and a ball, this other one is - one bear is playing on a drum and one is dancing.
G: And did you make up that design or did you see that somewhere?
J: No, that's out of a history...it's out of a book.
G: You got that out of a book, too? ...[inaudible].
J: Eastern Europe, you know, they talk about. And what I've read, in Russia now you can buy these very inexpensively - you know, four or five dollars.
G: Um.
J: I've talked to several people that have bought them over there.
G: Uh-huh. Russians are known for bears; they're very Rod Johnson 13
important in their...
J: Yeah. Bear stories. But then some of these other toys have evolved - this dancing figure called Limber-Jack, which - I've got two of them - started with seeing one out at the Sam Houston Folk Festival at a Dulcimer Band from Dallas, and the lady played the toy while the band performed, and they'd been at Folklife. I've had her use mine there in the barn, you know.
G: Uh-huh.
J: Hers was from a carver up in Oklahoma; it was of her husband playing a banjo and then dancing. Well, the first one I did, which Colonel Todd has, is of O.T. Baker.
G: Oh. Okay.
J: I did that four years ago. And O.T. wasn't that offended by it; he thought it was kind of cute.
G: Uh-huh. I think O.T. was probably proud of it.
J: Yeah. And so I came...after that one, I did one for myself which I've taken to Folklife for the last three years of a cowboy and then have gotten off... Because of my few years in the Navy I wanted to do a sailor and it's been an unsuccessful design of a Limber-Jack Dancing Sailor, with his arms spring-loaded and his wrists spring-loaded. But they don't - the spring - I can't get a soft enough spring to get those to behave - you know, to waggle.
G: To waggle...[inaudible].Rod Johnson 14
J: You know, to waggle a little bit.
G: You've got a whirlygig there?
J: That's a whirlygig of a...that was a trial thing. I was thinking of doing whirlygigs, but I don't have the time. But it's a sailor with two signal flags and they're turned, or you can turn them, so if you put a fan it'll run.
G: It is...do the signal flags say anything?
J: Yeah - TX.
G: Ah.
J: Texas.
G: Figures. That figures.
J: I had to go on the Internet to find those international signal flags.
G: Yeah. I assumed it said something or you wouldn't have ...
J: This one, the kids now that I take out for demonstration purposes, another history book toy. And I don't even know if it has a name. It's all wooden; it's an action toy where the...the one in the book was two bears...
G: Uh-huh.
J: ...chopping. But I translated that into two wood guys chopping.
G: Two wood...[inaudible].
J: And the kids, one of the questions. "Is that a real piece of wood there that they're chopping?" Well, it's all Rod Johnson 15
real wood. One of the comments I get, particularly from these toys, from kids, "You made that?" They don't...
G: It's hard to...[inaudible].
J: Hard to comprehend that...[inaudible].
G: Yeah.
J: Right. And a little girl at Folklife, one time, said, "How come they don't use a machine to make that? Why do you do it, you know, the hard way?" The jack-in-the-box over there was done, as well as this bouncing toy, for a movie a couple of years ago that was done in Austin, called ”True Women." It was a Texas history story, and I read the book, an excellent book, but the TV version turned out to be not what I thought.
G: A TV version.
J: A TV version where the prop guy that we've gotten to know, we did one for, did a Noah's Ark - Toni and I together did that Noah's Ark back for "Substitute Wife," it was. Part of the story was that the daddy was a woodcarver back in 1870 in Nebraska. It showed up in the movie, but these toys... He said, "I've got to have some toys because they're going to have kids playing with toys and I don't have any toys." So we went through a history book and he found a jack-in-the-box and said, "Can you make one?" So that's why I ended up doing that jack-in-the... Well, what Toni found - she did some carvings for "Lonesome Dove...Rod Johnson 16
G: Uh-huh.
J: ...and sold them.
G: Oh, okay.
J: And, "Never again," she said. "I'm going to rent them." So we rented that Noah's Ark.
G: Oh.
J: And then we rented these. So that's how we end up keeping them.
G: So you still have them.
J: And they're more than happy to rent them from you, rather than buying them.
G: That balancing toy is beautiful.
J: Yeah, he found that in a book and I don't know - I haven't gone back to read the history of that - the illusion, I mean there are many versions of that center of J: gravity being below the pivot point. Back to the jack-in-the-box, the difficult part of that was making a spring. I really had to call on my engineering experience of how to make a spring that's the right stiffness and the right height. The first spring, he jumped right out of the box, so you have to keep shortening up the spring to do that. The other...
G: On the balancing one, did you do the turning or did you buy that?
J: No, I just bought that. It's kind...[inaudible]. You Rod Johnson 17
know, you know, when he calls for movie props, it's...you know he, "I gotta have these in two weeks." So the one thing that Toni and I did together that did show up in a movie is a baby cradle, and Toni did some of her relief carving on it. That was burned in the movie because of the cholera epidemic in 1870, so they had to have two of them.
G: One to burn and one to show.
J: Well, one...in case the burning didn't go well. So we got the other one back. My two grandsons have both used that baby cradle.
G: Oh, wonderful. What a wonderful family tradition.
J: Toni did some nice, yeah, nice carving on it. And Toni someday is going to have grandkids; they'll use it, too, I guess.
G: Wonderful family tradition. You've got a bunch of little frogs here, what's the story of the frogs?
J: Well, my wife's a frog collector, so that's why I ended up carving those frogs. She's got a lot of frogs she's bought, but two or three of them there I've done. And then the Swedish horses are very much a tradition. And that's the one piece on that table that I have not painted, is that decorative painted horse, I had...I cannot...I had not taken the time to learn how to do that rosemaling and that decorative type of painting, so a friend of mine up in Linsbourg, Kansas, painted that particular horse for me. ButRod Johnson 18
that's one if you go to Sweden everybody has to come home with one of those.
G: Yeah, I've seen those little horses.
J: ...[inaudible]. Yeah.
G: Not as nice as that one.
J: Well, and then the other one, the green one, is...when I was...I went to a festival over there in '96 - a nine day Old World Festival, which was a rare experience to get to go. And ended up mostly carving flowers because the Swedes had never seen those wooden flowers.
G: So they invited you to come there as a woodcarver?
J: Right, right. Which as the first American to go to that Festival - it's a celebration over there of the history of that particular province of Sweden, which mostly had to do with making charcoal. The Festival was centered around charcoal making.
G: Interesting.
J: But the wood they had over there...you know, wood here for these wooden flowers is hard to come by - good - I use this sumac which grows along the roadsides out here.
G: Uh-huh.
J: Over there it was aspen. So I'd go harvest it every morning before I went to the Festival. And it was just beautiful carving wood, I wish I could get aspen, you know.
G: Tell me about the flowers, how did you learn to make Rod Johnson 19
the flowers? You said you knew how to make the flowers ...[inaudible]...JoAnn's...
J: I knew how to make those.
G: How did you learn how?
J: There was an old fellow that my dad and I got to know back in the '80s from Belton, Texas, Gene Haire, and he was the Texas traditional woodcarver. He had done it all his life, had grown up in Belton, never lived anywhere else - his father was a postman, he was a postman, walking postman - and he told me, he said, "I've learned how to do these flowers when I was a young kid, from an old man." So in his later life he said, "I've got to teach somebody how to do these, so you can pass it on to the kids." I mean, he carved flowers and gave them away, so there was always a line of kids standing by Mr. Haire's table wanting a flower. So that's why I knew how to do them because he had taught me how, for this "pass it on" sort of thing.
G: Uh-huh.
J: And that turned out to be why I got to be invited to Folklife Festival. And then I've passed it on to Herman Davis to do the flowers. But here the wood is not like the Northern states. I mean here the wood grows with too much difficulty and too dry, and you think willow would be good and it's not.
G: Life is too hard for...[inaudible].Rod Johnson 20
J: But Herman said out in East Texas or where he lives, in Beaumont, there's a lot more available bushes and wood that make good flowers. Where the only thing I've found here in Central Texas is sumac.
G: ...[inaudible] water, and it's fast growing.
J: Yeah, yeah.
G: So you need something that's very...that you pick fresh and it's green and it's...
J: But you have to let it dry for a little bit of a time. What I did in Sweden was de-bark it, and by the next day... I'd cut some every morning, and the next day it would be dry enough to do flowers.
G: So it's the age of the wood that's critical.
J: The age of the wood, yeah.
G: You've got a bunch of little trolls kinds of figures back there, those are Swedish?
J: Yeah, those are Swedish trolls, as distinguished from Norwegian trolls, which are...
G: Maybe troll isn't the right word?
J: No, it's...the Swedes have that word - troll. And Norwegians have it too, but it's all from that same derivation of children's books on those little characters that lived in the woods under the stumps of trees. The problem with Swedish trolls, I just don't have access to that kind of material, you know, I don't have any... I guessRod Johnson 21
I could probably order books from Sweden but never have taken the time to do that and...
G: And then there are these little Christmas figures; you have quite a bunch of little Christmas figures.
J: Yeah, I've done those over the years for gifts for family and daughter and son.
G: Texas Kris Kringle.
J: Yeah. The most recent is that Swedish...[inaudible], which is a character that's in...from tradition, from about a hundred and something years ago. The artist that did that connected the Christmas theme with the original ...[inaudible] which was a storybook figure. And I'm going to probably do some more of those in variations of what he's doing. You've got to put some life into them by having them doing something.
G: Your figures have wonderful faces.
J: Well, that's kind of what I'm interested in, is the face; the bodies don't interest me that much, it's more the faces and the eyes. And this little guy here started with this short Texan, and I've done and sold a number of those,
J: but they are boring to do. Was this little guy over here...
G: So you made him a little more interesting by putting a face on.
J: Yeah. Putting a face - either put a U.S. flag or a Rod Johnson 22
Texas flag or a Swedish flag.
G: Swedish flag.
J: Swedish flag in his hand. Short Texan.
G: And you make different faces on them...[inaudible]?
J: Yeah - well, I've carved long enough now where if I don't think about it, they'll all...they would tend to come out...
G: They all kind of look alike.
J: Look alike. So you've got to make a conscious effort to do something different in the faces. The profile is particularly important. You can't get a likeness of a face unless you do...have a side view of the face and the nose and what-have-you is such an important feature of...
G: ...[inaudible].
J: Yeah. He never could get a profile of Reagan. Yeah.
G: ...[inaudible].
J: The other table has sort of different kinds of things of mine - the Stetson hat, the full-size Stetson hat that I did on a commission basis for our managing director of our company over in Sweden. And I told him it was going to take a year to do that hat, and he said that's fine, but six
J: months later he got a job offer and left Dresser Industries. And so I finished the hat and kept it. Kids are really...a lot of kids have put their hands on that hat - it's a full-size, it's not hollowed out. That's one of Rod Johnson 23
the common questions is, "Can I wear it?" No, it's...and that's why I mounted it to that block is to keep people from picking it up. That's a Folklife too, that's...
G: The chicken puppet here.
J: The chicken. But he doesn't go so good down in Folklife, because of the grass and kids want to play with him, and, you know, a puppet like that gets tangled up and...
G: Yeah, marionettes are...
J: But it's been fun to do.
G: He's beautiful; he's a wonderful chicken.
J: I do those school programs with...the guy who would accompany me from Texas Folklife Resources played the fiddle, so...
G: Uh-huh.
J: With that dancing toy and that chicken - he'd always do the Chicken Reel or something like that for the kids. The LBJ bust I did back in 1977. As a result of a friend of mine, you know, way back into the '60s, went to work for the Secret Service and was with LBJ the last year before he died, so he ended up with one of those models of - that's the standard LBJ model - and so I borrowed the model, I had
J: something there to work from. Difficult thing to do, though, a likeness like that.
G: Likenesses are very hard, I think you flattered LBJ a Rod Johnson 24
bit. Is there a story to the Indians?
J: Well, that's my son's, I borrowed it from my son. That's...he wanted something and didn't particularly want a cowboy, so I said I'd do something that's Native American for him. It's one of the few - I've done two I think.
G: I was going to say - it's the only one I see, but I missed that one, yeah.
J: Yeah. Of Native Americans. This one has an interesting story of a old aviator. A lady at our church there in Austin, got to know and her two teen-age daughters, her husband was a prisoner of war over in Vietnam, seven years, and when Jim came back she said you've got to do something for Jim for his birthday - this is his first year he was back from that horrible seven years - and all that I could think of was to do something that would remind him of aviation - he was a pilot, and so I did it and liked it so much I did myself one, so there's two of those in the world: Jim Hibner's and mine.
G: Do you often duplicate things? I imagine people ask you to do it all the time.
J: I don't like to do dupli...I don't like to make a copy of something. That's not interesting, carving-wise, to sit and worry about replication. This one - I was telling you
J: earlier that - I put in two and a half years working for a company in Austin, a medical company that did hip and Rod Johnson 25
knee implants, and this was done with the guys, the engineers that I was working with. You need to do a carving of our celebration of the getting qualified to sell a product in Europe, the ISO-9000, so this is a hip - a hip joint. And the stamp, the CE stamp, and it was supposed to go to the managing director who would pass it on to the Swiss owners, and he backed out at the last minute thinking it was too much of a spoof on the Swiss ownership. So...but it's a bulldog face taken somewhat from Churchill and a French beret and lederhosen and Italian boots and holding the hip implant. So I was kind of glad I got to keep that one.
G: Well, he's...he's very unique. What about this...?
J: That's a replication out of a history book of Swedish wood carving, this Herman...[inaudible]. That's still not enjoyable for me to do a replication of somebody else's work. I mean it's interesting to do the carving, but it reminds me that it's a replication. I'd rather do something original and nobody...not based on what somebody else has done. And most of my faces and figures are - like this is my great-grandfather from Sweden: a big, tall, loud-mouthed Swede that was always out of character. He was an auctioneer here in Travis and Williamson Counties for a number of years. And I vague...barely remember him; he died
J: in 1942 when I was just a kid, but they had a lot of Rod Johnson 26
family photographs. This one is the one for the celebration in 1998 of Williamson County - that's "Three Legged Willie" that the Williamson County was named for: Robert McAlpin Williamson, State Senator and Judge in 1848. And he never lived here in this county but as an honor, they named the county for him. And he had...his right leg was drawn up at the knee from what the records show, from what they called "milk leg," when he was a kid, fifteen years old, so he'd been on a wooden pegleg like that for all his life. But he could ride a horse and was really an interesting figure. Judge Stubblefield here at district court is the one that is the historian of "Three Legged Willie." So I did this one and donated it to the county, for some day to have it at the County Museum of who "Three Legged Willie" was.
G: I see a few pieces here that are religious pieces, there's a...
J: St. Francis.
G: There's a St. Francis there.
J: Two of...well...
G: There's another one.
J: Yeah. I did those back - I think in the '70s even. And I'm not very proud of them as wood carvings; they're pretty crude and rough.
G: There's one over in your dad's work here that's...
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 1Rod Johnson 27
SIDE 2
G: This is Laurie Gudzikowski, and I'm talking to Rod Johnson about wood carving.
J: This is my dad's version of the creation of man, which he did in the '80s, he died in '89, so I think he did this one probably in '84 or '85. And he talked about it for a number of years, how he could...he had this mental picture of hands out of the clouds or something, but he couldn't think about how he could do clouds. So he finally came up with this driftwood and the old guy laying on the ground and then these bellows with these two big hands coming out of the driftwood breathing life into man. So he liked to talk about this one with people that, you know, when he'd go to the festivals and...
G: So your dad also went to festivals with you?
J: Yeah, he went to YesterFest and did...he never came to Folklife, he was...his physical condition where he couldn't come to Folklife and - eighty-eight. This one he did during the Reagan era and was originally labeled "Reagan's Trickle Down Economy." And people were so offended by that that he changed the name to "Downstream Pollution." That's Austin and Bastrop and on down the Colorado River. He'd always heard stories that they actually did this back in the Depression. But I don't know whether I believe it or not.
G: Well - it's a great carving. And what you said about Rod Johnson 28
your dad's humor - it's very obvious there.
J: Yeah. Strange. This one he saw...it's a...he saw it here in Georgetown at the show for the kids. They take their animals and the kid was sleeping on this box in the pen with his hog, with his hand laying out, you know, holding on to the hog. These two are from Swedish...again, from a Swedish book. The idea...my dad didn't...he didn't want to copy something. Once you get the idea in your head, then you go do it.
G: Right.
J: You know, without ever looking back at the book.
G: Sure. Well, anything else that you would like to talk about - any of these? Like this little bear.
J: I don't know why he did that. He just did it one time.
G: Just did it.
J: On his own, completely. My daughter's got another bear that she talked him out of back when. This one is Tip O'Neil. The first one he did...
G: I think his likeness is better than the Reagan.
J: That...we were at...that was at YesterFest in Bastrop. A lady from Brenham who had connections ended up talking him out of the other one and sent it to Tip, and my dad got a letter back from Tip appreciating the carving. So then he had to make himself one, so this is his second version of Tip.Rod Johnson 29
G: What's the red-bearded fellow back there?
J: That's a Viking.
G: That's a Viking.
J: Or his version of what a Viking looked like.
G: Well, that's a...
J: Yeah, I think it's the Hollywood version though. We don't know what they looked like. Those four back there are somewhat from that other Swedish woodcarver that I was telling you about - we went to the museum. This one is... this pair here is from a family photograph of two Swedish immigrants. This is that same great-grandfather that I did the bust of.
G: I see.
J: Andrew S...[inaudible].
G: Uh-huh.
J: And this is one of his old immigrant buddies, Mr. Wickstrom, who has descendents here. So these two old guys were friends back when they came from Sweden, you know, 18... Andrew S...[inaudible] came in 1881 to Texas.
G: It's interesting how two people take the same subject and come up with something very, very different, isn't it?
J: Right. Right. This is a...
G: That's what artistry is about.
J: This is a - Mobutu - I can't remember what country in Africa - that was another picture on the cover Newseek Rod Johnson 30
magazine.
G: Right. Uganda maybe?
J: Uganda, I think - Mobutu. Many of these little busts
J:`were people that he saw either at church or around Georgetown here.
G: That's a wonderful face. You do have a lot of these, don't you. Are they like on display around the house? Did you gather them from friends and relatives and out of boxes?
J: No, I...these, all of these of my dad's I keep stashed - packed down; where mine I keep, you know, pretty much out and take a lot of them with me when I do festivals. It's difficult to carry them around, and they get broke and I've broken several of them and had to do repair work.
G: Now you do quite a lot of work on commission now; the commissions come to you through your festival work?
J: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's...
G: Do you enjoy it?
J: I hate promising people because then you've got to do it, once you make a promise. And I've got about a dozen commissionings now laying that...I've told them it may be a year. "Oh, that's okay", you know, wait a year. A lady in Austin wants four for next Christmas. And another lady wants one or two every Christmas. And then a friend of mine, a cousin of mine's wife, who's a school teacher, and I've done her school program - seventh graders - over in Rod Johnson 31
Taylor. She wants two for her own sons, you know; it's part of the Swedish heritage.
G: Right.
J: That's what they tie it back to, is the Swedish
J: heritage, within the Swedish community.
G: So is a lot of your work. Are these little Christmas elves?
J: Well, she wanted...Darlene wanted...
G: Sounds like you could keep busy just carving Christmas elves if you wanted to.
J: Yeah. But it's boring to repeat and repeat and repeat - doing the same thing. I always try to do something different with it and not use the first one as any kind of model.
G: Right. Uh-huh.
J: Or any thought of it even, you know. It's the challenge of doing something for the first time.
G: Of all of your pieces, do you have a favorite?
J: I think that cat, that Egyptian cat, is probably one of my favorites.
G: Because...?
J: For an oddball reason, almost, is the... And it's the front view of that cat that you have to look at to get the symmetry. You know, that cat sat around for a long time... to try to get absolute symmetry here. This way is there's Rod Johnson 32
no...
G: It is beautifully symmetric, yes.
J: And then the toughest carving was...
G: The tail?
J: His tail curved...
G: What a beautiful tail.
J: Curved and reduced in size while it's curving also. She works for the State Teacher's Association, so this cat sits up in her office there in Austin; it's been admired by a lot of people. Interesting project to do something like that. And this guy is kind of one of my favorite character - caricature type carvings. And LBJ, but I'm never...never would probably go back to this kind of portrait carving or you know, bust-type carving, rather use the small figures - rather do the small figures. The "Three Legged Willie" was an interesting challenge to do.
G: Now was "Three Legged Willie" something you decided to do, or was that commissioned by the Williamson County .. ...[inaudible].
J: Well, no, it...well, County Judge Stubblefield could tell you his life's story if...you know, at the drop of a hat. And so he's the one, through our committee meetings and knew that I carved. And, you know, he suggested it or I thought of it or something, and pretty soon we decided to do it. The big portrait of him that this is based on sits... Rod Johnson 33
hangs in the capitol, in the senate chamber; and it's been restored about ten years ago. The painting was done like fifty years after he died, even, so I'm not sure about the likeness even.
G: Okay. So the likeness is all speculative.
J: Speculative.
G: What is the most fun of the carvings that you do?
J: I think the small - small human figures. In terms of pure pleasure of cutting and...
G: By small you mean something like this?
J: Of this size.
G: This is about six inches?
J: Yeah, they're about six inches. But it's this prior phase, almost, that's the most enjoyable, is the removal of wood, the process of removal.
G: Okay.
J: Once you get down to here you've got to slow down and sort of really paying attention, when you start getting into the facial details and the ear locations and...
G: So tell me about your wood, you get it in big - big particular blocks for wood carving or...?
J: It's, yeah, it's a specialty company up in Iowa that he cuts...another interesting story. He's the grandson of an old farmer up there that happened to have a sawmill. And Randy's grandfather gave him this sawmill, and Randy farms Rod Johnson 34
the old family farm and found that there's a market for basswood, which grows all over in that northeastern corner of Iowa and is now supplying people all over the country. And I do it by mail, you know, just pick up the phone and call him, and it's about seventy pounds UPS will bring you. And they are typically three inch by three inch by random lengths, like this. But the difference is it's air-dried.
J: Where you go buy commercially this wood that's been kiln-dried, it doesn't carve near as well as the air-dried.
G: It's harder and it's...?
J: It's too dried out almost. Where the...he air-dries this for eighteen months in the barn, you know. He has the luxury of sawing it up and putting it in the barn for eighteen months, and he won't hardly ship anything that hasn't been out there eighteen months. And it's always good - it's no grain, no knots, no splintering, no splitting, it's really God's...
G: So when you start, you start by deciding how big the finished piece will be?
J: Yeah, yeah.
G: By cutting off...
J: And I band saw a rough shape on it, you know, just to get rid of really the excess, 'cause that's where the pleasure is: taking that roughed out block and start carving on it.Rod Johnson 35
G: Now, are you like Michelangelo, that you see a...you liberate the figure that's within the block? Or...
J: I can...I can understand that, but it's usually a mental image.
G: Uh-huh.
J: I don't see it in the wood, I see it in my head as to what I want to do.
G: Uh-huh.
J: The face or the pose and what have you.
G: Uh-huh.
J: And that's why I think I became a design engineer, because design engineering is a lot of that...
G: Because you could see it in your head.
J: Seeing things in three dimension and doing it mentally. We always had that joke with our marketing people about, we've done it mentally, we just haven't done physically. And they never could understand that, you know. What do you mean you've done it mentally? You've got to go do it for real. And I think those two tie together. And my dad was like that; he could visualize - three dimensional visualization. We don't visualize colors very well. He didn't and I don't. We never tried to even, well, never been taught anything about colors, and color, you know, mixtures and...
G: Most of your figures seemed to be stained rather than Rod Johnson 36
painted.
J: I...well, except for, okay, these two here are cast reproductions of my originals. The originals sit in Sweden. We've got a guy in Brownwood that makes rubber molds and makes these castings and then we paint them. Toni and I have both done this now.
G: Um.
J: To have something available just to sell when the phone rings.
G: Right. And they're cast out...?
J: It's a resin.
G: Resin.
J: With forty-percent of it's ground up walnut shell, made into a flour and mixed into the resin. And what I'm so amazed about is that he can get an absolute reproduction of your original. You know, how he casts so he can get these between the arms here and every flaw shows up in the...
G: So you number each one of these.
J: Yeah, yeah. I've got these sitting up in Dallas at a little folk art museum up there, and she sells quite a few of them.
G: What do you sell them for...[inaudible]?
J: I sell them for thirty-seven, and she jacks it on up to about seventy dollars.
G: I was going to say, whoo [something falls] Rod Johnson 37
J: That's all right, they fall off.
G: You might talk to Janet at our store about it, because she's always looking for stuff.
J: Boy, is it boring to paint those things.
G: I'm sure it is.
J: Toni and I...
G: You've done as many as you want to do on that?
J: Yeah. Toni and I are both the same way; we'd rather be carving than to - selling or painting or...
G: Anything. Carving is...you need to find somebody who
G: likes painting to come and work with you.
J: I've been told, you know, go down to UT and put on the bulletin board at the art school down there. You'll get plenty of people to paint your castings.
G: You want to tell me about the spoons?
J: These are from a Swedish book on, you know, utilitarian type thing. A couple of things that's interesting here: it said, you know, how do you make a wooden spoon or wooden knife or anything useable - how do you seal it? And this has been boiled in milk for one hour and the casein in the milk goes into the wood and it won't pick up rancid tastes and what-have-you.
G: Of course.
J: Yep.
G: So you learned to do that from reading about it? Rod Johnson 38
J: Well, not really. This is - well, you can see a picture of a spoon; you can get a pattern...
G: No, I mean boiling it in milk.
J: Yeah, no, that's out of that Swedish book, and that tells me it probably goes back five hundred years or so, they'd learned how to do that. But these I did for the County Sesquicentennial, to have something of a historic nature, to be carving when we had our festival here and when they did the video of the County. So he got me doing one of these wooden spoons, and this is a typical Swedish butter knife, too, that you can buy them over there, even in Sweden
J: today - they still use them in fact. Very classic shape of a - spreading butter.
G: Uh-huh.
J: This is...you know, I've probably done, I don't know, two or three dozen of these wooden boots over the years. What I've noticed with woodcarvers, and my dad included, we all had a different mental picture of what a boot looks like. And so carvers that do boots, no two people do them alike - the toes and the shape of the toes. Let me get a couple of these over here.
G: Your dad has a...
J: Like this one. See how much different that shape is?
G: Oh, yeah, yeah, I see; I see what you mean. Uh-huh.
J: Yeah, he's got boots on, too. Different - toes turned Rod Johnson 39
up.
G: Yeah, yep, very different.
J: Very different. You can almost identify a woodcarver by the...
G: By the way they do boots.
J: By his boots.
G: Are there other carvers in this tradition around here?
J: Uh, yes and no. Uh, I taught when I lived in Austin, taught through the Community Schools, taught wood carving and taught through the church and I've taught here in Georgetown two or three times. But it's time-consuming and hard work. And one of the things I noticed - I counted one
J: time, just going back and pulling out my files, about seventy-five students that I've affected in some small way to carve, is that so many of them have no tradition and no heritage to draw on.
G: Right.
J: And I guess I feel so fortunate to have a heritage like that. You know, they end up being duck carvers or bird carvers or, you know - it's the carving part that more interests them. And that gets into competition and going to shows and winning blue ribbons, which I have no interest in, you know. Never do anything, I never spend that much time on a carving to ever have it judged competitively - get tired of it before that. But I really feel for people that Rod Johnson 40
don't have a heritage to draw on. A lot of them were retired IBMers that had come from all over the United States to the Austin area, you know. And had no, you know...like my wife, has no particular ethnic or cultural heritage, other than they are Americans, you know.
G: Uh-huh.
J: And wood carving is not traditional in the U.S. culture that much. I mean, Hispanic culture it is, from what I've seen, which you all have, is a lot of wood carving.
G: Yeah, there is. Uh-huh.
J: In fact, one that influenced me and my dad, significantly, was a Mexican fellow when I was a kid in Taylor that come from Mexico and could sit and do just
J: anything with a knife - chains and balls and, you know, cages...
G: I was going to say, I see that you...I don't see you doing any of the traditional whittler's things like chains and...
J: I've done a chain, I did a ball in a cage and done one and...
G: One.
J: ...and that's enough.
G: And I take it none of your children are interested in wood carving? At this time.
J: My daughter has sort of a peripheral interest - she's a Rod Johnson 41
commercial artist and does some good work. And on the computer now - and everything is computer generated - but she likes to work in clay and can do these character figures in clay.
G: Ah, in clay. Interesting.
J: She said you don't have to learn how to use a knife, you know; you just start with, you know, clay and start doing it.
G: Uh-huh.
J: My son is, you know...
G: So she believes in...she uses clay as an additive sculpture and...
J: Right, right.
G: And wood carving, she subtracts...
J: And she got a number of videos of that Claymation - you've seen videos of the Claymation?
G: Uh-huh.
J: She thinks that's just fantastic work, what some photographer did with the clay figures. And my son is... he's in the political world; he's chief of staff for a state rep, in session now at the state capitol, probably. He just graduated from college at thirty-two, thirty-three, with a degree in history and probably will go on into politics somewhere down the line. I don't think he'll ever take up the hand-type stuff.Rod Johnson 42
G: But you never can tell.
J: But I've got two grandsons now that I've got hope for, if I can last long enough to start bringing them to Folklife.
G: Okay. All right.
J: And break them in.
G: Have you started them on...they're too young to start on flowers.
J: They're too young, yeah. They're fourteen months and ten months.
G: Too young to start on flowers.
J: Let's hope I can last so I can, you know, have an influence on those two grandsons. What else, Laurie?
G: Ah, that's all I can think of. Can you think of anything that I haven't...that I haven't...that I've missed?
G: How about your father's driftwood...?
J: Yeah, that's...
G: ...creations.
J: He would see things - you know, he lived up on Lake Travis for fifteen years - and pick up and find old pieces of wood and crazy shapes and, you know, he can see the...he can see the...he put the eye in there.
G: Uh-huh.
J: But the bill - I don't know what kinda, some kind of a bird. Rod Johnson 43
G: Some kind of a creature. I love this one.
J: And, yeah, that's, you know, that's just a piece of two pieces of wood that he...that was his real tinkering sort of thing later in life, is to just do that kind of things with... That's kind of a nice fit where he fit that...
G: Yeah, that's wonderful.
J: ...that elf into that...
G: The elf is...
J: ...hollowed out. He did two or three of full size Indian heads too. And a couple of people ended up talking him out of two of them, so I've got two of them left. But I never had the patience, I guess, to start a project of that size.
G: I was going to say that...
J: I learned that when I did that cowboy hat that, you know - that's six months working on that.
G: How long does it take you to do a little figure? A small figure. One of your favorite six-inchers.
It depends.
J: It depends. Carving time is probably eight to ten hours spread out over a period of time. And I get asked that question - how long does it take? Well, it can take weeks. But that doesn't mean you carve on it all the time.
G: Sure.
J: You know, for a real...I can only carve four or five Rod Johnson 44
hours a day. And sitting at Folklife doing flowers, I used to come back...I came back to the doctor one time with tendonitis across here. I told him what I'd done. He said, "Well, just don't do that anymore." - carve for, you know, four days extensively. But it's not something you're particularly interested in knowing either.
G: Uh-huh.
J: You don't ever keep records of how long it takes.
G: Uh-huh.
J: You know, just sit around - and I typically work on one or two or three at, you know, at any given time. Sometimes I get...like these toys, where you have to get it done in two weeks, you know, I mean really forty hours a week or more, you know, to make these things. But it becomes work then. I mean, you don't look forward to it necessarily.
G: Uh-huh.
J: And that's why these commissionings kind of bug me
J: because Christmas is not that far off.
G: You've got a fair amount of work before Christmas. You'll have to come down to Folklife Festival to do it.
J: Yeah. We...Toni and I talked about that when we go out to Sam Houston Folk...take something along, for real, to carve on.
G: Uh-huh. Yeah.
J: And not just sit and carve on something, you know, for Rod Johnson 45
demonstration purposes.
G: Uh, what do you charge for your figures when you sell them?
J: The originals - these cowboys of these sizes go for about a hundred dollars. I've done a couple of dogs, you know, thirty-five, forty dollars for a dog. But that's not interesting even. In fact, I wish I had back a lot of the ones I've sold. You know, spent the money and that's... I may have a photograph and that's about all I've got left of it.
G: Uh-huh. Right.
J: Toni and I neither one are into it for...
G: Commercial.
J: ...commercial purposes. And that's why we went to the castings - to say, well, we'll have something; if somebody wants something, they can buy one of these reproductions.
G: For some artists, actually seeing them in someone else's hands is part of the...is part of it, but that's not
G: for you.
J: Yeah. No, really do enjoy festivals though and talking to people. And, as you well know, Folklife you never know who might walk up.
G: And that's something you're good at. No. No.
J: Including a lot of foreign visitors.
G: Yeah.Rod Johnson 46
J: Japanese visitors, you know, that are always so interesting to talk to, you know, in terms of Texas-type wood carvings. And a couple of years you had a lot of German tourists, I guess, come through San Antone or something for Folklife.
G: We get a fair amount of... Folklife, I couldn't tell you, because I'm always so wrapped up in other things.
J: Yeah, and you all are so busy.
G: But during the year we get a fair amount of people.
J: Yeah.
G: Who come from all over the place: Mexican, Spanish probably are most, but we get a lot of French, German and Japanese.
J: I think I already told you... Yeah.
G: A lot of Chinese lately.
J: Yeah. Back five or six years ago, we got an invitation to do the San Antone Livestock Exposition in February - thirteen days of it. It was a one year shot that they had special tents for demonstrator, artists and demonstrator...
G: Uh-huh.
J: It was a great time, you know, thirteen days sitting there, it was a great enjoyable time, but they never could get funded to do it again.
G: That's too bad. That's too bad.
J: Yeah. That ground and that space was too valuable to Rod Johnson 47
rent out, you know, to let us come down there. And they...
G: They do a good job of bringing kids out...
J: Yeah. No. And that's where I met the crew that you all have every year at Folklife from Poteet, the strawberry people.
G: Uh-huh.
J: They were sort of the instigators of that San Antone...
G: The Stock Show and Rodeo does do a really good job in bringing kids out.
J: Yeah. Yeah.
G: Okay. Well...
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 2.