Favorite Tools Sometimes There’s Nothing More Valuable Than The Right Piece Of Equpipment

FOR THE RECORD; February 10, 1995 CORRECTION: Dremel makes the “Moto-Tool” used by woodcarvers. The brand name was wrong in a story and photo caption in Thursday’s IN Life section.

When Gerald Ray was a little boy, he had a little shovel. He worked with it when he scooped the ashes out of the wood stoves in the parlor and the kitchen of the family residence in tiny Ralston, Wash., south of Ritzville.

He played with it when he dug in the sandy bed after the creek dried up in summer. “There were lots of places to explore,” Ray recalls.

Today, one week short of his 60th birthday, Ray still has his shovel. He uses it to clean out the fireplace insert in his Spokane home. “I misplaced it awhile back,” he says, “and I was brokenhearted until I found it.”

And if he ever has grandchildren, Ray says, he plans to pass it on to them.

It’s not exactly the stuff of valentines and verse, but all around us are little love stories about people and their tools.

Some special tools are large, like the two Steiger four-wheel drive articulated tractors on Philip Fox’s farm near Othello.

“They’re related to one I saw my wife driving before we were married, and it impressed me so much that a woman could tame such a huge beast that I decided to marry her,” Fox says.

Some are small, like the redplastic-covered Diamond Deb nail file Candace Finity of Hayden Lake has had since she was a girl.

“I’ve moved thousands of times, and it’s still here,” she says. “Kids like it. It’s real thin. It doesn’t hurt when you clean their nails.”

Some have immutable memories mixed with their metal, like the handsaw John Michler’s greatgrandfather used to rebuild his house following the famed San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.

When he had his own home built in Spokane, Michler says, “The little things I did inside, I used that saw as much as I possibly could.”

Jan Hartsell of Spokane shakes her head about the shop her father built behind his house.

“The house looks normal,” she says. “The shop, he’s gone ahead and put bars on all the windows, latches on the inside.

“He’s made it impossible to break in so that no one can get his tools. However, the house you could probably push on the door and walk right into, but that’s different, because it’s full of mother’s things and they don’t matter.”

Like old friends, old tools are familiar. And comfortable. And dependable.

Jennie Groenig of Spokane uses the same potato peeler she got as a gift at her wedding shower 46 years ago. “The newer ones just don’t measure up,” she says.

Leon Frechette, a Spokane construction consultant and author, still has the framing hammer from the first set of tools he bought, 27 years and at least four handles ago.

Writes Frechette: “I know there are other hammers out there, possibly hammers with a sexier design or a better heft, maybe even made out of more durable materials, but I’ll be faithful to my little jewel from the ‘60s ‘til death do us part!”

It’s been 20 years, but Bill Bell clearly remembers the elderly Post Falls man who sold him the slick (a chisel-like tool for planing wood) and several other tools that Bell used to build his log home.

The slick had helped shape skyscrapers in New York City in the 1920s and tugboat hulls in a Seattle shipyard during the war years.

“You almost had to qualify to get in his shop,” says Bell, a Spokane city planner. “You could tell he was sizing you up. He didn’t offer to show you anything; it was, `What are you looking for?’

“Every time he pulled out a tool, he would have a story about it. I spent days, went back a number of times just to talk to him.”

But the old ways aren’t always better. Spokane woodcarver Patrick Treadway can’t imagine how he ever got along without his Drexel mototool.

“I’ve come to live by it,” says Treadway, who’s also an actor in area productions. “I used to be kind of a purist, using gouges and X-acto blades. Not anymore.”

Along with wood, Treadway uses the cutting tool to work on his car and other odd jobs around the house. “I’m probably a little more rightbrained in the use of it than was intended,” he says.

When it comes to creativity with tools, Treadway has plenty of company.

Take Republic’s Rose Studley and her nutcracker. “It opens pill bottles, fingernail polish bottles, vanilla extract bottles, large bottles of 7-Up and Pepsi, tubes of glue,” she says, “anything that isn’t over a half-inch lid.”

At just under 5 feet tall, Betty Brooks of Spokane uses a longhandled fork to “stab, poke, shift, push, pull and glide boxes, bags and cans out of my top shelf cupboards.”

Jainnine Wagner has put her husband’s old hammer to work weeding her Greenacres garden. Lenore Koch of Spokane swears by her pipe wrench.

“It nails things, breaks things apart better than my hammer does,” Koch says. “And in the middle of the night, with a strange knock at the door, they’re great.”

Then there are weapons that turn into tools. Bill Bowe’s father, who served with the Flying Tigers during World War II, brought home a .50-caliber metal-piercing slug as a souvenir.

It started a second life as a center punch on his Pullman area farm, puncturing anything it came up against - including a few tires, when the Bowe boys got careless and left it lying around the shop floor.

When Bowe’s father retired, his equipment went on the auction block. “Early that morning,” says Bowe, “I sneaked out and dug one souvenir from a drawer of the shop bench - a center punch.”

Spokane’s Steve Haxton rescued a 10 1/2-foot lathe, weighing almost a ton, when the family farm near Moscow was sold.

“I couldn’t stand to see it go,” says Haxton, who plans to use it for everything from auto repairs to making metal lawn ornaments.

“It’s been said about the lathe that it’s the only tool that could reproduce itself,” he says. “It would take some doing, but anything round, you can build on a lathe.”

This summer, Lori Houck’s father gave her his old band saw to use in her craft work.

“I just wore the thing out,” the Spokane woman says. “My dad had it for quite a while and it never wore out on him.

“All my friends think I’m weird because I work with power tools,” Houck adds. “But sewing and sawing are very similar. You have your patterns, you follow the lines.”

When her mother passed away seven years ago and left a small inheritance, Arlene Knutson of Spokane decided to buy herself a nice New Home sewing machine.

While her husband didn’t want her to spend the money, Knutson said, “I got it anyhow, and I’m glad I did. Whenever I use it, it reminds me of my mother.”

What about her husband? “It’s still here,” Knutson says, “and he’s not.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with story: Some tools have their own stories to tell about their owners When we asked area residents for stories about their favorite tools, we also invited tools to tell us about their owners. Two did. One was Fishtail Gouge, a constant companion of Spokane woodcarver Paul Bolinger. “Tools are made to be used, so I am particularly happy that Paul has chosen me as his favorite,” wrote the rather refined Mr. Gouge, a Britain native. “It means that I get to work with him every day. “Together we have made some very beautiful carvings, things that make me proud. The work is hard, but it is so fulfilling that I don’t even mind the incessant banging from the mallet. “What I do mind is being sharpened - sometimes Paul gets me too hot, and I turn blue or even black. I do wish Paul would be more careful with his sharpening.” The other was Buck, a welltraveled knife who gave an address in Coeur d’Alene, inside Katie Osborne’s purse. “I used to live in Lloyd’s left front pants pocket, but since he passed away, Katie has taken care of me,” Buck wrote. “Lloyd used to say that a jackknife is the handiest carryaround tool that there is, always available, ready to do everything from opening the mail, to cleaning a wire on an appliance, to whittlin’ a wooden bird on a quiet afternoon. “I’m not as busy as I once was, but I do help Katie with her dollhouse when another, fancier tool won’t do. I show the nicks and scratches of time - don’t we all? - but my blades are kept lovingly sharpened and bright.” Buck’s closing words: “Favorite tools of the world, you should be so lucky as to be used and cared for in such a family!” Rick Bonino