Creating Beauty Gives Joy To Wood Sculptor
Answering two newspaper advertisements has paid off for Gene Sneider. The first led to a career, and the second to a hobby, both stemming from his boyhood love of model building.
As a professional model builder, Sneider has worked for a long list of well-known institutions including, General Motors, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hughes Aircraft and Walt Disney.
He has built scale models for such projects as NASA’s Apollo TM-1 mock-up of the lunar lander, Boston’s Mass General Hospital and Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean.
“I started building models when I was about 10 years old,” Sneider said. “I started with airplanes, but I wasn’t very good at that, so I switched to boats and have been building them ever since.”
After answering a second ad for a wood-carving class in Simi Valley, Calif., Sneider’s passion for model building evolved into a love for woodcarving. The southeast Valley home Sneider shares with his wife, Molly, is sprinkled with wooden sculptures.
Some are no bigger than the size of his thumb. Others are as large as the full-size Macaw mounted on a branch, which stands about 3 feet tall on a coffee table. All were carved by Sneider - most in the fully insulated workshop that runs the length of his garage.
“He comes in for sleep and food,” Molly Sneider said.
Sneider began carving almost 20 years ago to take his mind off of headaches that had nagged him for two years.
The years Sneider spent as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division during and after the Korean War were to blame for Sneider’s deteriorating health. Besides the headaches, Sneider is bothered by a neck injury he sustained during a training exercise accident 2,100 feet over Fort Benning, Ga. and a chronic knee problem.
Sneider hurt his neck when he got tangled up with another paratrooper and was knocked unconscious as he jumped from an Army plane. A line attached to Sneider’s parachute and the plane jerked the chute open, but Sneider was still unconscious when he hit the ground. The mishap landed him in the hospital.
Years later, a right knee battered and twisted by 50 jumps brought Sneider back to the hospital. He started doing little sculptures to pass time in the hospital during the first of five knee operations - including two knee replacements - and has made a sculpture during every visit.
“It’s very difficult when you take a man who has been active all of his life to what he called …” Molly Sneider said, pausing a moment while she thought of the right word, “inactive.”
The joy of wood-carving has been a welcome release for Sneider.
“When I was under a lot of pressure, it took that pressure off of me,” Sneider said. “You have to have total concentration on a piece.”
Sneider, who moved to the Valley four years ago, teaches wood-carving classes at McCoy’s Craft Village two nights a week, taking summers off to focus on his own carving. He also attends shows around the Northwest and has taken the people’s choice ribbon the last two years at the Spokane wood-carvers show - two years ago for the macaw he called “Raw Macaw” and last year for “Danse Des Dauphin,” which means dance of the dolphin.
“When I come back from a show, I’m so high that it’s like, ‘Where do I start?”’ Sneider said.
Every project starts with a square block of wood. Tracing the pattern on the block is the first step of a timeconsuming, eight-step process. Sneider estimated he put 390 hours into the macaw and dolphin projects combined.
“It’s almost impossible to appreciate the value of a sculpture,” Molly Sneider said. “There was one woman at a show that said to him, ‘It’s only a piece of wood,’ to which he replied, ‘But madam, it doesn’t grow that way.”’
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MEMO: To suggest subjects for Saturday’s People, please write The Valley Voice, 13208 E. Sprague, or call editor Mike Schmeltzer at 927-2170.