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J anus Waller is a woodworker, engineer, carpenter, tinkerer, part-time farmer, toy-maker and veteran.
Waller’s found it hard for a good man to stay unemployed and harder still for an industrious man, like himself, to sit idle.
The small rural Clarkfield home he shares with his wife Betty and the outbuildings that surround it, act like showcases for Waller’s craft and inventiveness.
Walking through the couple’s home, Waller and his wife point out the details and stories behind each finely crafted piece of furniture, each complex wooden toy, each inlaid chest or jewelery box and each whimsical craft decoration.
The work impresses, the variety overwhelms.
You’d never know that wood could offer such a pallette of colors, or shine so brightly. The memorabilia boxes and chests Waller creates almost sparkle and shine with the sheen of a fine polish and the startling contrast between woods of varying color and pattern. Their inlaid patterns shift in the light and give off an impossible number of descriptors for the color of wood: amber, auburn, bay, beige, brick, bronze, chestnut, chocolate, cinnamon, cocoa, coffee, copper, fawn, ginger, hazel, khaki, ochre, russet, sepia, sorrel, tan and tawny. To say simply ‘brown’, just doesn’t cut it.
There’s rarely any stain applied to Waller’s work. The wood when sanded, polished and lacquered speaks for itself.
Then there are the ‘toys’. But to describe Wallers creations as ‘toys’ is an understatement. Several of them line a half wall separating the kitchen and living room: tractors, trains, semis and trailers, loaders and bulldozers and backhoes. All completely made of wood, intricately designed and fully functional.
He points out a bulldozer that’s about the size of a Kleenex box. “That’s made from 320 different parts,” he says. The blade lifts and tilts. The working tracks are composed of impossibly small slivers of wood seemingly weaved together. If it belched smoke, began to rumble and started dozing Betty’s living room carpet all on its own, there’d be no surprise.
After the short tour of the few masterpieces he’s kept, Waller heads outside and is faced with a blustery January morning.
Waller is a man of habit. He walks out to his woodshop nearly every morning after breakfast and works the morning away until dinner time at 11:00 a.m. After that he works until about 3:30 before calling it a day. At 84-years-old he thinks he’s about as retired as he’ll get. He finally quit running a tractor for his friend and former construction partner of over 25 years, Dale Berg, this past fall.
Waller walks out to the outbuilding he stores his finished projects in. There shelves hold his boxes and chest, the toys seen earlier and the wooden urns he creates from cherry wood. He hopes to sell some of these things at the Ole and Lena Days craft fair, but it’s scheduled earlier this year and he worries about the weather and whether he wants to take Betty out in the cold. “That’s about the size of it,” he says.
He began his woodworking craft in earnest the first time he retired, when he was 62 and sold his half of the construction business to Dale. But a month later a young contractor asked him to do some carpentry work for him and Waller kept at it for about another three years. Then tennis elbow crept into both his arms and nail-poundin’ was out of the question.
He holds up another of his dozers and explains he can’t make them anymore. His hands have begun to shake and he can’t get as close to the saw anymore to make the intricate parts. Most of his work is inlaid with a penny that denotes the year the work was made. On the hood of the dozer rests a penny from 2010.
The prices he quotes for his work seem so low—especially once you witness the time and care that goes into each piece. He talks about seeing a guy selling a chest for about $500. He took a look at it and went home and made one better, but didn’t charge anything close to $500.
“It takes a lot of time and that’s what I got,” Waller says of his work.
He walks over to his garage. There he keeps his rough cut lumber. He uses 13 different kinds of wood. Woods like maple (regular, birdseye and slash), walnut, oak, fir, pine, cherry, lyptus and ash. His wood comes from lumber yards, the huge stumps of cut trees and from a barn that dates back to 1908.
Tucked back in his garage is what looks like a lawn tractor on steroids. The name ‘Jitney’ is painted on the hood. Waller calls it simply a ‘four-wheeler’ and he explains that he made this one from the frame, differential and transmission of a 1929 Chevrolet. This is the third one he’s made. The first one he made in his basement when he lived in the cities. When spring came, he disassembled the machine, moved it out of the basement and reassembled it outside.
Waller, a Hanley Falls native, lived in the cities for 22 years, met Betty while at the Dunwoody Institute and worked in both lumber yards and construction. Prior to that he had tried farming with his brother, “It just didn’t work out,” he says. Before that he served his country in the Navy during World War II in the pacific theatre.
Waller sits in his wood working shop now designing another inlaid box with three different colors of wood. He talks with pride about his time in war. He served on the destroyer escort USS Jaccard with 165 other men. They sailed the Philippines were tossed about by a typhoon that kicked up waves 45 feet high. The farm boy from Hanley never got sick—like most of his crew mates—and manned the wheel of the boat in shifts with the other sailors that held their chow as waves crashed over the conning tower.
“I wouldn’t have traded that experience for a million dollars,” says Waller.
It’s getting on lunch time and Waller’s about to head back to the house and Betty. He’ll have to finish the box he’s been working on later.
“I’m as busy as I want to be,” says Waller. “There’s so little money in this, it doesn’t hardly pay. I do it because I love it and it’s fun.”
J anus Waller is a woodworker, engineer, carpenter, tinkerer, part-time farmer, toy-maker and veteran.
Waller’s found it hard for a good man to stay unemployed and harder still for an industrious man, like himself, to sit idle.
The small rural Clarkfield home he shares with his wife Betty and the outbuildings that surround it, act like showcases for Waller’s craft and inventiveness.
Walking through the couple’s home, Waller and his wife point out the details and stories behind each finely crafted piece of furniture, each complex wooden toy, each inlaid chest or jewelery box and each whimsical craft decoration.
The work impresses, the variety overwhelms.
You’d never know that wood could offer such a pallette of colors, or shine so brightly. The memorabilia boxes and chests Waller creates almost sparkle and shine with the sheen of a fine polish and the startling contrast between woods of varying color and pattern. Their inlaid patterns shift in the light and give off an impossible number of descriptors for the color of wood: amber, auburn, bay, beige, brick, bronze, chestnut, chocolate, cinnamon, cocoa, coffee, copper, fawn, ginger, hazel, khaki, ochre, russet, sepia, sorrel, tan and tawny. To say simply ‘brown’, just doesn’t cut it.
There’s rarely any stain applied to Waller’s work. The wood when sanded, polished and lacquered speaks for itself.
Then there are the ‘toys’. But to describe Wallers creations as ‘toys’ is an understatement. Several of them line a half wall separating the kitchen and living room: tractors, trains, semis and trailers, loaders and bulldozers and backhoes. All completely made of wood, intricately designed and fully functional.
He points out a bulldozer that’s about the size of a Kleenex box. “That’s made from 320 different parts,” he says. The blade lifts and tilts. The working tracks are composed of impossibly small slivers of wood seemingly weaved together. If it belched smoke, began to rumble and started dozing Betty’s living room carpet all on its own, there’d be no surprise.
After the short tour of the few masterpieces he’s kept, Waller heads outside and is faced with a blustery January morning.
Waller is a man of habit. He walks out to his woodshop nearly every morning after breakfast and works the morning away until dinner time at 11:00 a.m. After that he works until about 3:30 before calling it a day. At 84-years-old he thinks he’s about as retired as he’ll get. He finally quit running a tractor for his friend and former construction partner of over 25 years, Dale Berg, this past fall.
Waller walks out to the outbuilding he stores his finished projects in. There shelves hold his boxes and chest, the toys seen earlier and the wooden urns he creates from cherry wood. He hopes to sell some of these things at the Ole and Lena Days craft fair, but it’s scheduled earlier this year and he worries about the weather and whether he wants to take Betty out in the cold. “That’s about the size of it,” he says.
He began his woodworking craft in earnest the first time he retired, when he was 62 and sold his half of the construction business to Dale. But a month later a young contractor asked him to do some carpentry work for him and Waller kept at it for about another three years. Then tennis elbow crept into both his arms and nail-poundin’ was out of the question.
He holds up another of his dozers and explains he can’t make them anymore. His hands have begun to shake and he can’t get as close to the saw anymore to make the intricate parts. Most of his work is inlaid with a penny that denotes the year the work was made. On the hood of the dozer rests a penny from 2010.
The prices he quotes for his work seem so low—especially once you witness the time and care that goes into each piece. He talks about seeing a guy selling a chest for about $500. He took a look at it and went home and made one better, but didn’t charge anything close to $500.
“It takes a lot of time and that’s what I got,” Waller says of his work.
He walks over to his garage. There he keeps his rough cut lumber. He uses 13 different kinds of wood. Woods like maple (regular, birdseye and slash), walnut, oak, fir, pine, cherry, lyptus and ash. His wood comes from lumber yards, the huge stumps of cut trees and from a barn that dates back to 1908.
Tucked back in his garage is what looks like a lawn tractor on steroids. The name ‘Jitney’ is painted on the hood. Waller calls it simply a ‘four-wheeler’ and he explains that he made this one from the frame, differential and transmission of a 1929 Chevrolet. This is the third one he’s made. The first one he made in his basement when he lived in the cities. When spring came, he disassembled the machine, moved it out of the basement and reassembled it outside.
Waller, a Hanley Falls native, lived in the cities for 22 years, met Betty while at the Dunwoody Institute and worked in both lumber yards and construction. Prior to that he had tried farming with his brother, “It just didn’t work out,” he says. Before that he served his country in the Navy during World War II in the pacific theatre.
Waller sits in his wood working shop now designing another inlaid box with three different colors of wood. He talks with pride about his time in war. He served on the destroyer escort USS Jaccard with 165 other men. They sailed the Philippines were tossed about by a typhoon that kicked up waves 45 feet high. The farm boy from Hanley never got sick—like most of his crew mates—and manned the wheel of the boat in shifts with the other sailors that held their chow as waves crashed over the conning tower.
“I wouldn’t have traded that experience for a million dollars,” says Waller.
It’s getting on lunch time and Waller’s about to head back to the house and Betty. He’ll have to finish the box he’s been working on later.
“I’m as busy as I want to be,” says Waller. “There’s so little money in this, it doesn’t hardly pay. I do it because I love it and it’s fun.”
