INBETWEEN changing to FILM-making, I made a MAPLE wood-pedestal CHAIR in the school woodshop (this main story is about trying to take it home at Christmas-time and stopped by the school cop, Morrie!)

(Excerpted from TWELVE DEAD FROGS AND OTHER STORIES, A Filmmaker’s Memoir, by Rick Schmidt ©2017).

CUTTING LOCKS (1969)

One of the perks of my teacher’s assistant job at CCAC (California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts in SF) was that I had my own set of keys to the foundry facility and could use the studio at the college any time I wanted, day or night. So I got a lot of work done during off hours. But occasionally, as with any institution of higher learning, there were a few crossed wires. At some point the school cop, a guy named Morrie, decided that the cabinets containing the power tools should be locked up each night, for security purposes. It was obvious that he considered the long-haired hippies on campus to be prime candidates for potential thievery. How he imagined that these young criminals could somehow first break into the heavily padlocked foundry in the first place, I’ll never know. But he did.

After traveling over from my house one evening to complete a sculpture for the next day’s critique, I discovered to my chagrin that I had no access to the power grinder, which I absolutely needed to complete my job. I was disgusted that somebody could have come into “my studio” and deprived me of a crucial tool, was “fucking with my precious time.” Without as much as a second’s hesitation, I picked up the nearby bolt cutters, a tool Morrie hadn’t been smart enough to lock away, gripped the lock with its blades, applied pressure to the two-foot long handles, and snapped open the lock without much of a problem.

The next day I heard something about my infraction from teacher and friend Charlie Simonds, who of course got a kick out of anything that upset the bureaucracy at CCAC. I told him that they had no business doing that, locking me out of my tools. He agreed. But a couple of days later it happened again.

I had driven in again to do some work and discovered a new (bigger!) lock hanging off the power tool cabinet. Again, I grabbed the bolt cutters (didn’t Morrie understand what this tool was used for?) and snapped it right off. No one was going to waste my evening of sculpting. No way! Well, this time the shit really hit the fan. No cop likes his authority to be questioned, much less twice in a row. There was a fairly big stink, resulting in some school official actually entering the dusty, smelly, cavernous foundry to talk over the situation with us. But Charlie was a well-respected teacher and we emerged victorious, forever straining my relations with Morrie. He seethed, and waited to get his revenge.

THE TEACHER’S CHAIR (1969)

At the same time, I was doing my foundry work at CCAC, almost involved with video at teacher Phil Makanna’s request, I attended a furniture design class at the woodworking studio that was right next door. I figured I would enjoy making things out of wood while I learned how to use some of their sophisticated equipment. Somehow, I was able to convince the teacher there, Mr. Judson, to let me make a chair out of solid maple, a modern chair that stood on a singular pedestal, like the kind he produced for rich people (only rich people could have afforded his designer prices).

As the semester progressed, Mr. Judson showed me how to make it, explaining one step after another. It was simpler than I could have imagined. He said I first needed to create a six-inch scale model in clay. Then I could cut it into slices with a thin piece of wire, each layer representing a 2” wide board. a section of the final, full-sized item. Next, I would trace around the little, cut-out clay shapes on graph paper, which allowed me to easily duplicate the layers to a life-sized grid. Finally, I’d create the full-sized wood pieces from the qctuql ” thick boards – cutting out each layer precisely with a jigsaw, squaring them with a joiner and planer – and glue it all together. A lathe would be used to fashion the pedestal base. With some chiseling on the seat and sides, and sanding overall; voila!

Mr. Judson, a world-renowned furniture designer at the time, repeated that usually he only allowed graduate students to produce something as complicated as an original chair, but that he had made an exception in my case. And not surprisingly, my finished chair looked somewhat similar to one of his prized designs, but only so far as both were wood, and both had a pedestal base. My design was completely my own.

My chair at Charlie and my shared studio, East Oakland, 1969.

When I finally happened by CCAC before Christmas break to pick up the completed chair, Morrie-the-cop got his chance to pay me back. I had barely lifted my chair off the top of the workbench when I heard his cop voice, loud and stern.

“Stop! Rick! Put that down!” he ordered out of nowhere. I looked over toward the door of the woodworking studio, about twelve feet away, and saw Morrie, his hand pressed against his holster, beady-eyed, lips pursed.

“Put that chair down, right now!” he ordered again. “But it’s my chair, Morrie,” I said, in shock from the interruption.

“No, it isn’t!" he tersely responded. “It’s Mr. Judson’s chair. And you better put it down this second.

“And CAREFULLY!”

I lowered it slowly back down the six inches to the table, and tried again to convince him that it was mine, but he was sure he knew better. He was convinced I was a thief (that much was proven by me having repeated “breaking and entering” of the foundry tool locker), and now I was a liar, too. By then I had tears in my eyes.

I was embarrassed when another student happened in and saw my wet face. I had never been good with confrontation or being reprimanded, and Morrie had dressed me down pretty well. As I left, I told him he’d learn at some point up the road that he had been wrong. In any case, I had to leave my precious chair behind until the first week in January 1970, worrying throughout the semester break that it might somehow be stolen.

The few times that I saw Morrie after the Christmas break, when I was finally able to pick up my chair, he avoided me, made no eye contact. And Mr. Judson gave me a “B” for the class. When I asked him about the (lousy) grade, he said it had nothing to do with the quality of my chair. Then what was the grade based upon? That’s all I worked on the entire semester, I reminded him. He mumbled something about “overall woodworking skills,” but I wasn’t impressed with that logic.

How had Mr. Judson felt when Morrie explained (proudly) that he had caught me stealing one of his chairs? How embarrassed had the teacher been to admit that it was actually mine. After all, Morrie had thought my chair was every inch as good as a ‘Judson original.’ In my book, I call that an “A.”

Read more from my “12 Dead Frogs” memoir (on Kindle) here:

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