Some of the BEST cabinetmakers are...

Alcoholics. My adult life has been involved in woodworking and cabinet manufacturing. The first few years it was in wood shops cutting parts, assembling cabinets, installing hardware and assisting installation crews. After, I used experience from college and learned to design, draft and engineer cabinets and furniture, moving out of the factory and into the office.

Some of the larger companies had journeymen carpenters who completed industrial arts courses and registered as skilled union workers. Those were the early days. As I got older, I found many of the large companies had gone bankrupt and closed their doors. Smaller shops with lower overhead became the norm.

This was years after soldiers came back from the Vietnam war and guys with talent looking for steady jobs took some woodworking classes and ended up in the cabinet business. That was the good part. The bad part was many of them had drug and alcohol addictions. All of them smoked and a few were still suffering nightmares as young men fighting for America came back with little support to get them 100%.

One of those guys was Murray. Skinny, tattoos everywhere, missing a few teeth and needed a few beers during the course of the day. Murray didn't drive. He lost his license on a DUI and came to work on a bicycle. He had a small ice chest strapped to the back of his bike and no one was allowed near it as he parked in the back of the shop near the bushes. We knew Murray went back there on lunch and cigarette breaks to chug a few beers. The owner knew Murray was a liability, but you can give him a shop drawing and he would give you a material list, cut all the parts and assemble some of the finest wall units you could hope for.

Murray didn't often miss work. It had to be something serious as he couldn't afford to be without pay. Maybe it was a run-in with the law for missing child support, but he was there first thing the next day eager to work.

I hired 'the Rock' a guy down from New York looking to make a clean start. We didn't ask and he didn't tell. Fantastic cabinetmaker. He didn't show up for work one Monday. We later found out he was in line at the check cashing store when someone popped a beer next to him. The entire weekend was a drinking binge and lucky for him the Veterans had him on the rehab program, cleaned him up and put him back on the street. He was good for a few months. The next time he went off the edge, involved cocaine and he wound up in jail. A jail fight knocked him out, put him in the hospital where he died.

The custom shop I worked at 8 years ago had 2 guys on house arrest wearing ankle bracelets and often they were visited by counselors/agents with breath analyzers, just to be sure they were clean. Hard life.

I'm in a different environment now. No longer directly connected to manufacture. I'm away from that crowd. Although I miss being directly connected to the manufacture of high-end custom furniture, I don't miss the problems surrounding it.

Thanks for reading my blog!