Building a Shave Horse

For years I’ve been planning to build a shave horse.  It is a foot operated vise that makes wood carving much easier for traditional woodworkers. We need one in the Woodwright shop.  I also wanted to make one so I can say that I did. For several years I had a nice piece of dried walnut sitting in my workshop. Never could I think of anything to do with it. Suddenly out of the ether came an idea. Make a shave horse out of  it!

I called a friend of mine who has a TimberKing bandsaw designed to make planks out of logs. He invited me to come over and he would cut the wood into planks.

After cutting the old log into planks I outlined the pieces I needed to cut out to make the shavehorse.  

Using a tablesaw and a bandsaw, with the assistance of a son-in-law, I cut out the pieces. 

I had previously reduced them to the  right thickness with a planer and finished them with a sander. I know this coveted item is made for using traditional hand tools, but there is nothing that says you cannot use power tools to make it.

Next I cut out the hole the foot lever would fit through. Not too difficult of a job.

The angled wood ramp followed.

Next sub-routine was to make the legs on my 1880’s lathe. I discovered the 1946 electric motor is failing and needs to be replaced in the near future. It had enough life in it to finish the job, fortunately.

I made a jig in order to drill the holes at the correct angle for the splayed legs. This part actually went smoothly, much to my surprise and delight. I glued and wedged the legs into the drilled holes. Perfect fit! A small miracle.

The installation of the angled ramp went well. It is held into place with carriage bolts. It was followed up by the installation of the foot lever. Everything fit and worked smoothly. 

Now I disassembled the shavehorse and put finish on it. I used tung oil. Two coats well applied and allowed to dry. 

After the finish dried I reassembled the shave horse. Everything still worked.

Upon completion I took it out to the Woodwright shop at the American West Heritage Center. It has been put to use in the manufacture of spoons and other kitchen products. It also serves as a training aid for people interested in traditional woodworking. 

A rewarding experience. Come and visit it sometime.

A Trip Down Memory Lane - Box Elder County Schools

I have been reading for some time of a temporary exhibit in the Brigham City Museum about the history of the schools in what is now Box Elder County.  I thought Mom might enjoy it since she is a product of those schools, so we set off on a Tuesday afternoon to see the exhibit before it is changed.  Since she is 93 years old and somewhat weak to do much walking and recently had cataract surgery, I popped her into a transport chair and we headed down the ramp to the museum which is the basement of the building.

The exhibit was mostly pictures with a few artifacts thrown in.  We hoped to see more names with the pictures but it was not to be.  Two ladies were working there in the museum, one in the back office and another wandered through briefly. We enjoyed discussing the pictures at a fairly high volume so Mom could hear me, but I think we didn't disturb anyone, since we were the only patrons there at the time.

A case in the front contained the report card of a Thelma Bott with a notation by her teacher that she was doing better, but that her mind just seemed to be somewhere else.  It was signed by a relative, Olive Hale.  As we got to the back of the room, Mom said, "Now there are some people I know!"  It was a picture of six people.  Mom immediately started naming them.  About that time the head person of the museum walked through and heard mom saying the names.  She said, Wait right here while I go get a pencil and paper.  I want to write these down!"  So we made our contribution to the museum knowledge.  If you look closely at the picture, you can see Mom's reflection just in the lower center of the picture.  It is a picture of the PE department at the time mom went to school there.  In front, from left to right, are Zula Hansen, Louise Call and Elizabeth Romney.  Two of the men were Coach Ferguson (football)  and Coach Rasmussen (basketball) who also taught biology. She didn't remember the other man.

The next picture is Box Elder High School.  When Mom attended there, the building to the right was not there yet.

 When the school system in Brigham City was started, there were 4 church wards in town. Each ward was apparently tasked with providing a school.  Since Mom's family lived in the old 4th Ward, she went to Lincoln School

This building is Lincoln School.  It has since been torn down.  If you look closer just next to the main entrance, there is some sort of fancy stone work.  My family didn't live in Brigham City, but once when I was about 6 years old and we were in town visiting,  I was sent off to school for the day.  My great-aunt, Thelma Kotter, was the teacher.

One of the artifacts in the museum was a piece of the stone work salvaged when Lincoln School was torn down.

 Before we left the school exhibit, Mom got her picture taken by a fairly modern Box Elder High School sweater.

Mostly we were interested in schools Mom attended, but there were pictures of many other schools as well.  One of them was this shot of the Intermountain Indian School.  It was a boarding school for Native American kids which has since been closed and mostly torn down.  Originally the school was built for use during World War II and was called Bushnell Hospital.  It specialized in caring for amputees with war time injuries.  Once the war was over, it was no longer needed, so became a school.  Ernest Freeman, my grandfather, was an employee there for a time, and even my mother remembered working there.

After looking at the school exhibit, we looked at some of the more permanent exhibits depicting life in Brigham City in the old days.  I was interested in the embroidery on this bonnet as well as the slat bonnet since I wear things like that sometimes.

Since we have a woodworker in the family I had to take the tool picture.

I think he would not mind having a lovely grindstone like this one to sharpen his tools.

Even more than the artifacts in the two rooms they had, were perhaps the signs with them with names of some relatives as donors.

Then we saw the shoe making exhibit and had to stop there. Before the Freeman family moved to Brigham City from England, they were shoe makers.  One of them eventually carried on the trade sometimes in Brigham since they brought their tools with them.  Although there were no names on the shoe lasts, we wondered if they might have come from Uncle Harry's shop.

The side wall of one of the rooms was two rows of adobe bricks covered with plaster.  Many of the older homes in Brigham have adobes in their walls still.  Norma Kotter lived in one of those homes.  The walls were thick and even in the summer heat, her home stayed cool without air conditioning. Norma's father, Henry Kotter, was a German man who ran a brickyard in Denmark before emigrating to the US.  He was also put in charge of a brickyard in Brigham, so he is likely responsible for some of the adobe bricks in many homes.

On one wall is an exhibit  with pictures and one page biographies of many early Brigham City folks.  Mom knew a fair number of them or their descendants.  The lady working in the back room eventually came out and chatted for a while about various folks in town.  It turns out that her father, Ephraim Johnson worked for the post office at the same time as Grandpa Ernest Freeman was the postmaster  What a small world!

They had no Freemans or Kotters in the collection, sadly, but we agreed to help them remedy that.  There was a time when pretty much everyone in town knew one of the Freemans.  Uncle Alf was the principal of the school as well as a teacher, Uncle Wilfred was also a teacher as well as Bishop of a local ward, (Mom took Biology from him.)  At one time Alf was also the mayor of Brigham City.  Their younger brother Ernest worked as postmaster, in the county assessors office and various other places and at one time was a Major in the National Guard.  The oldest brother, Harry, carried on the family shoe making and repairing tradition and worked as a carpenter.  The youngest brother, Bert, joined the Army for World War I, but tragically died in the Spanish Influenza epidemic

Hopefully some day if we revisit the museum, we will also find our family there.

D-Day - Brigham City man recalls Exercise Tiger, a 'forgotten' D-Day rehearsal

Fortuitous that I found where I tucked this article away...just at this time of year.

From an article in the Box Elder News Journal, Wednesday, May 25, 1994 of an interview with my uncle, Dean Freeman, about an experience he had 73 years ago.



The eyes of the world will turn to the beaches of Normandy on the 50th anniversary of D-Day, but its dress rehearsal Exercise Tiger--a disastrous operation that cost the lives of 749 American servicemen--has almost been forgotten in history

Along with other veterans of the incident, Dean Freeman of Brigham City knew at the time why it wasn't reported.  It would have tipped off the Germans that the Normandy invasion was imminent.  "It was top  secret.  Nobody could write home about it," said Freeman.  "We knew we were going to go ashore in France, but we had no date or place."

                     
                                                            Dean Freeman

But why Exercise Tiger remained classified information until 1974 was a mystery.  It was another ten years before Dr. Ralph Green of Chicago, a medical officer who treated some of the survivors, wrote about it.

Exercise Tiger, involving 3,000 ships and 30,000 men in full battle dress, was the U.S. 4th Infantry Division's final practice for D-Day.  The ships sailed into the channel to practice a landing at Slapton Sands in preparation for the real thing.

What began as a drill became a death trap.  Nine German torpedo boats operating out of occupied France happened onto eight LSTs (landing ship, tanks) that were part of the convoy.

On April 28, 1944, Captain Dean Freeman was on the upper deck of an LST of Convoy T-4, when shortly before 2 a.m. the two LSTs following it were struck by torpedoes.  He heard an explosion, that was all.

"I was the officer on duty on deck.  It was quite a ways behind, and I wasn't sure what was happening," said Freeman.  "We didn't know until morning.  The sound wasn't that unusual; every night there were German planes and anti-aircraft action."

With records declassified, now it is known what happened.  German boats, traveling at 40 miles per hour, darted about the lumbering LSTs which moved at about 5 mph.  Two LSTs were sunk and a third was damaged in 30 minutes.

The final toll of 551 soldiers and 298 sailors dead and 89 wounded made Exercise Tiger the most deadly U.S. training exercise during World War II.

"They went down within a few minutes.  There was one strange story.  One company commander and one sergeant were blown out the hole where the torpedo went in, and they both lived.  The explosion of the torpedo inside blew them right out the hole."

Most aboard the ships weren't so fortunate.  Of about 1,000 men in Freeman's battalion, 230 lost their lives.

"After it happened, we went back to the staging area for 20 to 30 days.  There was a building set up for a morgue, and a month was spent trying to identify what bodies had been recovered.  It was a terrible job," he said.

A number of errors worsened the tragedy.  Only one British ship guarded the convoy and a typographical error caused American ships to tune to the wrong radio frequency.

Men buckled flotation belts around their waists instead of under their arms.  Loaded with field packs, rifles, ammunition and steel helmets, many who jumped into the water turned upside down and were found floating feet up.

Since the operation had been a full rehearsal for D-Day, all but the men's personal gear had been taken along.  Military and payroll records went down with the ships, so it was a scramble to put those records together.

Freeman continued, "One odd thing, all those records of men and officers were in a waterproof box in one of the vehicles on the LSTs that went down."

"After landing on the continent we made new records.  about four months after D-Day, they brought the mail and there was the box, with records readable although it was burnt all over on the outside.  It was found floating down the channel to Plymouth Harbor."

On June 6, 1944, Freeman landed on Utah Beach with the rest of the 577th Quartermaster Battalion.  They climbed over the sides of the LSTs to LCVPs (landing craft, vehicles, personnel) which held 30 to 40 people.

When the LCVP got close to the beach, the front dropped and soldiers headed onto the beach as the engines went into reverse and headed out to sea.

Water was anywhere in depth from "knees to armpits or higher" said Freeman, who held his arms up to show how weapons were carried "any way you could."

"We had lifejackets, kind of wrap-arounds, with CO2 tubes to inflate.  We used those later as air mattresses in the bottom of fox holes," he added with a grin.

Utah Beach was all flooded for about a mile due to dikes erected by the Germans, so they waded for about a mile inland.  German pillboxes above had pretty well been taken out by shelling, bombing and paratroopers.

"Our assignment was to keep the beach open, so Patton and all the others could come in.  As an administrative and quartermaster unit, we were responsible for getting rations, gasoline, and ammunition to personnel in the field," he added.

He went on to Cherbourg, France, and later to Liege, Belgium, where he was stationed when the war ended.

Spending Thanksgiving Day on the train, he arrived home in late November 1945--two years from the time he departed for Europe in 1943.  It was the first time he had seen his son, born a month after his departure.  His wife Florence had remained in Logan with an aunt.

Although he had been a member of the local National Guard unit that went to war together, Freeman enrolled in ROTC at Utah State Universidy and was called up the day after his graduation in June 1942.  He attended officers school in Wyoming and Georgia prior to assignment in England.

Until an article about Exercise Tiger appeared recently, Freeman said, "I had never seen anything in print, except a little article a few years ago.  I guess there was a documentary on television on April 28, but I missed it."

Although he wouldn't have come forward with his story without urging by his wife, Freeman is glad Exercise Tiger is getting some attention and those who lost their lives are being honored.

On the 50th anniversary of Exercise Tiger, Americans went to Slapton Sands for services at the cemetery and then dropped a wreath in the channel for those who went down with the boats.