Chairmen of the Boards
by Doug Gillett
Two old friends
build
a bond as strong as
solid walnut.
The three rocking chairs sitting
in Cecil Cheves’ living room
are deceptively simple at first
glance. They’re elegant, but they don’t
grab your eye with wildly modern lines or
embellishments. You have to look closer
to observe the complexity of the tapering
lines and compound curves, run your
hand over the armrests and seats to feel
just how meticulously the wood has been
finished. And you can’t truly appreciate
the intricacy of the spindles, as subtly
cambered as airplane wings, until you sit
in one of the chairs, lean back, and feel
the spindles match the curvature of your
spine as closely as if they had been tailored
to your exact measurements. And
you realize that these are not just rocking
chairs—they are works of sculpture.
At a time when furniture retailers will
mass-produce entire room suites and deliver
them within hours, Cheves and his
longtime friend Chuck Brock are savoring
the virtues of patience, craftsmanship, and
a job well done. Nearly every Tuesday
evening for the past four years, they have
met in Brock’s workshop to craft walnut
rocking chairs inspired by legendary woodworking
artisan Sam Maloof. The three
rocking chairs sitting in Cheves’s living
room—soon to be joined by two more—are the products not of an assembly line
but of two dedicated men who simply
wanted to create something valuable and
lasting. Along the way, they created
friendship every bit as valuable and lasting
as their chairs.
• • •
Long before Cheves and Brock ever
a piece of wood together, they were teammates
of a different kind—members of
Rebels in Columbus’s Sally Little League
in the early 1960s. Their shared memories
of the team still pop up frequently in
chats in Brock’s workshop, many of them
centering around their cigar-chewing
coach, Carter Wolf. “He was a truck driver,
and let’s just say he was very salty,” Cheves
says with a chuckle. “But he was just
great coach who got the best out of
boys, and we won a lot of baseball games.”
After Brock and Cheves graduated from
Columbus High School in 1967, their
paths began to diverge. Cheves went off to
the University of Georgia, and later earned
law degrees from Samford and Emory;
Brock, meanwhile, earned an education
degree and returned to Columbus to teach
school—all the while keeping woodworking
a major part of his spare time. He even
took a couple years off fromteaching in the
early 1980s to devote himself full-time to
commissioned furniture projects.When he
and his wife Sheila moved into their current
residence in 1996, Sheila gave him
$1,500 to buy some new tools. “Everything
I put in my garage was supposed to be movable
so she could get her car in,” Brock
says, a sheepish grin evident in his voice. “That car has not been in that garage for
nine or 10 years now.”
Even as Brock was taking over the
family garage, Atlanta’s Highland Hardware
(now Highland Woodworking), a
longtime mecca for prominent woodworking
artists such as Maloof and Roy
Underhill, was expanding its shop by
8,000 square feet to keep up with growing
interest in its furniture-building
classes and seminars. By the turn of the
century, Maloof—dubbed “the Hemingway
of Hardwood” by People magazine for
his meticulously crafted furniture pieces,
many of which ended up in art museums—was approaching his nineties and
could no longer maintain his teaching
schedule at Highland, so the shop turned
to Brock to share his skills.
“It kind of felt like Gabby Hayes being
asked to do a duet with Elvis, because Sam Maloof has been the icon of all fine woodworkers
for the last 50 years,” Brock remembers. “And the classroom that I teach
in has got these huge pictures—and I mean
huge, poster-sized pictures—of Sam Maloof
through the years teaching there. The
first time I [taught a class] up there, in that
room with Sam’s pictures hanging on the
wall, I came home from the weekend and
woke up my wife and said, ‘Gee whiz, I
think this is what I’m supposed to do.’”
• • •
Neither Cheves nor Brock can quite
remember how they ran into each other
about 10 years ago. But wherever it was, it
was the right place at the right time:
Cheves had just inherited some woodworking
tools from his father-in-law but
wasn’t sure what to do with them. Once
he’d finally convinced Brock to come
over and have a look at the tools, he solicited
his old friend’s help in building a
pair of shaker tables, which they constructed
over the course of a few weekends
and which Cheves still enjoys.
Soon Cheves was perusing the
pages of Fine Woodworking magazine for inspiration
for new projects. Among the pieces that
caught his eye: one of Sam Maloof’s famous
rocking chairs. Cheves didn’t realize
it, but Brock was working on his own “Maloof-inspired rocker” at the same
time, and when Cheves saw the finished
product, he decided he’d like to have a
hand in building a similar piece.
If the shaker tables they’d worked on
were comparable to tentatively dipping
one’s toe into the world of woodworking,
though, the Maloof rocker was a leap
right into the deep end. “[Chuck] said, ‘Well, if you’re really interested, then
we’ll have to go to Pennsylvania to buy
the wood,’” Cheves says. “And I remember
being real stunned,
and I said, ‘You mean we can’t just go
to Lowe’s?’ I was really at the very
beginning stages of the learning curve.”
What ensued was a quest Brock now
calls the “wood safari.” He and Cheves
traveled to Lancaster County, Pa. and visited
a series of lumberyards in search of
the perfect piece of fine walnut out
of which to craft the Maloof chair. At
their last stop, at the lumberyard of a gray-pony-tailed
dealer Cheves describes as a “capitalist hippie,” they found what they
were looking for: a 17-foot-long section
from a 150-year-old English walnut tree,
which Brock described as “the most beautiful
piece of wood he had ever seen.”
Too beautiful, Cheves decided, to
leave any of it behind. He purchased not
one but two six-foot-wide slabs of the
wood, had them trucked down to a warehouse
in Columbus, and decided that he
wanted to build not one rocker, but five—one each for himself, his wife and their
three children. “I guess it’s like anything,”
he says with a chuckle: “You get caught
in the moment.”
• • •
Last September, Cheves made good on
a promise to mark his 60th birthday by
completing a triathlon consisting of a 60-mile run, a 60-mile bike ride and a 60-lap swim off Marina Cove in Green
Island. So while he occasionally may be
prone to getting “caught in the moment,”
he is not someone who gives up, scales
back or succumbs to impatience once his goals have been stated.
“The other night,” Brock recalls, “[Cecil] made a statement that began
with something like, ‘From the common
person’s perspective...’ And I stopped him
and said, ‘Cecil, you have no common
person’s perspective! You’re a guy who, at
60 years of age, ran 60 miles, competed
against the elements [in the Escape from
Alcatraz Triathlon], jumped in 50-degree
water and swam to the shore. How much
of a common man is that?’”
The uncommon patience of Chuck
Brock and Cecil Cheves was definitely an
asset to the Maloof rocker project. Brock
and Cheves brought their slabs of English
walnut down to Columbus in July of
2005; it took more than a year of Tuesday-night meetings for them to complete
the first chair. “Chuck is both an artist
and a woodworker,” Cheves explains. “What I learned, it’s one thing just to cut
and carve a piece of wood into a stick of
furniture; it’s another thing to bring an
artistic flair to it, where there are absolutely
no hard lines. It’s all a beautiful,
flowing piece of wood where you can run
your hand over it and not feel any dips or
bumps or joining or where the grain
changes.
“These are works of art. This is not a
piece of furniture where you go down to a
furniture store and put down $100 and
buy a chair. They are expensive”—some
of Maloof’s creations have sold for as
much as $30,000—“but when you think
of them as a piece of art, you can think of
the intrinsic value of what you have.”
• • •
Most of the houses in Chuck Brock’s
neighborhood are dimly lit this Tuesday
night, their owners most likely cocooning
inside to watch Dancing with the Stars.
From the street, the only clear signs of life
are in Brock’s garage, where the fluorescent
lights illuminate Brock and Cheves
trading grandchild stories, discussing the
state of Georgia football and building
chairs. Both men have crossed over into
their 60s, but both could pass for much
younger, particularly when the joy of their
work causes smiles to cross their faces.
One only has to observe the two
craftsmen for a few minutes to get an idea
of just how intricate the Maloof chair is.
Brock’s tools range from refrigerator-sized
machines with their own ventilation systems
to simple pieces of metal used for
scraping; they will use as many as eight
different kinds of sandpaper to ensure
that the surfaces are completely smooth.
After rough-cutting the seats, legs, spindles,
headrests, armrests and rockers,
Brock and Cheves took pains to match
up the parts as closely as possible based
on the direction of the grain, which
helps give the chairs their cohesive appearance,
almost as if each was carved
from a single block of solid walnut. But
the grain is structurally important, too:
If it runs across the delicate spindles as
opposed to lengthwise, it increases the
risk that they’ll break.
These are just a few examples of the
wealth of knowledge Cheves has gained
from his friend. “Chuck is combining now
his teaching gift with his gift of artistry, so
it’s a good blend. He’s kind of taken this
to another level,” he says. Indeed, Brock
partnered with Highland Woodworking
this year to produce a DVD and companion
booklet on how to create a Maloof-inspired
rocker. Packages consisting of the
DVD, booklet and patterns now have
sold thousands of copies all over the world. Back in the summer, Brock says, he
received an e-mail from an aspiring chairmaker
in Russia wishing him a happy Independence
Day.
“I don’t make these chairs because I’m
interested in selling them,” Brock says. “I
just enjoy teaching other people. And
then they can make 200 of them and sell
them all over the place as far as I’m concerned—I just enjoy knowing I helped
someone get started.”
• • •
Brock also has helped Cheves design a
workshop that will be part of a house
Cheves is renovating. It’s a good thing
he’ll soon have his own shop, because
Columbus will need someone to carry on
the woodworking tradition: Brock has put
his house on the market and is looking to
move to Tennessee to be closer to his
children and granddaughter.
But the move hardly means the end of
their working partnership. Brock and
Cheves say they’ll continue to meet in
Atlanta to lead classes at Highland
Woodworking. They’ve also got some
wood left over from the slabs they
brought back from Pennsylvania, which
Cheves says will make a nice table. More
importantly, though, their friendship will
continue even after Brock has moved
away.
“I owe a great deal of the success I’ve
had to three things—the Lord, Highland
Hardware and Cecil,” Brock says. “It’s just
been a great friendship built around a mutual
interest and doing something together,
and anytime people have that
kind of real honest connection, good
things are gonna come from it.
“We’ve influenced each other in a lot
of ways besides woodworking. When we
first started out, for example, I wasn’t as
much of an active Christian as he was,
but when we’d get together to start working,
he’d say a little prayer, and he influenced
me greatly there, too. Anytime you
can be around somebody who’s that outstanding
a person, it’s gonna influence
you. And that’s what it’s like being
around Cecil: I think it makes me a better
person. And I think a lot of these
doors that opened to me have opened because
of that relationship. I just can’t say
enough about that.”
To see this story complete with photos, pick up the latest issue of Columbus and the Valley at a retail outlet near you, or click here to subscribe online so you’ll never miss a word.
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