Made to Last

Shasta Woodworkers Club builds Community…

Cregg Zehnle’s journey into woodworking and construction began with a love story.
His father-in-law was building a house in Redding more than 60 years ago and needed a young go-getter to swing a hammer. Zehnle, then a college student, wasn’t particularly interested in the job, but he was certainly interested in the man’s daughter.

“I ended up taking that job,” he says, “and marrying her.” They’ve been together for 61 years.
That’s the kind of story that gets passed around at a Shasta Woodworkers Club meeting, part woodworking talk, part life stories, with sawdust on the floor and someone’s half-finished project in the corner for everyone to critique.

Zehnle, Redding-born and raised, spent 30-plus years teaching woodshop at Anderson High School, then built about 20 houses from the ground up as a side gig. He ran the woodworkers’ club meetings for a full decade on top of that. If there’s a person who can explain why this club has stuck around for nearly 40 years, it’s him.

In 1987, Ed Wilson, a shop teacher at the former Nova High School, began inviting a few fellow woodworkers to his shop once a month just to talk projects. Five years later, the group had grown formal enough to write a constitution and elect its first president. It’s been passing the gavel along ever since, from member to member, shop teacher to contractor, to whoever’s willing to run the meetings.

What hasn’t changed is where those meetings take place. Roughly 60 people belong to the club today, with 20 to 30 showing up each month. They still mostly gather in members’ own shops rather than in a rented hall. There’s a break every summer, and then it’s back to the third Thursday of the month at 7 pm.

Ask Zehnle what the club actually builds, and the answer sprawls: cabinetry, furniture, lathe turning, carving, clocks, pens, boat hulls, walking sticks, musical instruments and toys. Some members are the kind of woodworkers whose pieces end up in art galleries. Others, like Zehnle, are happy to call themselves sawdust makers.

“I got a lot of shop experience,” he says, “but I’m not at the top of the list for the quality of work and the knowledge these guys have. I kind of take care of the other half who are just making sawdust like me.”

That range is the point. New members end up standing next to people who’ve spent decades at the lathe, and mentoring happens without anyone calling it mentoring. It’s just what happens when a beginner asks a question at a meeting and six people lean in to offer an answer.

The club has put just as much energy into the community beyond its own shops. For years, members traveled to five school districts to run group builds with local students, mostly birdhouses, with lumber donated by Sierra Pacific, a partnership Zehnle brings up more than once, unprompted, because he wants the company to get its due.

Over the decades, that outreach has amounted to more than 10,000 donated toy cars and roughly 2,000 bluebird house kits distributed to schools, churches, scout troops, and veterans’ groups, along with repair work on Little Free Libraries around town. When the Riverfront Playhouse needed six new makeup tables, the club built them. Several members also help construct sets for Playhouse productions, and the club holds its Christmas party there most years.

The club has appeared in gallery spaces as well, most recently in the North State Woodworkers exhibition at the Shasta County Arts Council, where Zehnle’s contribution was a working reproduction of an 1843 wooden pedal bike, copied from an old photograph with no plans to go by, at the urging of his granddaughter. Rubber lines the steel wheel rims so it won’t throw sparks on pavement. The decorative balls are turned from gray pinecones. It’s the kind of project that only makes sense once you understand this is a club where somebody is always chasing an idea just to see if it can be built.

So, what do you say to someone in the North State who’s curious about woodworking but not adept with tools? Zehnle doesn’t hesitate. “Come to one of our meetings,” he says. “Check out our website. We always meet on the third Thursday of the month.”
There’s no audition, no portfolio, and no application. The club even lets prospective members sit in on three meetings before deciding whether to join.

The next meeting will be on September 17, the third Thursday, as always. If the itch to build something has been in the back of your mind for a while, the Shasta Woodworkers aren’t hard to find. •

www.shastawoodworkers.com

Article Written By:
Al Olson loves culinary arts, adult beverages and hiking in the North State wilderness. You may find him soaking up the scenery at one of our area’s many state or national parks or sitting in a barstool sipping a cold locally brewed craft beer.