DuPage woodworkers carve around gadgets and rules

A few years ago, the DuPage Woodworkers club decided to do something nice by making handcrafted wooden toys for needy children.

“We started out very small,” remembers club member Stan Anderson of Sugar Grove. “The first one or two years, we had 30 or 40 toys.”

Then, cellphones became common childhood accessories. The number of must-have iThings exploded, and the glut of electronic gadgets often overwhelmed the idea of a simple wooden toy. On top of that, stories of unsafe toys from China and elsewhere with lead paint and other toxic and dangerous materials led to a U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission crackdown and new bureaucratic rules and testing mandates that threatened to kill the toy donation effort.

Club members embraced the challenge, and this year expect to donate more than 1,500 well-made wooden toys, says Anderson, 81, the DuPage Woodworkers toy czar.

“All of our toys will have been assembled with bare wood and animal glue,” says club secretary Jerry Johnson, 74, a retired business executive in Naperville who has been working with the CPSC and Congresswoman Judy Biggert's staff to find a way to ensure that toys are safe without making the club fund expensive safety testing. A new rule scheduled to go into effect on Dec. 8 will be too late to affect this year's toy drive but should allow woodworkers next year to use different glues and “jazz up” toys with approved paint, says Johnson, who's making 16 tanker trucks for this year's donation.

The toys, which will be on display Nov. 30 at the club's regular monthly meeting spot at St. James the Apostle Parish, 480 Park Blvd. in Glen Ellyn, will be donated to the church, the Humanitarian Services Project in Carol Stream and to local schools for children with mental and physical disabilities.

“We've got a lot of members, and a lot of activities going on,” says Whit Anderson, 59, of West Chicago, one of the club's 178 members. “It's a good club.”

And a diverse one.

“We build birdhouses to period furniture and everything in between,” says club president Bill Hochmuth, 69, of Glen Ellyn. He started building things as a hobby when he was a kid in Brooklyn who inherited his grandfather's woodworking tools. His first project was making a cross for a local church.

“I went back to that church many years later and the dang thing was still there,” says Hochmuth, who, even as he whips out his modern phone to show photos of the beautiful cabinet he made, talks about how wooden toys still will have value long after electronic gadgets are clogging landfills.

The club, which features some highly accomplished professionals who have had work displayed in Fine Woodworking magazine, brings in experts from all over to host seminars and answer questions, and has a mentoring program.

“When I get stuck on something, I call other members of the club,” Whit Anderson says. Many of the club members are retired, says Hochmuth, who has more time for his woodworking since he retired from the software company he founded. The club struggles to attract younger members, and Hochmuth says he worries that todays kids are “so electronically entrenched that they can't open their minds to something else.”

But member Will Richards, an 11-year-old fifth-grader at Longfellow Elementary School in Wheaton, has been a woodworker since his grandfather, Harry Fischer, showed him how to operate a scroll saw two years ago.

“He's amazing,” Hochmuth says of the club's youngest member.

“I made a chess set, puzzles, a book shelf and stuff like that,” says Will, who is making little rocking horses for the toy drive. “It's fun to be able to say you made it.”

Club members “are so good to him; they've really embraced him,” says Eleanore Richards, Will's mom. “And the stuff he's making now is incredible.”

The club, with the motto of Learning By Sharing, meets the fourth Wednesday of every month (except July, when they host an auction) at St. James. The church donates the space and the club repays the favor by making signs, music stands and other wooden objects for the church. Information is available at www.dupagewoodworkers.org.