Woodworker crafts own casket
FINDLAY, Ill. — It’s pretty much a dead cert you won’t find too many guys who are building their own coffin.
Ed Ikemire is not like many guys. The Findlay hunter and supreme outdoorsman now busy crafting his own final resting place has always dug an individual path through life.
His girlfriend, Mary Satterfield, a Lake Shelbyville fishing guide and a previous national and world champion bass angler herself, says one state park superintendent calls her boyfriend simply “the legend.”
In his 69 years Ikemire has cooked food for Alaskan survey crews working miles from remote settlements where kids shoulder a rifle on the way to school in case of bears. He spent 25 years guiding elk, deer and bear hunters into vast wildernesses in the Yukon, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. And since he was first shown how in high school shop, he’s always had a knack for woodworking.
The apartment Ikemire built next door to his workshop is filled with tables, gun cases, cupboards, dressers and even a folding stepstool he made himself. And then there’s that captivating casket, all laid down in red oak with walnut trim and inlays, a wooden symphony of precisely mitered corners and sweeping curves that attests to a solemn sense of beautiful precision.
Ikemire is about six months into the coffin creation, and if he really puts the hammer to the nails, reckons he could be done in four months. Not that he’s in any rush to go gentle into that good night, especially now the weather is warm and the call of the wild has still got the retired guide on speed dial.
“I’ve already been turkey hunting, mushroom hunting and fishing,” says Ikemire. “I love being outside.”
He looks it, too. Standing 6-foot-1, slim as a whip in a camouflage shirt and with a shaggy white beard, ruddy complexion and a shock of silver hair that hangs to his shoulders, he looks like the Marlboro Man’s granddad. So why does a guy so full of life want to build himself a casket, albeit a very nice one that is destined to feature a padded lining in camouflage?
“I’m always looking for something to do, I love woodworking, and I thought, `Why not? It’ll be a good winter project,”’ Ikemire explained. “Yes, it’ll save money, at least for my family, but that is not why I’m doing it. It’s just that this way I get to decide the color of the wood, I get to choose the interior, I get exactly what I want.”
Of course, building a casket you are not planning on hopping into anytime soon — except for test-fittings, and all trial runs have shown it encases him like a glove — does pose certain grave storage considerations. Issue one is blending your box tastefully into the home’s interior décor while awaiting a house call from the Grim Reaper.
Ikemire has joked about turning it upside down and converting the base into a shuffleboard table in the meantime, but all aboveground coffins, no matter how nice, are destined at best to make for uncertain conversation pieces. Satterfield says visitor reactions so far have ranged from deep admiration for the workmanship to a mortal fear of even looking at it.
“Nobody wants to talk about death,” added Satterfield, 59.
Her alive-and-kicking boyfriend has no such qualms and, showing off the features of his custom casket like a car salesman, displays a neat pullout drawer built into the lid interior. “I kind of like Bacardi rum, so I might stick a bottle of that in there,” says Ikemire, blue eyes twinkling. “Maybe a deck of cards, too, so I’ll have something to do,” and then he glances toward his dearly beloved. “And maybe she might want to leave me a love letter.”
Who says you can’t take it with you when you go?