Douglas Van Dyck Brown taught Woodworking at a Massachusetts boarding school for 50 years. He retired in 2021 at the age of 82.
The following excerpts are taken from his biography “The Man in the Blue-Striped Shirt” by Una Suseli O’Connell, published, November 2024.
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“Mr. Brown is clear about who he is. He was a stabilizing figure on campus, an
anchor, and I think that’s something teenagers really need. Mr. Brown was
always calm and trustworthy.” (Julia)
The grandfather and grandmother clocks, the secretaries and sea chests, the piecrust, Shaker and tuck-away tables, the corner, roundabout and thumb back chairs, all built in Mr. Brown’s Woodshop between 1970 and 2020 were, for the most part, made by students who had never before held a chisel or planed a piece of wood.
In an English class, you arrive with pre-existing knowledge and learn how to assemble your words and ideas into a well-composed piece of creative or factual writing. In woodworking, you start with a photograph or an idea of something that already exists. Nobody came to Mr. Brown’s Shop knowing how to make a tambour desk or an inlaid card table.
“Shop is not like Crew or writing and yet, here we were, 10th graders making furniture that looked like it came out of a museum or a fancy store.” (Kara)
In 1973, his Fifth form year, Curtis asked Mr. Brown if he could make a bombe serpentine desk.
“I feared he was going to tell me that, as a seventeen year-old with little woodworking experience, I couldn’t possibly attempt such a complex project. Instead, he was very encouraging. He was good at explaining things. Of all the Shop teachers in the world, Mr. Brown may be the only one with an English degree from Harvard.
“Mr. Brown gave me confidence. As a landlord in California, especially in the early years, I didn’t automatically hire tradesmen. Instead, I took the time to figure things out for myself. I recall having some difficulty building an octagonal flower box around a mature oak tree – as much a test of my geometry as my cabinet-making skills. I said to myself: ‘Curt, you made a bombe serpentine desk with claw and ball feet, so you can certainly build this flower box.’”
Doug’s teaching style was unusual.
“There was no group learning,” explained David, who graduated in 1979, “no class demonstration on how to make table legs. He would give you whatever you needed to move forward with your project, but students had to take the initiative and ask for help if they needed it. If you were going down a wrong path, then Mr. Brown would guide you but essentially we all worked at our own pace. Either you loved that or you hated it.”
“We learned basic skills – how to use a chisel and a drill – but Doug also taught us how to use architect paper to draft out dimensions and scales. It was a practical Math project. We had to figure out how things came together.” (Ben)
“Mr. Brown’s teaching made Math – geometry, fractions, ratios – understandable for the first time in my academic career. Having a tangible way to translate concepts into something you worked with your hands was invaluable.” (Trux)
Mr. Brown had few rules in his Shop: no food, no gum and no popular music. The radio was always set to the classical station, which he alternated between Mozart and Haydn symphonies played on his record player.
“Carpenters, in my experience, generally prefer music with a steady beat, like Country and Western. In the Shop at school, there were noisy machines running at full tilt but, in the background, there was always this wonderfully soothing classical music.” (Amy)
Byron, who graduated in 1998, says he learned as much about proportion and beauty from the classical music in Mr. Brown’s Shop as he did from the woodcarving.
Bill described the Shop as a sanctuary and spent much of his free time there.
“In the 1970s, they weren’t as quick at figuring out a student’s learning differences. I wasn’t academic. I wasn’t on the debating team. The Woodshop was my superpower and the furniture making gave me confidence and recognition. I would have had a pretty miserable time at school without the Shop.
“Sometimes, I was the only kid there, but Mr. Brown was always there. He would be twenty feet away, seemingly working on something else, but also paying attention to me. Occasionally, we went to look at furniture together. My aunt had a grandmother clock at her home in Boston and Doug thought it would be a good piece for students to replicate. We drove down to Beacon Street and he took measurements and pictures.
“Every discovery I made, I felt as though he was making it with me. If I made a mistake, I would try to cover it up because I was embarrassed, but Doug would just say ‘Let’s start over.’ It was about perspective rather than discipline; discovery rather than obligation. It was quiet in the Shop and there was no requirement to contribute. It was empowering and I didn’t have that feeling in any of my other classes.”
Bill went to Brown University and received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a professional furniture designer and maker, often referred to as ‘The Chef of Wood’. When asked about his early influences, he never fails to mention Doug Brown.
Chloe, who graduated in 2012, learned a new skill in every class.
“It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I wish I could have had this in my other educational journeys. Mr. Brown’s feedback was always very specific. I would show him my work and he would take a pencil from his breast pocket and shade the areas that needed to be redone. I would keep going back to him until no more shading was required. During our exchanges, he never said a word.”
Chloe appreciated Mr. Brown’s quiet instruction. “When he is satisfied, he does not say much, but his silence speaks. I worked hard because I didn’t want to disappoint him.”
Doug had high expectations for his students. He made them take apart and redo any sloppy work, which was a valuable lesson for those who were used to succeeding in other subjects with minimal care and attention to detail.
Court, who graduated in 1986, built the first replica Townsend Goddard block front secretary, a 9’4” tall immensely intricate piece of furniture.
“I saw a picture in a magazine and took it to Mr. Brown”, explained Court. “His response was, ‘You can’t build that, it’s much too complicated.’ “But when he saw that I was serious, he agreed to support me on condition that I committed myself to finishing the piece once I’d started it.
“We spent a lot of time drawing it, using callipers and an architect’s ruler. We went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and to Yale, both of which have original pieces. They let us take pictures but we couldn’t touch the antiques.
“It was hard work,” Court told me. “Mr. Brown had very high standards and a salty no-nonsense attitude. The sides of the secretary were twenty-four inches wide, too big to fit through the eighteen-inch planer, so I had to hand plane them. It was exhausting and my hand was blistered and blue from the steel. Doug didn’t appreciate grumbling and quietly said to me, ‘Court, this is going to be a long journey. Grumbling isn’t going to help you. You have to be more positive.’
“When I was making the interior lattice work for the drawers and pigeon holes, I milled the wood stock 1/16th of an inch too thin for the prepared grooves. Doug watched me but let me proceed to see if I would self-correct. When I was nearly done, he walked by and casually shook the lattice work and of course the pieces wobbled. ‘This wood has been milled out too thin, Court,’ he said. I responded that it was ‘good enough’ and that I could use glue to hold them in place.
“Doug’s response was, ‘No, that’s sloppy work.’ He pulled out every piece of wood, stacked them up, took them to the giant band saw, sawed them all in half and threw them in the scrap box. ‘You’re better than good enough, Court. Start over,’ he said and walked away.”
It took Court another month of scraping and sanding to mill the wood to the correct thickness, but it taught him an important lesson.
“Mr. Brown was simply saying: ‘I have respect for you and I want you to respect yourself.’ He taught me to always demand the best of myself.”
“Reproducing a piece of furniture from scratch requires an intimate knowledge of each step of the process. A failure to anticipate a crucial step could prove irreconcilable. Of all my course work at school, Doug’s curriculum was most like the work I have encountered in the real world. It forces you to manage complex scenarios where decisions made today will have significant influence on the choices available to you in the distant future.” (David)
Doug Brown was an early champion of girls in the Shop.
“Girls in the 1970s didn’t get a lot of recognition and in Mr. Brown’s Shop everyone was equally taught.” (Amy)
Kara shared this opinion. “I had never done any woodworking before and I wasn’t very good at it, but I learned that if I worked hard, listened to Mr. Brown and was dedicated, I could make progress. Historically, in many schools, there has been this idea that Shop is mostly for boys. Mr. Brown’s class demonstrated that girls, too, could make amazing objects and feel confident working with their hands. Mr. Brown always encouraged boys and girls equally. The class made me think differently about what I was capable of.”
Doug was “a stickler for adhering to originality.” He was insistent that students do as many operations as possible by hand. Julia recalls spending a great deal of time scraping and sanding a small, long, connecting piece for a side table.
“I kept catching the grain on the wood and I began to worry that the width might be compromised. Eventually, Mr. Brown opened a drawer and whipped out a sander. I was shocked, flummoxed and a bit irritated. I could have saved myself hours of work! Then, I realised that it was more meaningful to have sanded the piece by hand. Hands aren’t perfect but they are part of the art of handmade objects.”
When I reminded Doug of this story, he said:
“Hand-sanding and hand-scraping were part of the Shop experience. I wasn’t there to teach kids how to operate machinery. The unspoken philosophy at the heart of what we were doing was perfection. Of course, we never achieved it, but it was in the trying. The medium I worked in was very physical. You can see the errors but you can’t fuss over four cabriole legs forever. You have to let it go and move on to making the table top.”
At weekends, Doug enjoyed visiting antique tool markets.
“The steel in the old chisels is a better quality,” he explained, “and the shape of the handle lies more comfortably in your hand than chisels cranked out by a machine in China. It’s like a favourite pen, it feels just right.”
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“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
Henry Brooks Adams 1838–1918
David has known his former teacher for forty-seven years. “Doug is at first a man of very few words. He has no ego. He is not interested in taking your time and showing you what he knows. And yet, ask him a question and he is extremely generous with his knowledge.”
Trux, who graduated in 1986, describes Doug Brown as “a master craftsman, a teacher, an advisor, a confidant, a therapist and a friend.”
“The Shop and Mr. Brown enabled me to develop a sense of self-worth that buffered me from the social challenges at school. Indeed, even today, when I have had a bad day at work, I will sit in the living room and look at my oxbow, claw and ball footed desk and use the knowledge that I created and built that desk as a touchstone.”