Retired engineering spends spare time on wood-working
projects
Vernon Litzelman picked up some tricks of the trade for working
with wood when he was a boy.
”
My father was a carpenter and I always had an interest,
”
he said.
He spent time working with his father on houses, but put the
interest aside for most of his adult life.
”
I didn’t really get serious until I retired,
”
he said.
”
Woodworking takes tons of time.
”
Retired engineering spends spare time on wood-working projects
Vernon Litzelman picked up some tricks of the trade for working with wood when he was a boy.
“My father was a carpenter and I always had an interest,” he said.
He spent time working with his father on houses, but put the interest aside for most of his adult life.
“I didn’t really get serious until I retired,” he said. “Woodworking takes tons of time.”
Litzelman retired from a 35-year career as an engineer at Lockheed Martin in 1995. He moved to Hollister in 1996 and that’s when he started to spend more time on a hobby that has become more like a part-time job.
“I wanted to get away from all the traffic in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara,” he said. “I wanted to get out in the country. I searched all over and ended up in Hollister.”
One of the benefits of Litzelman’s spacious Ridgemark home is that the three-car garage has plenty of room for the tools he has acquired through the years. Another is that he has space to keep many of his creations in his house.
After he retired, Litzelman said he needed something to take the place of working full time.
“You can play golf but it gets boring after a while,” he said. “You can travel, but it takes a lot of money. Woodworking is the perfect activity.”
Litzelman’s pieces fill every room of his home, from the kitchen to his office, to his living room and even the master bathroom. The pieces range from functional to whimsical. He has a wooden rack near the sliding glass door to the patios that he fashioned after the rotating postcard racks that can be found in gas stations or in tourist towns. His rack is full of CDs. In the same room is a large wooden structure that resembles a nuclear cooling tank. Litzelman said he saw a photograph of one once and came up with the idea for a large floor lamp.
“A piece that big has to be functional,” he said.
Thin wooden slats, with about a half-inch gap between each slat, form the base and sides of the tower, curving up to the top.
To make the project more challenging, Litzelman didn’t want to put a pole down the center of the lamp to hold the wiring. Instead it is embedded in a slat of wood, connecting the round, white bulbs that Litzelman describes as smoke clouds.
His inspirations for the pieces come from many sources. He has a miniature model of Immaculate Conception Church in his front entry way. The small building swings around and opens up to reveal a gold chalice in the center. On a pool table, he has a piece inspired by a long ago childhood memory.
“When I was a boy of 5 or 6, my older sister took me to a movie,” he said. “We saw a brand-new color cartoon by Disney. It was a delightful movie with lots of characters and soaring music.”
At the end of the movie, “Fantasia,” the main character danced up a spiral of piano keys that went up into the sky, seemingly to infinity.
“I never forgot that and last Christmas I though it is something I could make,” he said. “I couldn’t make the keyboard spiraling to infinity” but the idea of keys coming up from a piano.
The miniature piano sits on his table, with a wave of white and black keys coming up from it.
Each project starts with a rough sketch, and he said he tries to have paper and a pen with him wherever he goes in case inspiration strikes. From there, he might turn the piece into a more detailed two-dimensional or three-dimensional sketch. He thinks about the type of wood he wants to use, what the function might be for the piece and then gets started in his workshop. For furniture pieces he said he likes oak, walnut or cocobolo, a hardwood from Central America. He uses other woods sparingly, such as ebony, because it is expensive.
He said once he gets started on a project, he never gives up on it.
“Eventually all questions get answered and all projects get done,” he said. “Nothing is abandoned.”
Litzelman spends four hours a day, six days a week, working on his pieces.
“I usually work until I’m tired,” he said. “It’s the big activity of my life and I’m glad it is.”
The length of time it takes to complete a piece depends on the project.
“Some take two days,” he said. “Some take three months.”
Recently, Litzelman has been trying to slow down on his creations because he is running out of room for them. He estimated he has 75 objects in his house and he has given some pieces to his son and his son’s family, who live in Fremont. He’s found an alternative one day a week when he volunteers at the Hazel Hawkin’s Thrift Store, Hazel’s.
Litzelman said he doesn’t want to sell his items and he doesn’t want to give them away.
“People say I should sell them, but I don’t want to sell things because then I would lose my freedom,” he said, of designing items for others. “I don’t want to build things and then give them away and I don’t want to sell them.”
While he tries to slow down on his hobby, Litzelman has already started on his next piece. Filed away in a cabinet he built years ago when he was first married, he found a drawing a coworker at Lockheed Martin had given him nearly 30 years ago. The drawing is of a Spanish conquistador with a horse, drawn in a cartoonish fashion and reminiscent of Don Quixote. Litzelman has cut the wood for the piece and has the outline of the drawing on it to paint. The piece will be placed in a custom frame.
“I always have my eye out for a new idea,” he said. “I can see something anywhere.”
