Enjoy this conversation with George Wurtzel, a master craftsman, exemplary teacher, competitive skier, and true visionary. George shares his insights about teaching and learning, adapting to change, rebuilding confidence, and the value of sharing one’s knowledge with others. Whether envisioning possibilities in his mind’s eye, noticing the potential in a piece of wood, an open space, or in the skills and talents of others, George is always ready to learn and to connect with those who want to take the next step in whatever venture they are pursuing. George Wurtzel is a remarkable man who has made a huge difference in the lives of many people, blind and sighted, and he continues to look for ways to make an impact for good with the work that he does. You will be telling others about this episode. Don’t forget to look at the show notes for some great resources and information.
SHOW NOTES
(2:30) Biscuits vs. bread pudding
(3:00) Bio
(4:25) George reminds the audience that he is blind
(5:10) Writing desk project
(5:30) Ten years and now ready to bring the idea to fruition
(7:30) Finding the right desk for the project
(9:30) The dream – collaborating with 100+ blind and deaf-blind craftsmen
(10:00) Donation to a fund established by Helen Keller
(11:25) Residential school for the blind – 200 miles from home
(12:00) Skills, talents and abilities are based on who you are, not on your blindness
(14:00) Being asked to never tune a piano again
(16:00) Losing your vision doesn’t’ mean you’ve lost your knowledge, expertise, and wisdom
(16:40) Teaching artisanship vs. teaching “how to be blind”
(17:15) Using industrial arts as a tool to teach confidence
(18:30) Rebuilding confidence
(19:00) Only accept advice from people who are invested in the advice they are giving
(19:45) Courteous audience members trying to get George’s attention
(20:20) Highland Hardware, a scorp, a recommendation, and an unexpected encounter
(22:15) “Meet the Masters” video series – honored to be a featured guest
(22:45) Prediction from the 1970’s comes true – featured in Fine Woodworking magazine
(23:30) The resilience of young people
(23:55) Blind students and experiments on the school ship – totally capable
(25:00) Fish species identification
(26:45) Plankton identification, shell identification and a blind experts on shells
(27:30) Sometimes we think something is difficult and that turns out not to be true
(28:30) Using one’s senses to identify wood, including a lesser known method or two
(31:20) Maple vs. birch, with a nod to black walnut
(33:30) Safety issues when operating machinery – learning is the key
(35:00) The table saw blade is not the issue, it’s your hand movements
(36:30) How to avoid a sudden reaction to “wood failure” – again, learning and experience are key
(39:30) Moms have great “blindness skills” – being aware of your environment
(40:45) Great teachers assess learner skills and talents and adjust teaching methods to match student learning
(43:35) Musicians’ talents translating to woodworking skills
(45:15) Building Stevie Wonder’s coffee table
(46:15) Cabinet building school wouldn’t let blind students enroll
(46:30) Never said “I don’t know how.” Instead, “I can do that.” And then go learn.
(47:30) Former students - Emilie Gossiaux – a serious artist who stretched George’s teaching skills.
(49:15) Making the shift from drawing to sculpture (to express ideas)
(51:10) If you are active in the world, you learn every day
(51:30) If I know how to do something and you want to learn how, I will teach you
(51:45) Every person I’ve ever taught to carve wood has ended up a better carver than I am
(52:25) Two ways of looking at how things are put together in the world – reductive vs. cumulative
(54:00) From skiing for fun to the Paralympic Games to world travel
(55:30) Sticking with it – finishing in the last spots in a race, but many others dropped out
(58:30) Persistence, longevity, effort, and adapting to change.
(59:15) If you are static in your thought processes you will not go very far
(1:01:00) Cutting a pencil line in half on a bandsaw
(1:02:00) Mr. Rosnowski – Georges’ idol and role model – a great teacher
(1:03:00) Find a mentor and spend time with them
(1:03:30) One thousand and one hundred attempts at composite skis that outperform wooden skis
(1:04:30) Final thoughts: write a book? I’ve done a lot of cool things in my life
(1:05:00) My picture of success
(1:05:45) If you want help with woodworking, let me know and I will help you
EPISODE-SPECIFIC LINKS
George Wurtzels’ website - www.gmwurtzel.com
Helen Keller Foundation - https://helenkellerfoundation.org
Subaru TV ad (30 second version) - https://www.ispot.tv/ad/dwTL/subaru-outback-see-the-world
Highland Woodworking, episode #44, “Meet the Masters series”- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTZdzPqjHUM
Former student – blind entrepreneur Jason "JJ" Meddaugh - runs a technology access company (for the blind) atguys.com
Former student - artist Emilie Gossiaux <http://www.emiliegossiaux.com/> - struck by a truck while cycling and lost her vision as a result of that collision
Former student - Dr. Josh Miele – read his story here - https://www.rd.com/article/joshua-miele-inspiration-from-an-unthinkable-crime/, and here https://forward.com/news/476159/joshua-miele-went-blind-at-4-now-hes-a-macarthur-genius/
Can You See How I See? Documentary PREVIEW - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeqgeRJnOO8
George’s friend Jeff Thompson – blind podcaster – www.blindabilities.com
Woodworking for the blind – www.ww4b.org and https://www.facebook.com/ww4b.org
Be My Eyes - https://www.bemyeyes.com
Greenville Woodworkers Guild - https://www.greenvillewoodworkers.com
Recurring Links
Instagram - lead.learn.change
David Reynolds (00:00:11):
What matters most in learning the challenge, the thrill, the benefits, interacting with other people or something else, entirely. What is the connection between leading and learning? Does change drive learning or does learning drive change? What's more important teaching or learning? Is everyone a leader, a learner, a teacher want answers, listen in, as we address these intriguing issues through common and with guests who share their thinking and tell us their stories. Lead, learn, change.
George Wurtzel (00:00:56)
You would be sent off to a residential school. That could be in the, in my case, you know, 200 miles away from where my parents lived. It is their hands, my knowledge, and, and they produce an excellent piece of furniture. Giving young people opportunity to do things that they, uh, didn't think they would ever be able to do. Taking young, blind kids out and taking a 70 foot double masted schooner out on the great lakes and sailing it around for a couple days, doing scientific experiments on a school ship. It taught the people who ran the school ship an unexpected lesson. One of the things that makes me happy is the, the people who come and learn from me. They all claim that I'm a good teacher, Just because you lost your vision. You did not lose your vision. You know, what you, what you see is in your head. I've always thought that if I know how to do something and you wanna learn how to do it, uh, I'm gonna teach you how.
David Reynolds (00:02:09):
Today's guest on Lead, Learn, Change is George Wurtzel. George, thanks for taking time to speak with me today.
George Wurtzel (00:02:16):
Not a problem.
David Reynolds (00:02:18):
Let me guess, George. Uh, overall's flannel shirt. Second cup of coffee. Is that about right?
George Wurtzel (00:02:23):
Yes, sir.
David Reynolds (00:02:25):
Okay. What about biscuits this morning? Have you had any, uh, delicious biscuits made with one of those biscuit turners that biscuit cutters that you make?
George Wurtzel (00:02:32):
No. Sharon Sharon was Sharon was a slacker this morning and we had to suffer through some incredible bread pudding that she put together.
David Reynolds (00:02:42):
Okay. And what about the weather there in Greenville, Tennessee today? What's that like?
George Wurtzel (00:02:47):
Ah, it's trying to be sprinkly, but it's gonna be, you know, 65. So who can complain about that?
David Reynolds (00:02:52):
Yeah, exactly. Same nice day here. And as we discussed before in the middle of a construction zone in the adjacent properties, so we're just gonna have to roll right through the heavy equipment sounds if they come through. Let me share an introduction with the listeners and then we'll get into our conversation. When I first read about George, I knew I wanted to talk with him because not only is he a woodworker, which I dabble in, but he's industrial arts teacher, which where I started my teaching career. George teaches people about wood selection, design, hand and power tools, safety assembly, and finishing among other things. He has taught blind students to create amazing works of art. He can check out the show notes for links to see some of his students projects and is getting ready to undertake a very cool combination, philanthropic and teaching endeavor, which George will tell us about in just a minute.
David Reynolds (00:03:42):
George is also a skier and represented the United States in winter games competition in Norway in 1980, he's a long distance horse racer. He sails, he's a Volkswagen mechanic. He's been in a Subaru commercial. And he once met Jimmy Carter. George has been featured in many websites and magazines, including fine woodworking, which is widely acclaimed as the premier woodworking publication. And he has more accomplishments under his belt than we can mention today. I met George at a woodworking demonstration where I had the privilege of watching him turn a piece on the lathe. And I heard him share stories about his entrepreneurial adventures and offer advice and tips to anyone wanting to do something new, whether that's woodworking or something else. George, did I leave anything out of that introduction that you think people should know?
George Wurtzel (00:04:29):
Uh, the only small detail that you might have left out is the fact that I am a blind person as well.
David Reynolds (00:04:36):
Oh yeah. Right. Sorry about that. It's, it's actually easy to miss or just not believe it, uh, when there’s so much more to, to talk about, uh, your, your approach is I'm not a blind woodworker or a blind skier. I'm a woodworker who happens to be blind. So we're definitely gonna touch on some of that today during our conversation, but we're really gonna address so many other issues, especially teaching and learning since that’s really what you do more than anything else, let's start with something that often comes at the end of a conversation. I usually ask, you know, what's next for you. So tell us about this next project that you're working on, the one that with the writing desks and tell us what your hopes and dreams are for the participants who will be helping you out.
George Wurtzel (00:05:20):
Now, this is kind of a, a guess, no, no better description than a grandiose project. It's my dream. It's something I wanted to do. It's something I've been working on for probably almost 10 years to make it, you know, come to fruition. And, uh, it's one of those things that you, you want to make happen, but things just keep, um, pushing back or stopping it, you know, and I just keep kicking it down the road a little further and, and revisiting it. And, and now I think I finally have it to the spot where it truly will happen. And what I wanted to do is build a tribute to Helen Keller and I thought no better way than to do something, uh, than reproduce, you know, her desk that she used to sit at to do her writings and her contemplations and her learning. And we went through the Helen Keller archives and were fortunate enough to find a picture of Helen sitting at a library table/ desk in her house.
George Wurtzel (00:06:29):
Uh, and the photo is from 1936 or 37 somewhere in there. Sadly her house burned down in 1947. So the original desk that exists, you know, burned up in the fire. So we took the pictures of the, of Helen at the desk, and we went down to the Grove Park Inn. As a matter of fact, that event is happening this very week. I think every year they have the arts and crafts show at the Grove Park Inn, and all of the arts and crafts people from all over the country come there and they have a conference. Then they have seminars and they have an antique show selling arts and crafts things. They have people there selling brand new reproduction arts and craft stuff. So we took our photo and we went down to the show been three year, years ago now, I guess, and started showing our photo around. Everybody would take 30 seconds out of their, out of their time and, and look at it.
George Wurtzel 2 (00:07:26):
And we found a couple gentlemen who were very, very willing to help us with, with our quest, which was to figure out who made the desk that Helen was sitting at with the help of some people. We knew it was an arts and piece, but we nailed it down to an L and JG Stickley piece. We found catalog and gentleman found a catalog picture for us that, you know, showed us what it was. And we went downstairs to the antique show part of the, of the event. And we were wandering around and we walk around a corner and Sharon goes, there's the desk right there. And so we go over and we start checking out this library table this gentleman had for sale at his booth. And we go find our, our friends that we had been talking to about the Helen Keller desk. And they come down with tape measures and catalogs and sit down on the floor with us, with the tape measures and the catalogs start pulling ours out and to the best of their guests from the photo that we have, which is not a super high quality photo.
George Wurtzel (00:08:28):
It has some strange reflections, you know, and it, it has a, a radiator showing underneath the table that kind of distorts what the view is and everything. They are pretty sure that the desk we are looking at is the exact style brand that Helen is sitting at. So we, um, bought it and brought it back to my place here in, in Greenville. And then COVID came along and the whole thing came to a grinding stop. So I've, um, moved forward with not being, um, I guess encumbered by the COVID thing. And I've started building the desk. I have all the leg made, all the aprons made. I have the material ready to tape together, tape together, glue together for the top. And so hopefully within the next two weeks, I will have a working model of the desk. I'll build two of them in the process when I'm building it, I'll build one that, uh, I'll totally finish and use for doing photography and, and everything.
George Wurtzel (00:09:25):
And then I'll have one set of dry parts that we'll use to work off of. The dream for this is that over the course of a year, I will bring somewhere around a hundred blind and deaf blind people to my place here in Greenville, Tennessee, to my shop. And they'll spend, you know, four to five days working in my shop with me. And, uh, we will work on producing the desks. Everybody who comes and participates in it will sign the desk as a coil with me on the a desk. Then we'll sell our hundred desks and we'll take the proceeds from the desks and put back into a fund that Helen Keller started a long time ago for blind and deaf blind people who wanted to do nontraditional educational things. People who wanted to become potters and weavers and woodworkers and singers and songwriters, and those kinds of things, things that colleges and rehabilitation services for the blind were unwilling to fund. So that's our goal is to get some money back into that so we can help people who wanna do those kinds of things.
David Reynolds (00:10:32):
This does feed into your hope and dream, or your wish that for participants and others realized that the, the arts or other nontraditional outlets for creativity that blind people might have are, are absolutely in reach for a blind person. This feeds into what I heard you say once where you said, don't say, oh, you're blind. It's so amazing or inspirational. I think those, the two words you said that sometimes it's a little, little tiring. You want other people's encounters with blind people to be as normal as everyday normal Joe, I think is what you use with your friend, Jeff. And so it seems like you want the amazing comments to be based on the actual work that's created. Not because the people that created it were blind. Can you talk about that a little bit more?
George Wurtzel (00:11:19):
Yeah. I grew up in the, in the age when there was what they called residential schools with blind, and you would leave your, your cozy little home with your brothers and sisters, and you would be sent off to a residential school. That could be in the, in my case, you know, 200 miles away from where my parents lived. And so you would go to a place and you would go to a school that their method of teaching was all set up to teach blind people. And that's an incredibly great way to teach blind people's skills of blindness. The one thing that it is spectacularly good at doing that is missing today in our mainstream style education is the fact that if you went to a school for the blind, and then you had 300 or 400 other blind kids there at the school going to the school with you, you, you got to see that your skills, talents, and abilities were based on who you were and, and not your blindness.
George Wurtzel (00:12:18):
Uh, sadly when you go to the school, just across the street, from where you live, you may be the only blind person in that school whatsoever. So when people tell you that you are an amazing person, because you can get up from your desk in, in the school and, and walk out the door and go to the bathroom and come back to the desk all by yourself without any help that somehow that makes you amazing. No, it makes you a person who has, you know, learned some basic mobility skills and can get around the same as all the rest of the people in the classroom. And if that happens enough times, what happens with, you know, young, blind people, I've seen it time and time again, they begin to think because everybody says that they're amazing that that they are. And then when they graduate from high school and go on to do whatever they wanna do academically, or non-academically whatsoever, oftentimes they really, really fall on their face, really, really hard.
George Wurtzel (00:13:14):
And it, and because, um, they have this false sense of their skills, talents, and abilities based on what their peers and, and their teachers told them. I have run multiple programs and involved in a lot of programs, summer programs for, for blind kids and the growth that you see in blind kids, when you get a whole bunch of 'em together and they get to figure that out from the, from themselves, that, you know, it isn't being blind that makes me who I am. It's what my personal skills, talents and abilities are. That makes me who I am. People somehow have this preconceived notion that, uh, blind people have really, really good music skills. Cause they look at people like Stevie Wonder and say, my gosh, you know, blind guy, look at how, what a great musician he is. You know people would pay me not to sing. I mean, I, I don't, I don't possess that talent. You know, I, I took a piano technology class where he learned how to tune and repair pianos and everything. And the, the gentleman who taught the class, Jesse Manley, he was from, he was from Georgia and he had a really thick Southern accent. And I came into his class one morning and, and he came over to me. He says, he says, young man. He says, y'all promised me one thing. You will never, ever, ever tune another piano.
George Wurtzel (00:14:37):
But the very next day he came and found me and he says, we're going out to Michigan state university. We have to restring three of their grand pianos. So he took me out. I was an incredible mechanic. You know, I understood the mechanics of the workings of the piano incredibly well. I could, restring a piano. I knew how to work on the, on the action. I knew how to set up the, you know, the wits and the spoons and the, and the pads and all that kinda stuff. I learned all that stuff really, really easy, but I couldn't, I couldn't make it sound pretty. I could only make it work good.
David Reynolds (00:15:15):
I know you do engage with young people. You mentioned some camps and things like that, but they're not the only people that you teach. So tell us a little bit about the work that you do with adults who have recently become blind as a segue, into your thoughts. I'd like to read a statement of yours that I came across. You said these newly blind people who think their life will not be as good now as it used to be because they've become blind. I don't believe that to be true because I believe your life is what you decide. You want to make it to be not what other people decide. It should be added to that a little bit.
George Wurtzel (00:15:49):
Well, it's hard to improve on that statement and because that's truly how I look at it, you know, and I, I tell people who, especially people who become newly blind and everything I says, just because you've lost your vision, doesn't mean all the knowledge that was in your head just fell out the bottom of your right leg and is now laying on the floor and you don't have it anymore. The 40 years that you spent learning or being an architect or learning, or being a, uh, financial planner learning or being an auto mechanic, you know, a woodworker, whatever it is that knowledge didn't go away. I've always said that you give me a person who has had a trade for, you know, their whole lives and has now become blind. I can teach you to be a blind person. And in, in a relatively short period of time, I can't teach you to be a fantastic artisan that you spent 40 years of your life learning to be that I can't do.
George Wurtzel (00:16:51):
You've already done that process that know just still in there. I just have to show you a way to get it out through the ends of your fingers, you know, into whatever you want it to be. I sent you some pictures and some in some statements from some of my past students. And I've never, when I take one of the people who I'm teaching, you know, and using industrial arts as a tool to teach confidence, it is never my thought when I teach probably 90% or 99% of those people, that they will ever become a woodworker. But what I can do is show them that with a little bit of guidance and a little bit of knowledge from somebody, I can walk you through the processes to produce a beautiful piece of furniture, rather, uh, you could ever go back and reproduce that totally on your own. In most cases, the answer is absolutely no, they couldn't do that, but I've walked them through the process. I didn't do the work for them. I showed them where to put their hands. I showed 'em how to turn the saw on and off. I showed 'em how to push a piece of wood and it is their hands, my knowledge, and, and they produce an excellent piece of furniture.
David Reynolds (00:18:00):
You've you've mentioned architecture, and I know you have a friend, Chris in California, if I’m not mistaken, who is an architect. Oh yeah. And you've got Jeff. Yep. Your podcaster friend in Michigan, and both of these guys are blind. And you've also mentioned the notion of confidence. So I'm wondering if there's things you'd like to share about their stories and how important confidence is when working with learners, regardless of their, who might not really realize their, their full potential and capabilities.
George Wurtzel (00:18:34):
Yeah. I'm not so naive to, to think that everybody who comes across me and wants to learn from me, that I can rebuild that confidence. Totally. But what I can say about the process is that I certainly can show you the tools that it takes to regain that confidence now who are getting started, trying to figure out what they wanna do in life or everything. I says, you know, never take advice from people who have, um, nothing invested in the outcome of, of the advice that they give you. If they have nothing invested in, in the, the advice they're giving their advice, you probably isn't worth very much. You know, you want, you wanna find people who were willing to invest some of their time and energy into helping you get to where you want to be.
David Reynolds (00:19:25):
I wanna switch gears here. And it was something lighthearted for a moment. I saw something during your presentation at the woodworker's Guild that I think might make you chuckle. Uh, after your demonstration, you opened the floor up to questions and the auditorium was quite full. And I looked around and I noticed that people were raising their hands to be recognized. And I was thinking, Hey, George, can't see you. They were, they were being really polite and respectful, but you weren't gonna say, Hey you in the red shirt and, and point out somebody and call on them. But they were being your polite students, sitting in the audience and holding up their hand until they were called on. So I chuckled a bit and I thought you would find that amusing. And then I thought that you might want to tell us about the interesting interaction you had at Highland Hardware in Atlanta, because it's, it's got a little bit of a, a humorous twist to it. And it's a great store by the way, for our listeners, if they ever have a chance to go to Highland Hardware in Atlanta, it's a great store. So you were buying a tool called a scorp I believe. That's the story I'm thinking about. Yep.
George Wurtzel (00:20:31):
Back in the eighties, late eighties, maybe even early nineties, I don't know the exact date I was in Highland Hardware. I was working wanted to build some rustic style chairs where you, you scoop out the bottoms to match your butt. And so I was looking for tools called a scorp for doing that. And Highland hardware is renowned for having really, really good hand tools. That's one of their specialties, so have multiples to choose from. So I'm standing there checking these things out, reaching up, looking and, you know, hanging on the board. And, uh, this gentleman says, he, you looking for a scorp. And I said, yeah, I am. And he goes, this is the one that I really like. And he takes it down and hands it to me and I'm checking it all out. And I have big hands and this one happened to have pretty good size handles on it.
George Wurtzel (00:21:21):
So I thought, I thought, well, that one fits my hands. Pretty good. I kind of like that. And so I wandered my way around in the store. I had a friend of mine and I were there and we ended up up at the front counter getting ready to check out. And, and the gentleman who was helping me with the scorp thing, he was standing right next to me. And he says, oh, I see you bought the scorp that, that I like. And I said, yeah, you know, if it's my hands, well, I think it'll do really well, appreciate your input and everything. And I, I was being friendly and Southern and I stick out my hand. I said, I'm George Wurtzel, thank you very much for helping me. And he shakes my hand and he goes, I'm, I'm Jimmy Carter. And I says like, president Jimmy Carter.
George Wurtzel (00:22:01):
And he goes, I used to be, I mean, just as humble as humble could be. I mean, just, I will was just so thrilled, you know, and then Highland Hardware does meet the masters. They have a whole series of, I think they have 50, 50 programs now up on their website. They have one with Jimmy Carter up there where they interview Jimmy Carter. They have one with Roy Underhill. They have just all these greats in the, in the woodworking business. And I, I happen to be privileged enough to be episode number 44. So, uh, I'm really thrilled about that, that, you know, you've come into your own when, you know, you end up in, in those kinds of groups. I just recently had, you mentioned it had an article that was in Fine Woodworking magazine back in the seventies when Fine Woodworking magazine first came out. I was running my architectural millwork firm at the time. And I said to a couple of the guys who worked for me, he says, you know, I'm gonna be in that magazine someday. I was just a young punk kid in my twenties, you know, just being a smart Alec, you know, and you know, 50 years later I made it, you know,
David Reynolds (00:23:09):
I watched the Highland Hardware episode 44, and we'll have a link to that in the show notes, also meeting the president was unexpected. Obviously, what are some unexpected lessons maybe that you've learned, whether that's learned as a blind person or as a woodworker or as, as a teacher, one to three?
George Wurtzel (00:23:32):
Hmm. I don't know how to think about that. One of the things that comes to mind in, in those things is, is working with young people, their resilience, and their willingness to do crazy things and, and giving young people opportunity to do things that they didn't think they would ever be able to do. Taking young blind kids out and taking a 70 foot double mastered scooter out on the great lakes and sailing it around for a couple days, doing scientific experiments on a school ship. It taught the people who ran the school ship an unexpected lesson. When I talked to the people about, about doing the project, they side we just don't know how we could do things like that. You know, we run all these experiments on the ship. We do soil samples, we bring fish up and do fish count. And, uh, we do water quality and they had a list of 120 different scientific experiments that they did on the school ship on a regular basis with the, you know, the people who went out on it.
George Wurtzel (00:24:36):
So myself and a friend of mine, we sat down when we went through their 120 scientific experiments they had on the ship. And we narrowed down to probably, uh, a mere, 110 that the blind kids could do without any trouble, which totally blew them away because they were thinking there may have been down. And, you know, sometimes people just happen to in the right place. At the right time, I had a friend who worked for the school ship company. I didn't even know at the time. And he, he spent his whole life as an illustrator for scientific books, illustrating biology, things for Marine Marine biology. And he was retired at the time and he worked for the school ship and he says, oh, you know, we need, we need some samples for your kids to look at. And one of the things that they had to do on the ship was put out a big trap net and drag it behind the ship for a while, and then they'd pull it up and you'd pull all the fish out.
George Wurtzel (00:25:34):
And then you had to identify all the fish. So my friend Byak is his name. He went out and caught a bunch of fish, went out on the, the ship one day and drug the net and caught these fish. And then he dipped them in, in, uh, silicone and then made silicone molds of all the fish. And then he, he dipped them in and then peeled them off the fish and then filled the silicone molds back with, I don't know what was on the inside. And so he made exact models of the fish. So you could pick up his silicone mold of a, of a Goby fish or a perch or whatever it was. And then you could go pick up the flopping flipping fish that was laying on the deck of the boat and compare it to the models. And then you could throw the, the sad little fish back overboard, and let him go back to his happy little life living on the bottom of Lake Michigan.
George Wurtzel (00:26:24):
But that was a really cool thing. You know, that, you know, the school ship, he to this very day still have those models of those fish on their, on their boat. And everybody uses 'em now, but that was something that was done that, um, benefited everybody. And then he did the same thing. He took microscope slide, pictures of Zotto and phyto planktons, and the size that you would see them through the microscope is, is very visible. So here again, he took silicone material and he put it in a, a pastry bag and he drew out the Zotto and phyto planktons on pieces of paper. He just took the silicone and put down over his lines and made, you know, raised line representations of those planktons. So all the kids could see what, you know, what they look like. And then there's the other things that are instantly recognizable. You know, you pick them up and, you know, shells is a, is a great example. The world's on shells in the ocean is a totally blind guy, Dr. Verne, and he's written all kinds of books about it. And you can recognize all those shells because they're all different. The tactile part of them is totally different on every one of them. So what we think is difficult or hard sometimes turns out not to be,
David Reynolds (00:27:42):
I saw a clip on something I viewed last week, where you were talking about spalted maple on one of your turnings. And that is like the shell story that you just mentioned because the tactile part and oh yeah. You talked about how using deed alcohol and water and you could raise the grain the little bit and really feel the exact figuring that the bacteria fungi, I think it is in the spalted maple creates. Yep.
George Wurtzel (00:28:09):
Yep.
David Reynolds (00:28:09):
Other than touch and raising grain to see the orientation and figuring of the wood, how, how do you identify wood species and grain direction or differentiate maybe between sapwood and Heartwood. And I think maybe the answer's gonna be the same for all of those, but I know there are some listeners who have used wood in the past and are wondering, well, how, how does George know if that's Oak or cherry or spruce, which obviously all smell very differently as well. So how do you do that?
George Wurtzel (00:28:40):
You're on, you're on the, everybody is everybody who's been in the woodwork business for any length of time at all, either, um, knowingly or unknowingly has recognized the fact that they all smell different unless they, you know, don't have ability to smell anymore. The sapwood and hardwood thing is really, really tough because the, the, the difference is, you know, so, so, so subtle. So most of the time, you know, if I really want to eliminate the sap from cherry wood, I asked somebody, how much of this do we have to take away to make that go away? But other things, you know, density is a big thing. You know, people always, you know, look at what the specific gravity of the wood is. You know, as far as, you know, trying to decide, you know, if it's compatible another piece or how hard it is, we we're good for the project that I wanna make or whatever.
George Wurtzel (00:29:31):
But those, that specific gravity thing, uh, gives you a lot of other information that you don't write it off as specific gravity, but how heavy it is when you pick it up in your hand. We'll tell you, tell you that that's definitely based on the specific gravity, the density of the piece of wood, which is also represented in the specific gravity. If you take and you set your hand on a piece of pine and you set your hand on a, a piece of, uh, hard maple, if you put one hand on one and one hand on the other, in your shop, and they had all been there for the same period of time, they had been in the environment for, you know, the same period of time. You would instantly think that the piece of pine was warm and the piece of hard maple was cold, uh, under your touch.
George Wurtzel (00:30:17):
If you paid a little bit of attention, that the same is true. If you say your hand on a piece of pine and it happens to be sitting on a granite countertop and you put your other hand on the granite countertop, you say, oh, this granite countertop is cold. Oh, this piece of pine is warm. They are both exactly the same temperature. They're whatever the ambient temperature of the room is. The information that's fed back to you is different because how rapidly the, the heat transfer from your hand will go into whatever your hand is sitting on. The heat transfer into the piece of pine is really fast because it has not a lot of density to it. The heat transfer of your hand into the piece of granite is really slow because that piece of granite is really, really dense. So the piece of soft maple and the piece of, you know, the piece of pine and the piece of soft maple or hard maple, I mean, the difference is huge as far as the density goes.
George Wurtzel (00:31:10):
And if you learn to pay attention to those little subtle things, then that, that gives you your first step in trying to decide what a piece of wood is, then you have smell, okay. And then you have taste. If you're trying to differentiate the difference between a piece of maple and a piece of Birch as a, as a visual reference. Sometimes that call is really, really hard for people who have good vision, right? Especially if you have a really nice straight grain piece of Birch and you have a really nice straight grain piece of, of maple, the color is relatively close. The grain structure is relatively close. The difference in taste is huge. The piece of maple, if you take off a little toothpick size piece of it and you start chewing on it, hard maple, especially it has a sweet taste to it because everybody knows that's where maple syrup comes from.
George Wurtzel (00:31:58):
The Birch has a very bitter taste to it. And because it's got a lot of cur soil in it and creosote’s pretty bitter. So the difference is, is, is really big between the two, as far as taste goes, um, black Walnut, same thing. You pick up a little tooth, pick a black Walnut, and you touched on your tongue. You immediately have that, you know, that stringent, bitter that the, if you've ever shelled walnuts, the smell that you get off of the shells and everything is, is, is quite stringent and quite bitter and smell that that's also in the, in the wood. So over time you learn to, you know, absorb that kind of information, you know, you can't, you can't learn at all at once. Um, sure. It's like, you know, you walk around with a person who is a gardener and has been a gardener all their lives. And they'll say, oh, that's that kind of flower. And that's that kind of flower. And that's that kind of flower. They didn't learn that overnight. It took 'em a while to figure out how to differentiate between those things.
David Reynolds (00:32:56):
Those things are more, as you just described, learned as opposed to sometimes the misconception that, oh, a deaf person has, has better vision or they work on their vision and a, a blind person can simply hear a lot better or they've got, you know, they're born with a different set of tact abilities, but it sounds like this is something that you can pick up on regardless of your yeah. Sightedness or, or not. So people could understand that. I think another good question, a lot of people would have, and I do is the whole safety issue. So do you have any concerns or maybe somebody would even say, you know, I'm, I'm afraid, it's a fear about where your hands are in space in relation to the tool or the blade or the work piece. How do you orient yourself as, so that, you know, as you move away from a piece and you move back to machining it and that sort of thing, even a hand tool can be very, very sharp. How do you overcome those concerns or address those
George Wurtzel (00:33:58):
Well, you know, her of it is here again, we're back to, to learned kinds of things. Um, you watch a butcher working in a butcher shop. His motions are pretty fluid. He wants to pay a lot of attention to where the Cleaver's going and those kinds of things. And he, he wants to, when he is, you know, chopping up stuff on the, on the band saw, he wants to pay a, to that what he's doing or what he's slept to. When I teach a blind person or teach any person to run a table saw it doesn't really matter if you're blind or sighted. I use exactly the same process. You know, if the distance between the blade and the fence is less than two inches is you probably don't wanna be running your hand through there randomly. You probably wanna be using a push there.
George Wurtzel (00:34:48):
If the distance between the blade and the, and the fence, depending on your level of confidence is two and a half inches or greater. There's lots of room for you to run your hand through on that board, especially if you're a right handed person and you keep the right hand edge of your, of your hand, where your little finger is running against the fence and your thumb hooked over the edge of the board and push it through you set the saw up, you know, the distance between the blade and the fence. And if you stop and think about it, when you run a table saw table saw is really static. The blade spins, but the blade does move in any direction whatsoever, but around in a circle, it can't go anywhere. It can't move. The only way you can move that is to pick up the whole table saw and move it somewhere. So the only thing in the process that's moving is you. So if I show you the path, you know, either visually or tactally that your hand is going to take, and your board is gonna take through the process, that process can't change because of the nature of a table saw, you know, the, the dis once you set that distance between the blade and the fence, and you lock down the fence, it remains the, from then on, you are the only moving component,
David Reynolds (00:35:59):
Then you're using a reference point that's fixed. Yep. According to one of those things you've just learned about. Okay. That makes great sense. So sometimes despite all the preparation and safety measures, though, wood is wood, and sometimes it's going to split or splinter or crack yep. When you were turning your biscuit cutter, that had happened. But what I noticed was there were people 35 feet away who had a much more violent reaction than you did. I didn't even notice a flinch at all. Cause that simply resulted being prepared and being extra attentive to, to what's going on. I'm assuming that's the case.
George Wurtzel (00:36:34):
Yeah. I mean, it, it probably, you know, it probably made some noise, uh, before it, it, it came loose from the, from the lay before it flew away that registered in my brain before, before it actually happened. As I looked at the piece afterwards, there's a big internal crack in that piece of wood. Right. So once we started down in there with, the tool, it caught on that big crack and it, and it split the actually the whole piece split all the way down the side, you know, but it, it probably gave me some sort of, um, microscopic, you know, maybe two rotation, uh, alert to the fact it was gonna do that. So, and you know, it, I guess there, again, it all has to do with know, how long have you been doing it? And you know, how often do pieces fail on the lathe I've turned over a thousand of those biscuit cutters. And I will tell you that there, there's probably somewhere, somewhere between a, you know, five to 7% failure rate on them. That truly is the first one I've ever had fly off when I'm doing the internal part of the cut. I've had them come on, they come apart when doing the external part or doing the handles or whatever, once you get pin down. But, but it was just the case of it happens. I mean, it's experience.
David Reynolds (00:37:51):
I just thought it was really interesting how poised you were and how you just instantly moved on to whatever was next. But, you know, and then of course, somebody came up and moved the guard or the big plexiglass shield closer to them. So that if it happened again, they wouldn't get hit. And I remember you describing the person, well, there's, there's a paranoid person right there, which was, which is pretty funny.
David Reynolds (00:38:15):
When I was an industrial arts teacher, it was a real focus intensive and high awareness environment, obviously because you have 12 to 20 eighth and ninth graders, you know, 12 to 15 year olds or whatever, in, in the room, running multiple machines at the same time. And you're also assessing individual progress from things as straightforward, as double checking, a dimension, or maybe something subjective, like looking at a curve in a design or how, or whether to apply, finish to a project. So there's a lot of moving parts going on with people doing lots of things. At the same time, you are an industrial arts teacher and you teach people like you said, who are blind or are cited, but how do you supervise a class of learners that are using tools and machines when you can't be one on one with all of them the same time I suspect you're gonna tell me it's exactly what I did. And, but I'm not sure.
George Wurtzel (00:39:11):
I don't know how many times in, in your teaching process that the something in your, in your environment happened behind you and you knew it happened, you didn't see it. You just knew it happened because you heard it happen. You heard the router make a noise that the router's not supposed to make. All of a sudden the router makes this real high screaming noise, you know, and all of a sudden you hear, um, the piece splintering off of the edge when someone's running the router.
David Reynolds (00:39:37):
A bandsaw blade snaps, or a piece of paper tears off a, a belt sander. Yeah.
George Wurtzel (00:39:42):
Yeah. And you know exactly because you've, you've learned those things, you know exactly what they were. Moms are incredibly good at having really, really good blindness skills because mom can be in the other room on the other side of the wall and she will say, get out of the cookie jar. You know, she's not in the same room, but over time she has learned what the noise is of the lid coming off the cookie jar and or the refrigerator door open, or the refrigerator door, not closing, don't leave the refrigerator door open. She's not even in the same room. You know, mom is applying her blindness skills really, really well to keep little George in line.
David Reynolds (00:40:26):
That's a great example, an explanation. So thinking about the teaching and the stereotypical teachers have eyes in the back of their head thing, which is what we're talking about here. Yes. What do you think makes a great teacher, a great teacher? What characteristics or qualities do you have and display and use all the time if you are a great teacher?
George Wurtzel (00:40:47):
One thing that I know that I personally am really, really good at, I mean, it is, I mean, everybody has things in the world that they're really good at Stevie Wonder is really good at singing and writing music. OK. Uh, George Wurtzel happens to be really, really good at meeting somebody and running you through some sort of assessment operation. That gives me an idea of what your skills, talents, and abilities are. And I am really good at changing my method of teaching to match your method of learning. I truly do excel at that. And, and I will tell you everybody learns different. Not everybody is comfortable learning in the same way. How I do that is a, is a mystery to me. If you ask me to sit down and write you out a description of how George assesses, uh, you know, how Sally learns in comparison to how Billy learns, I can't verbalize that.
George Wurtzel (00:41:47):
I can't put that in words. I don't know how to express that. I only know that it becomes really, really clear to me as to how to show people how to do things. Some blind people are very, very comfortable with you putting your hand on top of their hand and showing them something. Some blind people that absolutely terrifies 'em because they think that're being trapped. Okay. They, they can't get away if they want to. They want to put their hand on top of your hand and see how you are doing it. So, you know how you figure out which people are one way or the other just requires just a little bit of, you know, working with them. Some people you have to show them multiple times how to do something. Some people you can go three steps in one process. Okay. And, and they understandably other people.
George Wurtzel (00:42:39):
You have to break those down into individual, little, teeny, tiny baby steps for them to understand it. And I happen to be really, really good at that. One of the things that makes me happy is the, the people who come and learn from me, they all claim that I'm a good teacher. Uh, and I don't know, you know, and like I said, it's just, you have different gifts in the world. And that just happens to be one of my gifts. I, I can pick something up and look at it and tell you how it's made. I mean, I can look at a piece of furniture and tell you what it looks like on the inside without even looking at the inside.
David Reynolds (00:43:20):
And this goes back to your earlier comments, how do you help students resist the temptation or tendency maybe to compare their accomplishments to those of their peers?
George Wurtzel (00:43:32):
Yeah. That is a tough thing. It's, it's back to what we talked about a little bit earlier, that when you, when you have a individual person working in a solitary situation, it's, it's hard for them to understand what their, you know, skills and talents may or may not be. When you take that person and you put them in a, in a group situation, then they start to see that I'm the most familiar with this. It isn't my blindness that makes me not be a good woodworker. It's because I don't have those kinds of mechanical motor skills that it takes to, to do these kinds of things. I instantly can tell you when I get new students and I don't know much about them. I can instantly tell you which students are piano players and guitar players and musicians, and those kinds of things, because of their fine motor skills for how they run.
George Wurtzel (00:44:23):
Their fingers are really, really good. You can take a piano player and show them where to put their fingers on a cross cut guide, uh, to run a piece across the table, saw to make a little data and walk away and, and know that they are gonna put their fingers back on that piece of wood. Exactly the same every time, cuz that's how you show to do it because they know how to make a C chord on the, on the guitar. And every time they make the C chord you have of your fingers at exactly the same spot to do that. Those people are a dream to work with. You know, you get people who are, and you have met them. And then in your industrial arts, their hands are all over the place all the time. They don't ever put their hands back in the same place twice. You know, every time you take them to the table saw, you have to remind him, okay, this is the push stick. And this is how you use it. And this is how you push the board across the soft and you have to watch it and make sure they do do it. Don't try to shortcut the, the process.
David Reynolds (00:45:22):
You mentioned Stevie Wonder a minute ago. And I know you were commissioned to build his coffee table, which looks like a, a piano, anything you wanna share about that.
George Wurtzel (00:45:34):
The state of Michigan was looking for someone to build an achievement award for Stevie Wonder. And um, they said, no, what would work better than to have a blind person, you know, do this. So they called me up and said, you know, we want to present Stevie Wonder with an achievement award from, from the state of Michigan. And I said, do you have any ideas about to do? And I said, yeah, let's build a, and it was all my idea. Let's build a, you know, one third scale model of a panel and we build a one third scale model of a Steinway D grand piano as a coffee table. It was great. I mean, I young kid, I mean, I, um, you know, I, I started off, I wanted to go to a, I wanted to go to a cabinet building school after I figured I wanted to be a woodworker.
George Wurtzel (00:46:16):
And the state of Michigan actually ran a cabinet building school for, uh ex-cons and people with physical limitations, you know, missing arms or legs and deaf people. They wouldn't let blind people go to their, go to their school. At that point in time, this was way back in the seventies before you could to us their arm and make him do it. So I just started doing it on my own. So when this project came along to do this thing for Stevie Wonder, I never built anything. I never built anything like that before with, you know, curved components and everything. And I just, oh yeah, I can do that. There was never any time anybody ever came into my meal shop when I was a young kid that I didn't say, I didn't know how to do something. I didn't helmet. I didn't know how I would say, oh yeah, we can do that. And then I'd go learn how, you know, I'd go find somebody in the, I built some big archtop windows and built curb jams for them and everything. And I, I had to go find somebody to teach me how to do that. And I did. I went out in the community and I found a, a really cool gentleman who had been the millwork business, you know, all his life. And he knew about how to build those big curve jams for the windows. And it was a whole, whole big new learning process.
David Reynolds (00:47:19):
And you've had students who approach their challenges exactly the same way where they think I can do that. And I know this just because I looked at your students work and I read a little bit about some of them specifically Josh M and Jason, JJ also had a last name M and, and Emily,
George Wurtzel (00:47:39):
Emily Gossiaux
David Reynolds (00:47:40):
Who has lots of work on display in museums, and anything you wanna share about some of those students or their work or, or their learning or their confidence or anything like that.
George Wurtzel (00:47:51):
I will tell you that Emily Gossiaux um, she absolutely stretched my learning, teaching skills to the absolute max. I was relatively new at I'd run my own millwork operations and that, and had employees and everything. And in that process, you learned that, you know, teach your employees the way you want things done. When I was working at this was when I was working in Minnesota for blind incorporated, which is a private rehabilitation center for the blind. She ended up being one of my students. And I had had quite a few students before her and, and my job with those students was to use the wood working as a, as a confidence building tool. She was the first person who showed up on my doorstep, who was a serious artist, who wasn't sure she had just recently lost her vision. She wasn't sure that she could continue on to be an artist.
George Wurtzel (00:48:46):
She, uh, she thought because she had gone blind that, that avenue of what she had spent her whole life up until that point in time doing was now closed to her. So I had to try to be pretty creative about how do I reinvigorate her confidence in herself as it relates to her art. And it, it boiled back right down to the very same things that you know. We've said quite a bit before in this conversation is the fact that just because you lost your vision, you did not lose your vision. You know, what you, what you see is in your ad. You know, the only thing I have to do for you, Emily is show you how you now, instead of getting your, your thoughts and your, and your art out of your body, through the end of a pencil, now we have to teach you how to get it outta your body, through your fingers as sculpture. So she, she just, you know, in her head, she readjusted to that. And now she has a MFA in art. She went back to college and finished up. She's doing art shows all over the world. It makes me warm inside every time I think about the fact that I, I had a very small part in putting her back on the path, you know, to where she wanted to go.
David Reynolds (00:50:06):
We'll add a link to her site in the show notes as well. Yeah. At the Guild, you said that you don't draw, uh, with your eyes, you, you draw with your, your hands and a pencil and that the design begins in your mind. That's right. Whether you're cited or not, the ideas formulate first in your minds. Yep. It's a mental construct, not a visual one. And that makes me want to ask you about teaching and learning in the intro of every episode, the narrative that I speak asks a lot of hypothetical questions, and one of them is what's more important teaching or learning, and that may not be an either or response, but I'm curious how you view those two components of getting things done. I mean, there's teaching and learning involved every single time. So is there one that's more important or how do they play off of each other?
George Wurtzel (00:51:00):
I'm pretty sure my learning will end the day that they lapse the casket closed. I mean, uh, that's, that's all, I, you know, see it in my head. If you are active in the world, you learn every day. There are some people in the world who have the attitude that if I tell somebody my tricks or my magic way of doing something that somehow will diminish me and make them better than me, because now they know how to do what I do. And maybe they'll start to do it better than I do. And I have never, ever, ever had that in my head. I've always thought that if I know how to do something and you wanna learn how to, to do it, uh, I'm gonna teach you how every person I've ever taught to carve wood has become a better carver than I am.
George Wurtzel (00:51:55):
I'm not a very good, I can carve you a pretty decent spoon. You know, if we put together arms and legs on a chair or a sofa or something, and they've been carved on a master carver or on a CNC router, and you have to carve across the joints to make 'em all match up pretty, I can do that really well, but to pick up a block of wood and carve uh, a dragon out of it. I struggle with that. There are two different, two different ways of looking at how things are are made in the world. You have the, the, the sculptor who takes the block of, of granite and wants to take, wants to turn it into a Swan. And he looks at it and says, oh, this is really simple. Alls I, alls I do is take away everything that isn't Swan.
George Wurtzel (00:52:44):
Okay. And when he is done, he has Swan. You have the Potter who picks up a chunk of clay and wants, and the piece of clay into the Swan and the, they look at the piece of clay and they say, oh yeah, I have this glob clay. Alls I have to do is add the wings and the, and the neck and the head and the beak. And I have a Swan. So there are two entirely different ways of looking at how things go together or come apart, whatever you want, whichever direction you wanna look at it from. I do really, really well with the start, with the glob of whatever and add on pieces to it, to get what you want. I'm really good at building a piece of furniture from starting off with a log, cutting it up into boards, and then assembling it into whatever I want.
George Wurtzel (00:53:26):
I struggle a little bit more with the, take the log and carve, everything you don't want and, and make it look like the bear. I mean, that, that gives me a little more difficulty. Wood turning has, has improved my ability in that dramatically, because that was one of the things I had to learn when I start first started turning is that you do it's reductive. You know, you have to take away what you don't want. It's totally different than what I call cumulative, where you keep adding to it until you, you get what you want.
David Reynolds (00:54:04):
You do mountain climbing. I think you said you've done some ice climbing. You sail, horseback, riding long distance stuff. I think the listeners might want to hear a little bit about the US Paralympic games and some of those other ventures, any memories or lessons or anything else you'd like to share about those? I remember you saying, well, I came in 19th place, but you also said there were 2.8 seconds between first and 19th. So that's actually, that's not too shabby. That's pretty close to first. And if I'm not mistaken, did you race in more than one race or was that just the 10 K is that's the one I saw 19 thought I saw a 20 K and maybe a relay team where the were even higher. Yeah.
George Wurtzel (00:54:46):
Yeah. I was in all of those, you know, it, I started off skiing because it was fun. There was a, a really cool guy who came to the school for the blind when I was maybe in 10th grade or something like that. And he says, who here wants to go cross country skiing. And I just held out my hands. I wanna do that. That's outside. I did. I wasn't a real big indoors person. One of my teachers even wrote on, one of my report cards when I was a little kid. I don't think George likes being indoors. She was absolutely right. That's one of those things that, you know, few to ask me what cross country skiing would do for me when I first started doing it. And I saw just get me some fun. It got me all over the world. I grew up in Michigan.
George Wurtzel (00:55:29):
So it was, you know, readily available, did a lot of cross country skiing. And I skied all of the local ski races around the area, skied the Burkey Biner in Wisconsin, which is one of the biggest cross country ski races in the country. It was a, a new ski race that started up in Northern Michigan. When I was a young kid called I the white pine stamp tree. There were 250 people who started the race, which is nowadays a relatively small amount. There was 43 people that finished the race, my friend, Ray Landfair and I were number 42 and number 43, all the rest of the people dropped out. The people who set up the course thought that everybody who was going to this race was Olympic class skiers. This course was just unbelievably hard. It was one, one spot where it went up the backside of a big hill, Northern Michigan.
George Wurtzel (00:56:21):
And, and it was like a, it was like a mile of what they call herring bone, where you, you know, just basically have to turn your skis the opposite direction. So you don't slide back down the hill and go clunk clunk, clunk clunk one step at a time. And it was just, it was grueling. And the race started off at probably 10 degrees temperature. By the time the race was, was we were finishing up and it was like minus 10 degrees. So the weather wasn't cooperating, conditions were brutal. The wind was blowing, it was snowing. And the course was incredibly hard. That was one of the toughest races in my whole life. You know, that was when I first got started, but the Olympics was fun. You know, I got to represent our country when I was involved with it. It was really, really new.
George Wurtzel (00:57:06):
And the Paralympics did not happen at the same place that the regular Olympics happen at. Now they use the same venue. The, uh, quality of the Paralympians has become really mainstream, super, super competitive. And in some cases, some of the prosthesis that people have there's controversy over them now because the prosthesis are making them better performers than the people who are normal, who have, you know, the pieces that they got when they were born instead of new add-ons. So it's, it's gonna be interesting to see where that goes in the future as exoskeleton, uh, devices become more available for people who, you know, are missing limbs and different things.
David Reynolds (00:57:56):
How do you navigate when you're cross country skiing and you're blind
George Wurtzel (00:58:00):
Cross country skiing is pretty easy, cuz you're, you're following a track or a trail that, um, in, in the case of all the skiing that you do, that tracker trail has been set by some sort of mechanical device. They, a device they go through and they pack it down. Back in the day, they actually used to set too little, so little slots on the snow that your skis actually went into. They don't do that anymore. Cuz of the Cubs skate skiers, they don't like those things, but downhill skiing is a little more difficult. Cause you're going a little bit faster. The person skis behind you and gives you directions right left, you know, and it's like everything else. The, the first time you go down a, a hill or a slope as a blind person, you, you do the considerably slower than, you know, a sight person may, but as you become more knowledgeable of the terrain and you become more familiar with it and you become more familiar with working with whoever your guide is, you can do pretty well. Mike May blind friend of mine, he's been clocked at 80 miles an hour on giant slolum runs, totally blind guy. You, you know, that's having a lot of faith in your guide and that's having a lot of faith in being a really, really good skier.
David Reynolds (00:59:14):
Three questions and we'll wrap up persistence, longevity, really making a good effort. That thing really clearly matters. Yeah. I know you said at your presentation that, you know, you've had a dream about having a, a shop and a gallery and a place to live right there in, in the same location. And you said, you know, 50 years and it's it's come true. Yeah. So what would you tell a young person or even an older person about persistence and work ethic and adapting to change?
George Wurtzel (00:59:47):
The very first thing is you have to be willing to adapt to change. So if you're static in, in your thought process, you're really not gonna go real far. There's some small exceptions of that. But for the most part you have to, you have to learn to adapt. If you find that you can't do something one way, you know, you have to, you know, try a different way to do it. There's some things in the shop that I'm not good at. And I don't really like to do, I can do them. Uh, if no one else is around to do, 'em cutting something out on a bandsaw to cut out a real leg on the bands saw do, can I cut out a Cabroille leg on the bands saw absolutely can't there. I mean, I can do that process. I know how to do the layout.
George Wurtzel (01:00:31):
I know how to make the pattern. You know, I know how to get it the way you want it. Am I good at doing it? No, because I have to make a cardboard pattern. I have to put a little device on the front of the bandsaw, right in front of the blade, a little, a little indicator that you can feel with your finger and you follow your, the edge of your pace board pattern that you made, you know, with a little indicator. Well, you can't get a little indicator piece right on the very front of a band saw blade. Cause you can't get it there. There's no way to do it. So there's a space between that indicator and the pointer that I use in the front of the bandsaw, depending on which bandsaw in my shop I'm using. That space is anywhere from a quarter of an inch to, to a half inch, depending on how the guard sets up on the bandsaw.
George Wurtzel (01:01:16):
So you have to allow for that distance between those two points and that that's, that's hard to. So my cuts aren't as graceful as someone who's just cut out 300 of these things and can look down there and splits the line and leaves half the line on the piece of wood. When they cut out the Cabroille leg, I worked with a guy over in Hickory, North Carolina, a long time ago in little woodworking guy. And he says, if you're not leaving half the line, you're not doing a good job. He says, if you take all the line away, then people don't even know you did a good job. I was like,
David Reynolds (01:01:56):
Well, you know, my answer to that is make sure you're using a really soft pencil that makes a big thick line because that's about the best way I'm gonna leave half the line.
George Wurtzel (01:02:05):
He used to use mechanical pencils that tells you how good, well
David Reynolds (01:02:08):
He's splitting the line. That's, that's fantastic. Who has encouraged you the most?
George Wurtzel (01:02:15):
You know, I've had some people when I was young, especially there was a, a gentleman at the school for the blind who was a teacher, Mr. Rosnowski. Uh, we called Mr. R and, um, he was a blind guy who, uh, he was my idol. The man knew how to do everything. It wasn't one single piece of machinery or equipment at the, in the, in the metal working shop or the woodworking shop or the small engines thing that he didn't know how to run that he didn't know how to take apart, put back together, fix whatever it was or teach you how to run. He was my idol. I mean, he was the guy that I patterned myself after ever since I met him. And his philosophy very similar to mine is that if I know how to do it, and you wanna learn how that I will, if you're interested, I will do everything I possibly can to teach you how to do that.
George Wurtzel (01:03:04)
Find somebody to be your mentor, find someone to, to follow, find someone who you admire, how they do what they do. And if you're lucky enough to find that they're gracious enough to show you what they know, how to do, you know, respectful of that and be appreciative of their they're spending time to teach you what they know how to do persistence persistence is it the guy who invented really high quality composite downhill skis is a guy by the name of Head was Head ski company. And his first successful ski that outperformed the wood skis that existed at on the market was his 11th hundreds pair that he made. You know, he made 1100 pairs of skis before he figured out how to get his composite ski to outperform the wood ski that existed on the market before he, he started into it and he kept copious amounts of notes and seven or years after his ski business was absolutely booming.
George Wurtzel (01:04:03):
And everybody thought he was the smartest guy in the world. As it relates to skis, Wilson company came to him, says we wanna build a composite tennis racket because we see how well your composite skis perform over a basic wood racket. And Mr. Head's story, as he walks little over to his library of notebooks that he kept notes on for when he was building the skis, he says, I pulled down the notebook and I opened a page number, whatever. And he says, I, I built a racket for him. He says the very first bracket I built outperformed the wood racket. Wow. You know, he says, so that persistence paid off twice. He says the first time in the ski, but it really paid off in, in the racket.
David Reynolds (01:04:46):
George, is there anything else that I should have asked or that we didn't uncover?
George Wurtzel (01:04:53):
I have a couple different people who are trying to encourage me to write a book. And I guess I should, when I do these interviews now at, at this stage of my life comparison to, you know, doing them 30, 40 years ago, you know, I look back at, you know, what, I've, what all I have done, you know, it is for anybody. I mean, blind or sighted. I mean, I've done a lot of pretty cool things I think in my life. And have I been really successful? I'm not really sure that I've been, you know, successful in some people's vision or I, you know, because of monetarily of I, and I end up in life, you know, sitting here comfortably with half million dollars in the bank to retire. No, I did. I, I didn't, it wasn't successful in that aspect of it. I, but I I've kept plugging away at what I wanted to do. And you know, maybe that's my success, I guess, in the world.
David Reynolds (01:05:49):
Anything else? Any closing comments?
George Wurtzel (01:05:52):
Well, if you, if you know somebody or you have a friend, or if you are suffering from some sort of, uh, vision loss, um, and you'll want to continue to pursue what you do, if it's a line of expertise that I have, I'm more than willing to help you, especially if it's woodworking, metalwork and mechanics, those kinds of things. I'm really good at that. If you've been a computer programmer, sorry, not much help to you. So, but I could point you in the direction of someone who could,
David Reynolds (01:06:23):
We'll talk off Mike here in just a second and make sure that I have all the correct information for our show notes. I just wanna thank you, George, for giving us more than a glimpse into this world of yours that is amazingly similar yet. It's uniquely different. And it's really been encouraging to hear the thought processes for everybody to be able to learn almost anything. I just appreciate everything that you shared with us today and especially just being so willing to, to give us so much of your time.
George Wurtzel (01:06:51):
Thank you for asking.
David Reynolds (01:06:52):
Have a great day and I'll talk to you soon.
George Wurtzel (01:06:55):
Okay. Bye bye.
David Reynolds (01:06:58):
Thanks for listening today. Find the Lead. Learn. Change. podcast on your search engine, iTunes or other listening app. Leave a rating, write a review, subscribe and share with others. In the meantime, go lead, go learn, go make a change. Go.