Working wonders with wood
<p>Ray Gotz, 88, demonstrates how a wooden airplane prop works on Friday at his Coeur d’Alene home. Gotz has crafted hundreds of wooden items that he gives away to family, friends, and among the community.</p>
<p>Among his many projects, Gotz has made and given away more than 70 candy dispensers.</p>
<p>Ray Gotz’s woodshop is full of custom cabinets, tables and shelving all made by the woodworker.</p>
COEUR d'ALENE - Imagine a world where items normally made of metal are fashioned out of wood - airplane engines, Ferris wheels, logging chains, Geneva drive gear mechanisms, maritime pulleys, pendulum systems within grandfather clocks.
Throw in mischievous puzzles, functional and fashionable home decor and unique pieces of art and you would see a world created by Ray Gotz.
"I just like to make stuff," the 88-year-old Coeur d'Alene resident said.
Every corner of Gotz's home contains some display of his master woodworking abilities. He has cabinets full of intricate pieces; scale representatives of complex mechanical systems that one really has to see to believe.
"If you saw his stuff, I mean, it's just amazing," said Dave Carlson of Post Falls, owner of Apex Plumbing and Heating, Inc. Carlson and his employees have done some work on Gotz's home and always walk away amazed, sometimes with a unique Gotz piece to take home as he is quite generous with his creations.
"He's very giving, he makes stuff out of wood and just gives it away, gives it to kids," Carlson said. "To me, he's just a treasure to our community."
"I've made lots of them, and I've also made lots of friends," Gotz said. "I'm not keen on selling things, I like to give them away."
Gotz is a Navy veteran who entered the service right out of high school and continued his military career in the Reserves. He never went to college, but was "always good at the figures" and has an innate curiosity about how things tick. He worked in sheet metal for a manufacturing company in Illinois where he met his wife of 33 years, Louise, and he has cultivated that curiosity through his woodworking hobby.
"I retired when I was 60, and I still had a lot of energy left, so I had to do something with myself," he said, grinning.
Gotz has earned countless accolades for his creations, including first-place awards, blue ribbons and the Grand Champion Award at the North Idaho Fair and Rodeo. He used to belong to the woodworkers guild and has given presentations on the subject. Most of his pieces are complex working models, from the wooden padlocks and keys to the ventilation system he rigged with PVC pipe and wooden contraptions in his basement wood shop.
But many are also artistic. While Gotz sometimes uses designs and patterns, he also has the talent and ability to simply look at something and bring it to life through wood.
"There was a picture in The Press of a chef in New Jersey that made cookies and he put all kinds of decorations on them, then he put them on sticks and made edible centerpieces," he said referring to a wooden curiosity on his coffee table. "Well I thought, 'I could do that out of wood.' So I did. There's only one in the world like that."
There is a story to each creation - how careful he had to be filing the teeth on the gears, the uses of certain devices or who was a recipient of a certain piece he made. Gotz appreciates the different types of wood he uses and knows them by name. He knows his invention history and he has a kind sense of humor that often accompanies his tales.
One item he has made and given away several times is a versatile centerpiece that can be used to hold flowers or other decor.
"I just gave one to the First Presbyterian Church, and this is jatoba, it's a Brazilian cherry," he said, a smile forming on his face as he presented the centerpiece. It contained three cylindrical glass vases filled with orange polyester flowers and colorful pebbles.
"So I told them I had to go down to Brazil and get this piece of wood and then when I got back I waded in the ice cold water in the Coeur d'Alene River and picked these little stones up and I had goosepimples a quarter of an inch high. And he says, 'Yeah, right, you probably watered the flowers, too.'"
Gotz hasn't been too active with his woodworking hobby lately because he has macular degeneration and glaucoma, which are affecting his eyesight. But he has immensely enjoyed this pastime, which he said is "better than sitting on a barstool" and has allowed him to integrate his love of mechanics with his talent with wood.
Always patient and always careful, he is a master of the craft.
"You know, these kids now, they're always punching around on them electronic gadgets that they have, and they're not learning this stuff," he said. "Everybody isn't made to sit at a computer, including me. I like to work with my hands."