In the Shop

Restoring old furniture, sheep wagons and Airstream trailers is one of Gov Dave's favorite pastimes. He got started in woodworking while growing up on his family's farm in Thermopolis, building sheds and fences. Farm life taught him to fix things by himself and to reuse every scrap of wood. To help pay for college, he worked construction jobs, including welding tanks.

Woodworking and restoration projects give him satisfaction because they're some of the "few things in life where I'm not moving paper from one side of the desk to the other," he says. "When I finish a project, I'm actually done." As an example of his work, he shows before and after pictures of a doctor's buggy he had restored.

Gov Dave has filled a garage at the governor's residence with his saws, benches, drills, sanders, and even a sand blaster, to serve as his woodshop where he can go out and work some evenings. He enjoys the time to work with his hands and to think about the issues of the day.

This spring, his son Bret visited for a few days, so he helped Gov Dave on the governor's current project of restoring and refinishing a hutch that dates to the 1920s. As with all of his projects, Gov Dave first took the hutch apart into its basic parts and cleaned each one, and then he and Bret reinforced the joints on the piece, which had been battered by 20 years of raising children.

Gov Dave applies the precepts of woodworking to his style of governing. For example, when trying to balance energy development with protection of natural areas such as the Wyoming Range, he explains the need for careful consideration by quoting the old carpenter's rule: "Measure twice and cut once."

The woodworking isn't limited to the men in the family. On the same spring evening while Gov Dave and Bret were in the shop, First Lady Nancy helped daughter Katie assemble a pre-fab bookcase in the family's living room. But with confusing directions and pieces that didn't quite fit, their task proved almost as challenging as rebuilding the hutch.