Rod Johnson

Woodcarving
Rod Johnson
Born: June 11, 1935

audio

"A Heritage to Draw From"

This is Laurie Gudzikowski and I'm talking to Rod Johnson in his home in Austin [Georgetown]. Rod, I want you to tell me a little about your dad, yourself, and your woodcarving.

"The Swedish Uncle" was carved in the late 1930s by Rod Johnson's father S. E. Johnson. The image is believed to be of his Uncle Anton Karlsson of Nässjö, Sweden, who was also a wood carver.

Well, my dad passed away about ten years ago, but he carved most of his life.¹ Based on the stories I've heard, his parents were immigrants to Texas from Sweden. His father came in 1893 and my grandmother came in 1902. They always talked about this old uncle in Sweden who never immigrated. He was sort of a loner-never married, sat and made crazy things carved in wood.

I found out later that [carving] is pretty typical of that particular region of Sweden; Smaland is heavily wooded with poor agriculture, so I know why they came to Texas looking for land. But as a kid my dad talked about how they didn't have any toys. He was born in 1905, that's early times, and he said, "We made our own toys back then out of blocks of wood and what-have-you. And then the airplanes came along and we made toy airplanes."

Sigurd E. Johnson was born 1905 in Jonah, Texas, of Swedish parents who immigrated to Texas in 1893.

He started carving seriously in 1935 (July) based on an article that was in Popular Science Magazine by E.G. Tangeman. Now I've found a reference to that article in one of Tangeman's books. They offered as a kit: a knife, and a little block of wood with a pattern marked on it, and a piece of paper that showed some instructions. That was his big breakthrough, to finally make contact with someone official in legitimate woodcarving. Everything that he'd ever done before was typically with a pocketknife and so forth. . . I have that knife and I have that very first carving that he did in 1935.

"Skipper Sam," an early image carved by S. E. Johnson along with the first carving knife that he received in the carving kit.

He carved up through the late 1930s and early 1940s, stopping before the Second World War ended. I never did ask him why he quit then. But I grew up with that and watched him with that knife: there are eight figures that he did in that period of time. He got a lot of pleasure out of that as I can remember that. During the war years we didn't go any place; I was just a kid, born in 1935 also.

On Sunday afternoons back in 1972 we got to reminiscing about these carvings and if he still had them. Well, he'd sent several of them to his sister up in Michigan, so of the original eight carvings, about four of them, I think, were with my aunt up in Michigan. She had sent them back, and maybe that's what triggered it off, that she was returning those carvings. I asked my dad, "Well, wouldn't you like to do that again? Let's try it again; I've got an interest."

"Just Stepping Out for a Smoke" image of Carl Hammar, the church sexton at the Hutto Lutheran Church in Hutto, Texas. Carved by S. E. Johnson, 1942.

I was in the engineering world with high-stress jobs and what-have-you and thought of it as something for stress management. He knew about pocketknives and had this one old knife, and we got a book and finally found some decent wood in Austin, basswood, which we'd read and had heard is the kind of wood you want to use for carving. Linden is the proper name of for the wood; basswood is a slang term. From what we've read, the early fishing lures up in Wisconsin were made out of linden and that's how it got the slang term basswood.

"A Job Where You Start at the Top" depicts farm life in Williamson County, Texas, in the 1940s. Carved by S. E. Johnson, 1978.

From 1972 on, what I've got represents about eighty of his carvings that he did-much later in life-and really enjoyed it. He and I had seventeen years together carving before he died in 1989; and most of these carvings of his I furnished the wood because I found a good supplier of basswood from up in Iowa.

"Cattle Buyer at the Auction" a figure seen at a cattle auction in Williamson County, Texas, in the 1950s. Carved by S. E. Johnson, 1988	"The Swede and the Texan: Swedish Heritage?Western Style" carved by Rod Johnson in the 1980s.

He always had new ideas about what he wanted to do. You can see in his work that it was always somewhat caricature and humorous, and the characters of the local area here-the farming and ranching of Williamson County. Mine tend to be somewhat different than my dad's in that I've got a different interest in what you're producing for a carving; it tends to be Western in form and of a Swedish heritage.

We got to return to Sweden. My wife took my parents to Sweden in 1980 and stayed five days on a typical tour through Norway and back through France and what-have-you. And my dad said, "We've got to go back; five days in Sweden wasn't enough." So we went back in 1982; I went with my mother and dad then. We tried to find some woodcarvings, but there's very little of this old heritage left over there. You find woodcarving but it's a very modernistic sort of thing, very stylistic.

The Swedish?

"New Arrivals to Texas." Carved by Rod Johnson in 1996.

The Swedish style. We had some cousins over there, distant cousins. My dad still had two first cousins over there which helped us locate some old-timers my dad's age, that still did some of this old traditional hand carving in that region. There's a particular region of Sweden that is known for it and that's Smaland. Smaland is like what Arkansas is to the U.S.; it's just heavily wooded, rocky, poor land. These people had to survive there for all these thousands of years. It was tough to survive the winters and grow enough food and what-have-you to even live over there, so I can understand why the immigrants heard about coming here and particularly to Texas, where my grandfather came, for the land that was available to them. In seven years my grandfather got enough together to buy a farm here, a cotton land farm, which is still in the family.

In this trip back to Sweden, we did find one museum there of a very traditional old Swedish woodcarver and bought several books, but they're all in Swedish and I can't read or speak Swedish. Well, my dad could both read and speak Swedish, so he would translate a lot of the story of this particular old woodcarver. So that was a real stimulus, to go back to Sweden that he'd only heard about. He had never seen the land where his parents came from and the farm that his father came off of. So his [carvings] vary from cowboys to the old Swedish characters.

We liked the faces and the profiles and the noses and the look of the face; I guess I learned that from him too, of studying people. I've joked about it, but you sit in church and look at somebody's profile in a pew right in front of you and categorize faces like that-about the nose and the mouth and the lips and the ears, of locations and sizes and what-have-you.

"The Four Reagans" were carved in the 1980s by S. E. Johnson using photographs on the cover of "Newsweek" magazine.

There's four of them sitting over here that my dad struggled with during the 1980s, and that's of President Reagan.² These were photographs-he used the photographs that were on the cover of [a magazine]. I subscribed to Newsweek, and I always brought the old issues to him. That's where these four Reagan busts came from, and he never was satisfied with the four. I don't even know what order they're in, but he never got Reagan to look like Reagan, he didn't think. But he attempted, at least, to do that.

Well, tell me the story about the bedbug³ trap.

This bedbug trap was made by S. E. Johnson in 1983 after hearing the story of a bedbug trap when visiting in Sweden.

Well, there's this cylindrical thing that looks a little bit like a rolling pin but it's got holes drilled in it. It's hollow, and it's got two corks stuck in the ends; it's a cylinder full of holes with two corks. We went to a small home-type museum over in that part of Sweden. This guy brought this thing out from a closet or something, and was telling my dad the story of this device. It was a Swedish invention from 1700 or so. This is a Swedish bedbug trap, and you'd sleep with it; the way my dad translated the story is that in the mornings you'd fling the cover back and let the light come in. The bedbugs would look for a dark place, so they'd crawl into this cylinder through these holes; you'd have them all trapped in there, and you could pull off the corks on each end and blow them off into the fire.

When I heard the story it was in Swedish, and I don't understand Swedish-I didn't get the story. So when we got in the car and were leaving, my dad said let me tell you about this story this guy just told me. He never knew whether he believed the guy or not: the guy said it straight-faced. Now, I think my dad still had some possibilities that it was a put-on, but it probably was and it was probably a Swedish invention-bedbugs were bad back in those times.

You've got your dad's very first pieces. Do you have your very first pieces?

"A Donkey" was the first figure carved by Rod Johnson as a child in 1947.

I've got a little one; it's a little donkey that I did. The only wood that he had and that I had when I was a kid was apple boxes and the ends of apple boxes were about three-quarter inch thick, and so we could glue two and get an inch-and-a-half. Well, this donkey I've got is done out of the thickness of an apple box.

And you did that when you were a kid?

Yes, yes. My daughter's got a cowboy boot that I did when I was a kid.

But when you started working later with your dad on it; do you have an early piece from that time?

"The First Cowboy" carved by Rod Johnson in 1972.

Well, this is the first cowboy that I ever did. And I'm not very proud [of it]; I can look at it now and say, "That's some terrible carving." But it is the first cowboy, done from a pattern used by the carvers out in the Ozarks. It doesn't have the Texas look about it; it's got more of the caricature.

Sort of southern-looking.

Yes. Many of these cowboys that I have are from the 1980s. What I've zeroed in on now pretty much are the smaller figures. These bigger ones, this first cowboy is roughly nine inches tall or so and it's a little bit large for holding. These smaller figures are a little bit easier to hold onto and easier to work on.

You do quite a lot of demonstrating at festivals. How long have you been doing that, Rod?

Wooden flowers carved by Rod Johnson at the Texas Folklife Festival.

Well, I started at Folklife Festival in 1987 or 1988, I can't remember which year it was. Nancy Lou Webster from Elgin-Treenware and I were at a festival in Bastrop, the YesterFest, and Jo Ann [Andera] came up and that's how the conversation started. The reason Jo Ann wanted me was that she had just run off the guy that'd been carving the wooden flowers, and I knew how to do the wooden flowers; so that's how I first got into Folklife. I did those for five or six years until Herman Davis took over that task of doing the wooden flowers at Folklife. The other fairly major festival is the Sam Houston Folk Festival out in Huntsville, and that's really a museum type festival out there, fairly serious, a lot of costuming, and there's an association out there.

Sounds like a place to go.

Yes. Toni and I are going again that'll be in just a month. They begin on Friday-it's a Friday, Saturday, Sunday-five thousand school kids on that Friday and that's too many kids. You can't cope with that many kids-jumping off a bus and running all over the grounds. I'm not that sure they get that much out of it. But I do some school programs, and I was nominated and approved by the Texas Commission for the Arts to do school programs.

So you're one of the arts. . .

Art in Residence.

In Residence.

I've never taken a Residency myself, but I work through Pat Jasper and the Texas Folk Life Resources.

Is that mostly around in Georgetown and Houston?

Yes. But I'm going in just two weeks to Hurst, Texas. There's a school district up there, an elementary school, that's bringing a number of us in like that. And what I've learned to do and found effective is to do a face carving in potatoes, with the kids.

An example of a potato head carving that Rod Johnson uses in teaching students.

I bought some of these heavy-duty plastic knives, and I've cut them off so they're little stubby, so they don't break the blades; they've got a rounded point on them. So in about forty-five minutes to an hour with third graders, you can generally get most of them to carve a face, and they're just thrilled with it. I'm sure the teacher in the next class has to deal with those kids all fired up, and they all want to take them home to mother.

There are dried potato faces all over Texas.

Well, I don't know how long they last.

I'd love to see you do that sometime. You'll have to come down to the Institute some day.

Yes. That's something with the kids that I really think is effective.

Yes, that sounds terrific.

You see a lot of variation in the kids on what they can do, but you can see in some [of them] a light turning on or something-I didn't know I could do that, sort of thing.

Yes.

And then I've done school programs, just presentation type things and that brings in the issue of these toys that I've done.

Tell me about the toys. They're wonderful.

"The Pecking Chickens" toy carved by Rod Johnson in the 1990s.

That started with Folklife about seven or eight years ago. Jo Ann [Andera] talked about doing something for the kids on Sunday. The first one I did was this toy here, which is out of a history book. The corn is all gone off of this one, but it's that pecking chicken toy that's been very effective with the kids because parents and grandparents said they had something like this when they were kids. This one is out of a history book-from Sweden-that E.J. Tangeman found. He thinks it was made about 1910 or so. And it's a carved one. You can still buy them Swedish-made, but it's all done by machine. Not a bit of it's hand-carved.

You have to come to Texas to get the hand-carved ones.

"A Dancing Bear" toy carved by Rod Johnson in the 1990s.

Yes. But this is what started at the Folklife Festival, and from that another similar toy, and it is a couple of bears. It's that same principle of strings and a ball, this other one is-one bear is playing on a drum and one is dancing.

And did you make up that design or did you see that somewhere?

No, that's out of a book.

You got that out of a book, too?

They talk about Eastern Europe. And what I've read, in Russia now you can buy these very inexpensively-four or five dollars. I've talked to several people that have bought them over there.

Russians are known for bears; they're very important in their [culture].

"The Dancing Cowboy" is an Aggie cowboy used in demonstrations and was carved by Rod Johnson in the 1990s.

Yes. But then some of these other toys have evolved-this dancing figure called Limber-Jack, and I've got two of them. It started with seeing one at the Sam Houston Folk Festival with a Dulcimer Band from Dallas. A lady played with the toy while the band performed, and they'd also been at Folklife. I've had her use mine there in the band.

Yes.

Hers was from a carver up in Oklahoma; it was of her husband playing a banjo and then dancing. Well, the first one I did, which Colonel Todd has, is of O.T. Baker.⁴

Oh. Okay.

I did that four years ago. And OT wasn't that offended by it; he thought it was kind of cute.

I think OT was probably proud of it.

Yes. After that one, I did one for myself, which I've taken to Folklife for the last three years of a cowboy. Because of my few years in the Navy, I wanted to do a sailor and it's been an unsuccessful design of a Limber-Jack Dancing Sailor, with his arms spring-loaded and his wrists spring-loaded. I can't get a soft enough spring to get those to behave, to waggle.

You've got a whirligig⁵ there?

"The Whirligig Sailor" is the only whirligig carved by Rod Johnson in the late 1990s.

That was a trial thing. I was thinking of doing whirligigs, but I don't have the time. But it's a sailor with two signal flags and they're turned, or you can turn them, so if you put it in front of a fan, it'll run.

Do the signal flags say anything?

Yes-TX.

Ah. That figures.

I had to go on the Internet to find those international signal flags.

Yes. I assumed it said something.

"Men Chopping Wood," is a chopping action toy carved by Rod Johnson in 1996.

This one, I take out for demonstration purposes with kids, is another history book toy. And I don't even know if it has a name. It's all wooden; it's an action toy. The one in the book was of two bears chopping, but I translated that into two wood guys chopping. And one of the kids usually asks, "Is that a real piece of wood there that they're chopping?" Well, it's all real wood. One of the comments I get, particularly from these toys, from kids, "You made that?" A little girl at Folklife, one time, said, "How come they don't use a machine to make that? Why do you do it the hard way?"

A "Jack-in-the-Box" toy that Rod Johnson designed, fabricated, and carved for a movie in 1996.

The jack-in-the-box [was hard]. The difficult part of that was making a spring. I really had to call on my engineering experience of how to make a spring that's the right stiffness and the right height. The first spring, he jumped right out of the box, so you have to keep shortening up the spring to do that. The jack-in-the-box, as well as this balancing toy, was made for a movie a couple of years ago that was done in Austin, called "True Women." It was a Texas history story, and I read the book, an excellent book, but the TV version turned out to be not what I thought.

A TV version.

A TV version where we knew the prop guy. We did another one, a Noah's Ark-Toni and I together did that Noah's Ark back for "Substitute Wife." Part of the story was that the daddy was a woodcarver back in 1870 in Nebraska. He [the prop man] said, "I've got to have some toys because they're going to have kids playing with toys and I don't have any toys." So we went through a history book and he found a jack-in-the-box and said, "Can you make one?" So that's why I ended up doing that jack-in-the-box. Toni did some carvings for "Lonesome Dove" and sold them. "Never again," she said. "I'm going to rent them." So we rented that Noah's Ark, and then we rented these. So that's how we ended up keeping them.

"Noah's Ark" is made from red cedar with a removable cypress roof and carved by Toni Silver and Rod Johnson in 1994 for the movie "The Substitute Wife."

So you still have them.

And they're more than happy to rent them from you, rather than buying them.

That balancing toy is beautiful.

Yes, he found that in a book. There are many versions of that center of gravity being below the pivot point.

On the balancing one, did you do the turning or did you buy that?

"Balancing Act" is a toy that was available in the late 1880s and was carved by Rod Johnson in 1996.

No, I just bought that. When he calls for movie props, it's "I gotta have these in two weeks." So the one thing that Toni and I did together that did showed up in a movie is a baby cradle, and Toni did some of her relief carving on it. That was burned in the movie because of the cholera epidemic in 1870, so they had to have two of them.

One to burn and one to show.

Well, one in case the burning didn't go well. So we got the other one back. My two grandsons have both used that baby cradle.

Oh, wonderful. What a wonderful family tradition.

A cradle designed and built by Rod Johnson and carved by Toni Silver in 1996 for the television movie "True Women."

Toni did some nice carving on it. And Toni someday is going to have grandkids; they'll use it, too, I guess.

What a wonderful family tradition. You've got a bunch of little frogs here, what's the story of the frogs?

"Frog Family" carved by Rod Johnson for his wife's frog collection in the 1980s.

Well, my wife's a frog collector, so that's why I ended up carving those frogs. She's got a lot of frogs she's bought, but two or three of them there I've done. And then the Swedish horses are very much a tradition. The one piece on the table that I have not painted, is a decorative painted horse. I had not taken the time to learn how to do that rosemaling⁶ or the decorative type of painting, so a friend of mine up in Linsbourg, Kansas, painted that particular horse for me. But if you go to Sweden, everybody has to come home with one of those.

Yes, I've seen those little horses. Not as nice as that one.

"Swedish Dala Horses" are typical of those sold everywhere in Sweden. The horse on left is in the traditional Swedish style and Carol Laubach of Austin, Texas, painted the one on the right in Texas style.

I went to a festival over there in 1996-a nine day Old World Festival, which was a rare experience to get to go-and ended up mostly carving flowers because the Swedes had never seen those wooden flowers.

So they invited you to come there as a woodcarver?

Right, right. It's a celebration over there of the history of that particular province of Sweden, which mostly had to do with making charcoal. The Festival was centered around charcoal making.

Interesting.

The wood we use here for these wooden flowers is hard to come by. I use this sumac, which grows, along the roadsides out here. Over there it was aspen. So I'd go harvest it every morning before I went to the Festival. And it was just beautiful carving wood; I wish I could get aspen.

Tell me about the flowers, how did you learn to make the flowers? You said you knew how to make the flowers.

I knew how to make those.

How did you learn how?

There was an old fellow that my dad and I got to know back in the 1980s from Belton, Texas; Gene Haire, and he was the Texas traditional woodcarver. He had done it all his life, had grown up in Belton, never lived anywhere else-his father was a postman; he was a postman, walking postman. He told me, "I've learned how to do these flowers when I was a young kid, from an old man." So in his later life he said, "I've got to teach somebody how to do these, so you can pass it on to the kids." I mean, he carved flowers and gave them away, so there was always a line of kids standing by Mr. Haire's table wanting a flower. So that's why I knew how to do them because he had taught me how, for this "pass it on" sort of thing.

That turned out to be why I got invited to the Folklife Festival. I've passed it on to Herman Davis to do the flowers. The wood here is not like in the northern states. I mean, here the wood grows with too much difficulty and is too dry, and you think willow would be good , but it's not. Herman said out in East Texas or where he lives, in Beaumont, there are a lot more available bushes and wood that make good flowers. But the only thing I've found here in Central Texas is sumac.

So you need something that you pick fresh and it's green.

But you have to let it dry for a little bit of a time. What I did in Sweden was cut some every morning, de-bark it, and the next day it would be dry enough to do flowers.

So it's the age of the wood that's critical.

The age of the wood, yes.

You've got a bunch of little trolls kinds of figures back there, those are Swedish?

Yes, those are Swedish trolls, as distinguished from Norwegian trolls.

Maybe troll isn't the right word?

"Swedish Trolls" carved from pictures in stories of Swedish trolls was done by Rod Johnson in 1997 and 2002.

No, the Swedes have that word-troll. And Norwegians have it too, but it's all from that same derivation of children's books on those little characters that lived in the woods under the stumps of trees. The problem with Swedish trolls, I just don't have access to that kind of material. I guess I could probably order books from Sweden but never have taken the time to do that.

And then there are these little Christmas figures; you have quite a bunch of little Christmas figures.

Yes, I've done those over the years for gifts for family and daughter and son.

Texas Kris Kringle.

"Jultomten" is a figure adapted from an 1880's Swedish Christmas card. Carving by Rod Johnson in 1998. The carving is owned by Tommy and Carol Nelson of Austin, Texas.

Yes. The most recent is that Swedish [one], which is a character from tradition, from about a hundred and something years ago. The artist that did that connected the Christmas theme with the original, which was a storybook figure. And I'm going to probably do some more of those in variations of what he's doing. You've got to put some life into them by having them doing something.

Your figures have wonderful faces.

Well, that's kind of what I'm interested in, is the face; the bodies don't interest me that much, it's more the faces and the eyes. And this little guy here started with this short Texan, and I've done and sold a number of those, but they are boring to do.

So you made him a little more interesting by putting a face on.

Yes. Putting a face-either put a US flag or a Texas flag or a Swedish flag.

(NOTE to reader: See image on abstract page.)

Swedish flag.

Swedish flag in his hand. Short Texan.

And you make different faces on them?

Yes. I've carved long enough now where if I don't think about it, they would tend to come out. . .

They all kind of look alike.

A full size Stetson hat carved by Rod Johnson in 1985-86.

Yes. So you've got to make a conscious effort to do something different in the faces. The profile is particularly important. You can't get a likeness of a face unless you have a side view of the face and the nose and what-have-you.

The other table has sort of different kinds of things of mine: the Stetson hat, the full-size Stetson hat that I did on a commission basis for the managing director of our company over in Sweden. I told him it was going to take a year to do that hat, and he said that's fine, but six months later he got a job offer and left Dresser Industries. So I finished the hat and kept it. A lot of kids have put their hands on that hat; it's a full-size, it's not hollowed out. One of the common questions is, "Can I wear it?" No, and that's why I mounted it to that block is to keep people from picking it up.

"The Dancing Chicken" was created by Rod Johnson to use with children at the Texas Folklife Festival.

The chicken puppet here.

The chicken. But he doesn't go so good down at Folklife, because of the grass and kids want to play with him, and a puppet like that gets all tangled up. But it's been fun to do.

He's beautiful; he's a wonderful chicken.

The guy who would accompany me from Texas Folklife Resources played the fiddle, so with that dancing toy and that chicken, he'd always do the Chicken Reel or something like that for the kids.

"President Lyndon B. Johnson" is bust carved by Rod Johnson in 1977.

That's the LBJ⁷ bust I did back in 1977. A friend of mine, way back into the 1960s, went to work for the Secret Service and was with LBJ the last year before he died, so he ended up with one of those models (that's the standard LBJ model) and so I borrowed the model. I had something to work from. It is a difficult thing to do, though, a likeness like that.

Likenesses are very hard; I think you flattered LBJ a bit. Is there a story to the Indians?

Well, that's my son's; I borrowed it from my son. He wanted something and didn't particularly want a cowboy, so I said I'd do something that's Native American for him. It's one of the few; I've done two, I think.

I was going to say-it's the only one I see, but I missed that one, yes.

"Early Aviator" was originally carved for Jim Hivner after his return from Vietnam, 1980 and this one was carved to keep by Rod Johnson.

Yes. Of Native Americans. This one has an interesting story of a old aviator. There was this lady at our church there in Austin that I got to know and her two teen-age daughters. Her husband was a prisoner of war over in Vietnam for seven years, and when Jim came back she said you've got to do something for Jim for his birthday; this was his first year back after those horrible seven years. All that I could think of was to do something that would remind him of aviation. He was a pilot, and so I did it and I liked it so much, I did one for myself. There's two of those in the world: Jim Hivner's and mine.

Do you often duplicate things? I imagine people ask you to do it all the time.

"The International Standards Man" was carved by Johnson as a spoof celebrating a new hip implant created by an Austin firm. Carved in 1994.

I don't like to make a copy of something. That's not interesting, carving-wise, to sit and worry about replication. This one, as I was telling you earlier, I put in two and a half years working for a company in Austin, a medical company that did hip and knee implants, and this was done with the guys, the engineers that I was working with. "You need to do a carving of our celebration of the getting qualified to sell a product in Europe, the ISO-9000." So this is a hip-a hip joint. The stamp, the CE stamp, was supposed to go to the managing director who would pass it on to the Swiss owners, but he backed out at the last minute thinking it was too much of a spoof on the Swiss ownership. It's a bulldog face taken somewhat from Churchill and a French beret and lederhosen and Italian boots and holding the hip implant. So I was kind of glad I got to keep that one.

Well, he's very unique. What about this one?

That's a replication out of a history book of Swedish wood carving. That's still not enjoyable for me to do a replication of somebody else's work. I mean it's interesting to do the carving, but it reminds me that it's a replication. I'd rather do something original, and not based on what somebody else has done.

"Andrew Spong" was the great- grandfather of Rod Johnson who came to Texas in the 1880s from Sweden. He carved it in 1980.

This is my great-grandfather from Sweden: a big, tall, loudmouthed Swede that was always out of character. He was an auctioneer here in Travis and Williamson Counties for a number of years. I barely remember him; he died in 1942 when I was just a kid, but they had a lot of family photographs.

"Robert McAlpin Williamson" was carved for the 150th birthday of Williamson County in 1999 and donated to the Williamson County Historical Museum.

This is the one for the celebration in 1998 of Williamson County. That's "Three Legged Willie" that Williamson County was named after: Robert McAlpin Williamson, State Senator and Judge in 1848. He never lived here in this county, but as an honor, they named the county for him. His right leg was drawn up at the knee from what the records show, from what they called "milk leg," from when he was a kid, fifteen years old. He'd been on a wooden peg leg like that for all his life, but he could ride a horse and was really an interesting figure.

Judge Stubblefield here at district court is the one that is the historian of "Three Legged Willie." I did this one and donated it to the County Museum [to show] who "Three Legged Willie" was.

I see a few pieces here that are religious pieces, there's a St. Francis there. There's another one.

Yes. I did those back in the 1970s. And I'm not very proud of them as woodcarvings; they're pretty crude and rough.

There's one over in your dad's work here.

"The Creation of Man" was designed and carved by S. E. Johnson in 1984.

This is my dad's version of the creation of man, which he did in the 1980s. He died in 1989, so I think he did this one probably in 1984 or 1985. He talked about it for a number of years; he had this mental picture of hands out of the clouds or something, but he couldn't think about how he could do clouds. So he finally came up with this driftwood and the old guy laying on the ground, and then these bellows with these two big hands coming out of the driftwood breathing life into man. He liked to talk about this one with people when he'd go to the festivals.

So your dad also went to festivals with you?

Yes, he went to YesterFest. He never came to Folklife; [he had a] physical condition where he couldn't come to Folklife.

"Down Stream Pollution" was carved by S. E. Johnson in 1984 as a humorous statement about pollution.

This one he did during the Reagan era and was originally labeled "Reagan's Trickle-Down Economy."⁸ People were so offended by that that he changed the name to "Downstream Pollution." That's Austin and Bastrop and on down the Colorado River. He'd always heard stories that they actually did this back in the Depression. But I don't know whether I believe it or not.

It's a great carving. And what you said about your dad's humor, it's very obvious there.

"Hogheaven, Texas" was carved by S. E. Johnson after a visit to the Future Farmers of American Show in Georgetown, Texas, in 1984.

Yes. Strange. This one he saw here in Georgetown at the show for the kids. They take their animals and the kid was sleeping on this box in the pen with his hog, with his hand laying out holding on to the hog. These two are from a Swedish book; he didn't want to copy something. Once you get the idea in your head, then you go do it.

Right.

You know, without ever looking back at the book.

Sure. Well, anything else that you would like to talk about-any of these? Like this little bear.

I don't know why he did that. He just did it one time.

Just did it.

On his own, completely. My daughter's got another bear that she talked him out of back when. This one is Tip O'Neil.⁹

I think his likeness is better than the Reagan.

"Tip O'Neil" was carved by Sigurd Johnson in 1983.

That was at YesterFest in Bastrop. A lady from Brenham who had connections ended up talking him out of the other one and sent it to Tip, and my dad got a letter back from Tip appreciating the carving. So then he had to make himself one, so this is his second version of Tip.

What's the red-bearded fellow back there?

That's a Viking. Or his version of what a Viking looked like. I think it's the Hollywood version though. We don't know what they looked like. Those four back there are somewhat from that other Swedish woodcarver that I was telling you about when we went to the museum. This pair here is from a family photograph of two Swedish immigrants. This is that same great-grandfather that I did the bust of.

I see.

And this is one of his old immigrant buddies, Mr. Wegstrom, who has descendants here. So these two old guys were friends back when they came from Sweden to Texas in 1881.

It's interesting how two people take the same subject and come up with something very, very different, isn't it? That's what artistry is about.

"Mobutu, Ruler of Zaire, Africa" carved by S. E. Johnson from the cover of "Newsweek" in 1986.

This is a Mobutu. I can't remember what country in Africa. . .that was another picture on the cover Newsweek magazine.

Right. Uganda maybe?

Uganda, I think, Mobutu. Many of these little busts were people that he saw either at church or around Georgetown here.

That's a wonderful face. You do have a lot of these, don't you. Are they on display all around the house? Did you gather them from friends and relatives and out of boxes?

No, all of these of my dad's I keep stashed; I keep mine pretty much out and take a lot of them with me when I do festivals. It's difficult to carry them around, and they get broke and I've broken several of them and had to do repair work.

You do quite a lot of work on commission now; the commissions come to you through your festival work?

Yes.

Do you enjoy it?

I hate promising people because then you've got to do it, once you make a promise. And I've got about a dozen commissions now; I've told them it may be a year. "Oh, that's okay" and they wait a year. A lady in Austin wants four for next Christmas. And another lady wants one or two every Christmas. A friend of mine, a cousin of my wife who's a school teacher (I've done her school program-seventh graders-over in Taylor), she wants two for her own sons. It's part of the Swedish heritage.

Right.

That's what they tie it back to, is the Swedish heritage, within the Swedish community.

Sounds like you could keep busy just carving Christmas elves if you wanted to.

Yes, but it's boring to repeat and repeat and repeat. I always try to do something different with it and not use the first one as any kind of model. Or any thought of it even, you know. It's the challenge of doing something for the first time.

Of all of your pieces, do you have a favorite?

"The Egyptian Cat" was carved by Rod Johnson in 1986.

I think that cat, that Egyptian cat, is probably one of my favorites, for an oddball reason. It's the front view of that cat that you have to look at to see the symmetry.

It is beautifully symmetric, yes.

And then the toughest carving was his tail [because it] curved. . .

What a beautiful tail.

Curved and reduced in size while it's curving also. She [my daughter] works for the State Teacher's Association, so this cat sits in her office in Austin; it's been admired by a lot of people. Interesting project to do something like that.

This guy is kind of one of my favorite caricature type carvings. And LBJ, but I would probably never go back to this kind of portrait carving or bust-type carving. I'd rather do the small figures. The "Three Legged Willie" was an interesting challenge to do.

Now was "Three Legged Willie" something you decided to do, or was that commissioned by Williamson County?

Well, County Judge Stubblefield could tell you his life's story at the drop of a hat. And so he's the one, through our committee meetings and knew that I carved. He suggested it or I thought of it or something, and pretty soon we decided to do it. The big portrait of him that this is based on hangs in the capitol, in the senate chamber; and it was restored about ten years ago. The painting was done like fifty years after he died, so I'm not sure about the likeness.

Okay. So the likeness is all speculative.

Speculative.

What is the most fun of the carvings that you do?

I think the small human figures.

By small you mean something like this?

Of this size.

This is about six inches?

Yes, they're about six inches. But it's this prior phase, almost, that's the most enjoyable, is the removal of wood, the process of removal.
Once you get down to here you've got to slow down and sort of really pay attention, when you start getting into the facial details and the ear locations.

So tell me about your wood; do you get it in big particular blocks for wood carving?

Yes, it's from a specialty company up in Iowa. That's another interesting story. He's the grandson of an old farmer up there who happened to have a sawmill. And Randy's grandfather gave him this sawmill, and Randy farms the old family farm and found that there's a market for basswood, which grows all over in that northeastern corner of Iowa and is now supplying people all over the country. I do it by mail, just pick up the phone and call him, ordering about seventy pounds. They are typically three inch by three inch by random lengths, like this. But the difference is it's air-dried. When you buy commercially the wood has been kiln-dried, it doesn't carve near as well as the air-dried.

It's harder?

It's too dried out almost. He air-dries this for eighteen months in the barn. He has the luxury of sawing it up and putting it in the barn for eighteen months, and he won't hardly ship anything that hasn't been out there eighteen months. And it's always good: no grain, no knots, no splintering, no splitting.

So when you start, you start by deciding how big the finished piece will be?

I band saw a rough shape on it, just to get rid of really the excess, 'cause that's where the pleasure is: taking that roughed out block to start carving on it.

Now, are you like Michelangelo? Do you liberate the figure that's within the block?

I can understand that, but it's usually a mental image. I don't see it in the wood, I see it in my head as to what I want to do, the face or the pose or what have you. I think that's why I became a design engineer, because design engineering is a lot of that.

Because you could see it in your head.

Seeing things in three dimensions and doing it mentally. We always had that joke with our marketing people about, we've done it mentally, we just haven't done it physically. They never could understand that. What do you mean you've done it mentally? You've got to go do it for real. I think the two tie together. My dad was like that; he could visualize in three [dimensions]. We don't visualize colors very well. He didn't and I don't. We never tried, never been taught anything about colors, and mixtures.

Most of your figures seemed to be stained rather than painted.

These two here are cast reproductions of my originals. The originals sit in Sweden. We've got a guy in Brownwood that makes rubber molds and makes these castings and then we paint them. Toni and I have both done this now, just to have something available to sell when the phone rings.

Right. And they're cast out. . .?

It's a resin; forty-percent of it's ground up walnut shell, made into a flour and mixed into the resin. And what I'm so amazed about is that he can get an absolute reproduction of your original.

So you number each one of these.

Yes. I've got these sitting up in Dallas at a little folk art museum up there, and she sells quite a few of them.

[How much] do you sell them for?

I sell them for thirty-seven, and she jacks it on up to about seventy dollars.

You might talk to Janet [Weber] at our store about it, because she's always looking for stuff.

Boy, is it boring to paint those things.

I'm sure it is. You've done as many as you want to do on that?

Yes. Toni and I are both the same way; we'd rather be carving than selling or painting.

You need to find somebody who likes painting to come and work with you.

I've been told to go down to [University of Texas at Austin] and put on the bulletin board at the art school down there. You'll get plenty of people to paint your castings.

You want to tell me about the spoons?

"Wooden spoons" carved by Rod Johnson in 1998 that he uses in demonstrations on functional objects.

These are from a Swedish book on utilitarian things. A couple of things that's interesting here: it said when you make a wooden spoon or wooden knife or anything useable, how do you seal it? This has been boiled in milk for one hour and the casein in the milk goes into the wood and it won't pick up rancid tastes and what-have-you.

Of course. So you learned to do that from reading about it?

Well, not really. You can see a picture of a spoon; you can get a pattern. . .

No, I mean boiling it in milk.

Yes, that's out of that Swedish book, and that tells me it probably goes back five hundred years or so, when they'd learned how to do that. But these I did for the County Sesquicentennial¹⁰, to have something of a historic nature, to be carving when we had our festival here and when they did the video of the county. So he got me doing one of these wooden spoons, and this is a typical Swedish butter knife, too. You can buy them over there, even in Sweden today-they still use them in fact. Very classic shape.

I've probably done, I don't know, two or three dozen of these wooden boots over the years. What I've noticed with woodcarvers, and my dad included, we all had a different mental picture of what a boot looks like. And so carvers that do boots, no two people do them alike: the toes and the shape of the toes. Let me get a couple of these over here, like this one. See how much different that shape is?

Oh, yes. I see what you mean.

He's got boots on, too. But they are different: the toes are turned up.

Yes, yep, very different.

Very different. You can almost identify a woodcarver by his boots.

Are there other carvers in this tradition around here?

Yes and no. I taught when I lived in Austin, taught woodcarving through the Community Schools and the church. I've taught here in Georgetown two or three times. But it's time-consuming and hard work. I counted one time, just going back and pulling out my files, about seventy-five students that I've affected in some small way to carve; so many of them have no tradition and no heritage to draw on.

Right.

And I guess I feel so fortunate to have a heritage like that. You know, they end up being duck carvers or bird carvers: it's the carving part that interests them. And that gets into competition and going to shows and winning blue ribbons, which I have no interest in. I never spend that much time on a carving to ever have it judged competitively-get tired of it before that. But I really feel for people that don't have a heritage to draw on. A lot of them were retired IBMers that had come from all over the United States to the Austin area. And like my wife, has no particular ethnic or cultural heritage, other than they are Americans. Woodcarving is not traditional in the US culture that much. I mean, it is in the Hispanic culture, from what I've seen, which you all have, a lot of wood carving.

Yes, there is.

In fact, one that influenced me and my dad, significantly, was a Mexican fellow when I was a kid in Taylor. He came from Mexico and could sit and do just anything with a knife: chains and balls and cages.

I was going to say, I don't see you doing any of the traditional whittler's things like chains.

I've done a chain, I did a ball in a cage. . .

One?

…And that's enough.

I take it none of your children are interested in woodcarving at this time?

My daughter has sort of a peripheral interest; she's a commercial artist and does some good work on the computer-everything is computer generated. But she likes to work in clay and can do these character figures in clay.

Ah, in clay. Interesting.

She said you don't have to learn how to use a knife; you just start with clay and start doing it.

So she uses clay as an additive sculpture, and [with] wood carving she subtracts.

Yes. And she has a number of videos of that Claymation¹¹—you've seen videos of the Claymation?

Yes.

She thinks that's just fantastic work, what some photographer did with the clay figures. My son is in the political world; he's chief of staff for a state rep, in session now at the state capitol, probably. He just graduated from college at thirty-two, thirty-three, with a degree in history and probably will go on into politics somewhere down the line. I don't think he'll ever take up the hand-type stuff.

But you never can tell.

But I've got two grandsons now that I've got hope for, if I can last long enough to start bringing them to Folklife, and break them in.

They're too young to start on flowers?

They're too young, yes. They're fourteen months and ten months.

Too young to start on flowers.

Let's hope I can last so I can have an influence on those two grandsons. What else, Laurie?

How about your father's driftwood creations?

My father would see things; he lived up on Lake Travis for fifteen years and would pick up and find old pieces of wood and crazy shapes. He put the eye in there, but the bill…I don't know, some kind of a bird.

Some kind of a creature. I love this one.

Yes, that's just two pieces of wood. That was his real tinkering sort of thing later in life.

Yes, that's wonderful. The elf is. . .

Hollowed out. He did two or three of full size Indian heads too. A couple of people ended up talking him out of two of them, so I've got two of them left. But I never had the patience, I guess, to start a project of that size. I learned that when I did that cowboy hat; that's six months working on that.

How long does it take you to do a little figure? A small figure: one of your favorite six-inchers.

It depends. Carving time is probably eight to ten hours spread out over a period of time. And I get asked that question: how long does it take? Well, it can take weeks. But that doesn't mean you carve on it all the time.

Sure.

I can only carve four or five hours a day. I came back [after carving flowers at Folklife] to the doctor one time with tendonitis across here. I told him what I'd done. He said, "Well, just don't do that anymore." Not carve for four days extensively. But it's not something you're particularly interested in knowing either. You don't ever keep records of how long it takes. I typically work on one or two or three at any given time. Sometimes I get these toys, where you have to get it done in two weeks: really forty hours a week or more to make these things. It becomes work then. I mean you don't look forward to it necessarily. And that's why these commissionings kind of bug me because Christmas is not that far off.

You've got a fair amount of work before Christmas. You'll have to come down to Folklife Festival to do it.

Toni and I talked about that when we go out to Sam Houston Folk Festival and take something along to carve on; not just sit and carve on something for demonstration purposes.

What do you charge for your figures when you sell them?

"A Couple of Texans" was carved by Rod Johnson in the early 1990s to represent his Texas heritage.

The originals—these cowboys of these sizes go for about a hundred dollars. I've done a couple of dogs: thirty-five, forty dollars for a dog. But that's not interesting even. In fact, I wish I had back a lot of the ones I've sold. I may have a photograph and that's about all I've got left of it.

Right.

Toni and I neither one are into it for commercial purposes. And that's why we went to the castings, to say, well, we'll have something; if somebody wants something, they can buy one of these reproductions.

For some artists, actually seeing them in someone else's hands is part of it, but that's not for you.

Yes. I really do enjoy festivals though and talking to people. And, as you well know, at Folklife you never know who might walk up, including a lot of foreign visitors.

Editor's Note: In 1999 Rod Johnson was named the "Swedish American of the Year" by the VASA Order of America which honors Swedish emigrants who settled in North America and to show recognition to individuals who have strengthen the bonds between Sweden and America.