Tongue-and-Groove and Tongue and Cheek

By Paul E. Fitzgerald
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, January 15, 2001

FINCASTLE, Va. -- Jake Cress will probably be smiling on Friday when he walks into Sotheby's in New York, but his wife, Phebe, may be the only one who can tell.

She knows that Jake seldom involves more than his eyes -- a crinkle at the corners and a twinkle in the centers -- when he smiles. The occasion may evoke some slight deviation. This taciturn, laconic master cabinetmaker and craftsman from the southern Appalachians will be there for the first sale of one of his creations by an international auction house. It's a new experience, both for Sotheby's and for Cress, because the piece is a life-size, three-dimensional cartoon, executed in wood and called "Hickory, Dickory Clock." The catalogue for this "Important Americana" auction calls the clock "absurdist interpretation of historical styles." Cress uses the term "animated furniture."

Whatever the label, it's off-the-scale on the whimsy meter, and has delighted children and humor-empowered adults. This specific execution was a gift from Cress to the Art Museum of Western Virginia and is being offered at auction to benefit that Roanoke institution's acquisition fund. It is a traditional, dignified, grandfather's clock that has come alive, writhing and twisting, its face grimacing, trying to use its pendulum bob to smash a mouse that is running up the clock's cabinet, while a more agile, second mouse has avoided the clock's outstretched foot. A similar Cress piece is in the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

Cress's growing focus on "funny furniture" is moving him away from his hard-earned reputation as a highly competent repairer, restorer and reproducer of designs and products created by others. It has changed him at age 56 into an artist with uncommon vision and the skill to express it. He says that he is aiming at youngsters "before their imagination has been corrupted by conformities." He is doing so by applying creativity, ingenuity and humor to usually stuffy 18th-century furniture.

Such an odd approach is no surprise to Cress's neighbors in this historic county seat, where the town limits today are exactly where they were in the original charter of 1772. He has the distinction of being accepted as a true eccentric in a community where some degree of eccentricity is considered a norm, if not a requirement.

In this village of slightly fewer than 400, cupped in a mountain bowl between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Front, Jake Cress is known as a salty ex-sailor who for years carried a vicious, profane parrot on his shoulder or atop the steering wheel of his aging pickup truck. He makes his furniture in a log cabin built in 1784, the immediate previous owner of which also was a skilled woodworker. His restoration of a friend's 1915 Old Town mahogany canoe, in his early Fincastle days, may be rated by Cress's acquaintances as the most memorable of his efforts. The canoe has gained a cachet of its own in local lore. This past summer, as a bluegrass band played and a choir sang "Amazing Grace" on the banks of the James River, Cress's handiwork disappeared in a pillar of flame as part of a rather spontaneous Viking funeral held for its affectionately regarded owner.

Cress now does a lot of custom work for nationally known furniture collectors; some of his pieces have been priced as high as $25,000. He has been known to refuse a commission or restoration work that offends his sensitivities -- even in his empty-pocket days. He is not given to idle chatter, suffers fools badly, and when he does speak, does so softly, surely and shortly. His is a lurking humor that unnerves the humor-impaired, as does his direct gaze when focused on those less sure of themselves. He prefers to peer quizzically -- over granny glasses and from beneath bushy eyebrows and drooped lids that mask his clear green eyes -- and he does, indeed, look askance -- frequently.

Cress turned his back on a two-generation mining tradition and the rigors of life in Norton and the coal fields of southwestern Virginia, but seemed drawn to dance in harm's way. He extended his Navy enlistment to five years in order to volunteer for submarine training, and later found himself in 1968 beneath the surface of Haiphong harbor in a decrepit World War II diesel sub, four years before the publicized open mining of that waterway in 1972.

With a correspondence course and the Navy's superior sound and recording equipment, Cress prepared himself for a career as an actor. Adventures as a radio announcer and disc jockey, in dinner theaters and national touring companies, onstage and in film, paralleled his successes with wood. Many locals consider his acting zenith to have been his portrayal of a town marshal in the movie "Sommersby," filmed in 1993 on location in neighboring Bath and Rockbridge counties. Cress, however, says his greatest satisfaction came from his role as Dr. Dorn in a 1991 production of Chekhov's "The Seagull" at Virginia Tech.

His first furniture effort was in 1969. Fresh out of the Navy, broke and needing a wedding present for his only brother, he built a set of tables -- using a handsaw with a bumper jack for a clamp. He later joined that schoolteacher brother in 1974 in opening a woodworking shop in Abingdon, Va.

Jake credits Phebe, an Abingdon native who had an antique shop there at the time, with being the source of most of his knowledge regarding 18th-century furniture, its designs, techniques and values.

When the couple moved to the Fincastle area in 1975, his career in wood took on a new dimension. "I started out as an expert, and then spent years discovering just how much I didn't know," Cress says. He feels that he then was "producing good pieces but nothing that could have been called fine."

That level of recognition was not long in coming, though.

Within two years, customers readily used "fine" to describe his work. Their judgment was validated by an increasing number who entrusted highly valued antiques and beloved family heirlooms, damaged or neglected, to his ministrations for repair and restoration. As word spread, his pieces wound up in important furniture collections up and down the East Coast, and his work was featured in antique and woodworking magazines. Cress's awareness of the delicate details and nuances of late-18th-century furniture set him on the road to developing a nonconformist style of his own. He found himself grossly offended by the promotion efforts of a Georgetown gallery that was flacking an exhibit of another's reproductions as "art" and their creator as an "artist."

Feeling that "I can do better than this," he began to visualize a not-so-gentle nudge for those who might take themselves too seriously. Thus, in 1990, was born "Oops!" in the Philadelphia Chippendale style, except that in the "claw-and-ball" foot of one front leg, the ball has "escaped," with the chair's leg and grasping claw stretching to recapture it.

More than a dozen additions to his field of wacky furniture have followed. The "Hickory Dickory Clock" concept first took shape in 1997. But despite the acclaim Cress has won, when people in Fincastle ask what he does for a living, he is likely to respond -- with a twinkle -- "I make sawdust."

© 2001 The Washington Post Company