Kunkel Plastics, Inc. – Plastics?!
— Excerpt from Sawdust Between Our Toes: Growing Up with Mr. Sawdust, an in-progress biography project by Mary B. Walsh.
It was everywhere in the late sixties, with a clean and contemporary appeal. Smoke colored light fixtures, borderless picture frames—and for some reason my Dad caught the bug.
I remember the night it happened. He brought home a one and three quarter inch thick piece of clear Plexiglass, and very curious, took it down to his shop to experiment; cutting edges and shaping curves. Through trial and error he figured out exactly how to work with it. Of course it was very different than wood; very unforgiving if not handled correctly the first time around. He ended up cutting out the body of an electric guitar that night—an instrument that is still in existence today. He was very impressed with how clean the material was to work with—and the wheels started turning.
Within weeks, a new business was in the works. He landed a job with a large lighting outfit making "egg-crate" lighting fixtures for business offices, and he was on his way. He hired a right hand man who had a very good business mind, and then, to my delight, he hired my husband—more accurately, my "future" husband. When I walked into the shop one summer afternoon, he was busy working. He stopped for a moment to be introduced to me—and we both knew.
And we were right.
Looking back this chapter seems like a detour for a man so in love with woodworking. And it was. Yet it was his first step away from big business and on his own. And without that detour I would not have met the love of my life.
So was it really a detour after all?
On October 21, 1970 — Wally mailed a package to his folks back home, telling them all about his new venture and how things were situated. Inside that package was this set of 8x10 photographs taken around the Kunkel Plastics workshop. Each one is thoroughly annotated. If you can parse the handwriting, there’s some truly clever details — techniques, jigs, ways of working, et cetera. It’s just plain interesting.
If you keep scrolling beyond the photos, you’ll find out what became of Kunkel Plastics…
1973
Another letter home — with a different tone this time…
In the end, the plastics venture didn’t turn out to be the wild success we’re sure he’d planned it to be – and closed its doors. In this excerpt from a letter to his parents – dated June 12th,1973 – you can almost feel yourself in the room with him as he writes about the situation… and he closes with a fascinating hint towards what’s to come… something that would prove both successful and meaningful, for the rest of his life… working with wood.
“I am typing this in my shop. There is a deadly silence all around me. The machines are quiet because they have no work to do. [...] I am facing the fact that Kunkel Plastics is on its last legs...”
“I ask for your prayers as I pray for you. I ask for you to pray that I may work with my hands as Ezra did, if it is God’s will. That’s what I want — if that’s what I’m meant to do. I want to work with wood — a God-made material — not a man-made material that does not feed the soul. Pray for that. If it’s meant to be, it will happen. If not, I will be shown another way.”