Meet Joe Amuso...
Joe has always been a handy guy with tools and wood (he built several of his children’s homes), but his nephew opened up a whole new field of hobbying for him when he was shown how to build handcrafted, beautiful, sturdy, practical, Shaker-style boxes. “I’d been retired from the (Pittsfield) fire department and had also hurt my back, so I was really getting bored. I was sitting watching my sons build a barn, and my nephew came up and told me he had something I’d really love to do, to build these Shaker boxes. He said, ‘hey, I make ‘em, I’ll show you how.’” Joe was 75 when he started making his first oval boxes. He made the first one out of native cherry, "it took me awhile to get it, I mean, the quality I wanted. But I stuck with it, perfected my technique. I got into it deep, really into it. I cut my own wood, a buddy of mine has a sawmill in Beckett and anytime he cuts down a cherry tree, why he gives me a call, and I grab a few boards. I take them home and saw them up. I go from 3/4” board, to 1/2” board, down to 3/16th of an inch. I sand them down and bring it to whatever dimension the box requires.”
In answer to a question of the time he invests, he says “After the bands are made it takes me about three days. You can’t continue on them until you stain them, boil them, bend them and let them dry for some time period, depending on the moisture content. About seven hours over three days, so it’s not too bad.”
During high school, he was sent over to Hancock Shaker Village for a scrap metal drive. “We got word that they had a lot of old cast iron farm machinery to donate. So PHS sent a pickup truck and the school janitor and a couple of us kids went out there. We managed to get out of school for the day,” he chuckles. “So the men loaded the truck, while some of the women showed us around, gave us milk and cookies. It was still a working farm then, you know, there were still some Shakers left, before it became pretty much a museum.” That was Joe’s first experience of the great precision and detail the Shaker’s put into their lives and their crafts and it left him deeply impressed. So at 17 he was first inspired and at 75 he started making the Shaker boxes in much the same manner. “So it only took me about 60 years to get going on it. I hope people who see them on the website and get some for themselves, love the work the way I do!”
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