My Handsaw

Everyone has a family history by which they cannot help but be influenced.  I am no different.  My father a number of years ago started talking to his aunt, my great Aunt Betty, about our genealogy.  Betty had been doing research and had history going back a number of generations.  I have always been curious, but never enough to research it myself.  Instead, I prefer to be inspired by the story of my family, as told to me by my family.  I am also incredibly fortunate to have an object that I inherited to assist me in understanding it better, my handsaw.

After my paternal grandfather, Robert, died in 1994, my dad inherited a number of his tools.  Among them were a number that he inherited from his father, John Haas.  John Haas was the first Haas born in the United States.  His father, my great-great grandfather, emmigrated from Germany to settle near Guttenberg, Iowa.  As a young man, John moved from the Guttenberg Iowa area, to Southern Minnesota, near Sleepy Eye, MN, where I grew up.

John Haas made the move from Iowa to Minnesota in a wagon with two sets of tools, a set of knives for butchering livestock, and a set of woodworking tools to construct barns.  My handsaw, the handsaw that I inherited, came in that wagon from Iowa to Southern Minnesota.  In 2011, it made it's way back to Iowa when I moved  here with my family.  It was involved in the construction of barns between Eastern Iowa and Southern Minnesota and many other projects over the years.  It is etched "Pat. Pending June 23rd, 1874" on its blade, made by Henry Disston and Sons of Philadelphia.  Before any tool collectors get any funny ideas, let me assure you it is not for sale.

Throughout my early teenage years, I worked hard on general farm labor, later at the grocery store in Sleepy Eye.  I remember getting a raise at the grocery store that was a pretty healthy increase, like a quarter an hour.  The store manager put the idea in my mind about staying on after graduation and continuing to work for him.  I was never content with it, knowing that I wanted more.

I diverged quite a bit from the path that most of my family has taken.  Most of my family are very hardworking blue collar types.  I have a Masters degree in Engineering from the University of Minnesota.  Education through high school was strongly supported, but after that, college wasn't looked upon as necessarily a good thing.  It was expensive, and people with college degrees lacked common sense.  We were encouraged to continue with some education after high school, but learning a trade at a vocational school was more along the lines of what was expected.  An advanced degree in engineering was a foreign concept.

Although as a structural engineer, I have a career that doesn't require much physical labor, I still do most of my house remodeling tasks myself.  My career does give me a better than average knowledge base to draw from, so it is not completely unrelated.  I am around construction plans every day.  I was a do-it yourselfer before that was cool enough to have its own cable channel.  I use my handsaw at least once on every project possible.  Most recently, I used it to cut 2x4's that I am using to form the foundation for steps that I am making for a patio project outside my kitchen sliding door.  The history of the object that I hold as I do it never escapes me.  And that saw cuts better than any other handsaw that I have purchased.  Maybe it is because they made saws better in the 1800s.  I like to think that it has to do with a little extra effort being put forth by my great-grandfather.  I think he is pushing the saw as much as I am, its teeth removing the wood stroke after stroke under the influence of his muscle power as much as mine.

When I moved to Iowa in 2011, I was 41.  I told my wife that when I turned 82, I would be 1/2 Iowan.  I came to Iowa for work, changing my career focus from working on buildings in large cities, to work on projects in rural areas, many of them in the agricultural industry, amazingly similar to my great grandfather more than 100 years earlier.  As much as I like my career behind a desk, each time I use that saw to cut through a piece of wood, I am reminded how much satisfaction I get from a good days worth of hard labor.

I have done a lot of introspection over the last couple of years.  Having a serious disease like Parkinson's tends to bring that out of you.  My handsaw not only tells a lot about my family, it reveals how much I am influenced by them and their history.  I always thought I was a big city kid, not quite fitting in with Iowa.  It turns out that this is where we started.  I always thought I was so different from my family still living in Minnesota.  It turns out that I was wrong about my family and Iowa.  I am already 100% Iowan, and very comfortable being descended from hardworking folks who get satisfaction from physical labor.  My handsaw proves it to me.