Queen Anne China Cabinet

While in the service of our great country I met many thousands of fellow servicemen, but only a few were ever close enough to be considered really friends.  One of those I met in 1960.  I have lost contact with the fellow serviceman over the ensuing years, but I am fortunate to yet call his wife a dear friend.  We shall know her simply as Ellie.

In a recent letter she told me a bit of her growing up years that I never knew, and I think it is a story that others will enjoy also.

Her father was a struggling young artist in the late depression years prior to World War II.  To add to his meager income from his art work he crafted and sold jigsaw puzzles.  As well as this undertaking, he also fashioned marionettes and produced shows such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Aladdin.  He must have been an inspiration to all those he came in contact with during those lean years.  Times improved through the war years, but still life was no bed of roses with a family to feed.

During 1949 a complete restorative program was begun for the White House in Washington, D. C.  President Truman had remarked to his wife that the building creaked and groaned during the night, and seemed to stand more by force of habit than structural integrity.  The first stage of the remodeling project was to completely disassemble the entire inside of the building leaving only the shell standing.  Some of the interior parts, not considered essential to reconstruction, were sold to the general public.  At this point Ellie’s dad procured three interior doors removed from the White House.  What an extraordinary feat.  One day he appeared at his home with the three large doors in the trunk of his aging 1936 Ford car.  He needed help entering his own driveway because there was a dip and the back of the car hung low from the additional weight.

Ever the artist, he tore the doors apart after stripping them of countless coatings of paint.  He now had a supply of the most beautiful, and historical, cherry wood in the nation, over 150 years old, and loving hands had brought it to a patina of exceptional color.  After considerable concentrated thought, he decided that the special wood should become a china cabinet.

Within his mind he visualized what it should look like, and proceeded to lay out the various parts on the precious wood available.  He had just so much wood, and not an inch more.  Each section of the Queen Anne cabinet was selected for its grain pattern so the parts would flow together as a unit when completed.  Maybe he had never worked with wood before, but the artist knew what was needed to make his project what he had foreseen.  The feet were fashioned in a rounded fashion, as they were in the original Queen Anne time period.  Each piece was lovingly fitted until a work of art was fashioned, merely from wood, rather than on canvas.

Can you think of a more precious piece in existence today than that one-of-a-kind Queen Anne china cabinet fashioned by the artist from the prized wood removed from the White House?  Ellie, you should be extraordinarily proud of your father’s work.