Larry Haun, the Carpenter’s Carpenter - NYTimes.com
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October 26, 2011
The Carpenter’s Carpenter By PENELOPE GREEN
LARRY HAUN, who turned 80 in May, grew up on the wind-blown Nebraska plains, in a balloon-framed wood house with no insulation, electricity, running water or central heating. His first “constructions” were a little house, a wagon and some shelves he made with orange crates and a curved-claw hammer. Since then, Mr. Haun has spent a lifetime building houses — straw bales in Nebraska, adobe and cob in New Mexico, tract houses in Southern California — and teaching others to do so, in articles and books written in clear prose spiked with an anecdote or two, for Fine Homebuilding magazine and its publishing parent, the Taunton Press. His methods, gleaned during a thrift-driven, Depression-era childhood and honed through decades of production building, can be summed up as a collection of elegant shortcuts, making him the E. B. White of carpenters. After he “retired,” to a little 1950s clapboard in Coos Bay, Ore., Mr. Haun built houses for Habitat for Humanity, and wheelchair ramps and grab bars for poor people with special needs, or those who were in hospices. In his engaging memoir, “A Carpenter’s Life as Told by Houses,” published last month, the author, a former union journeyman carpenter and philosopher, wondered if his freezing childhood was the source of his restless energy, which until about six months ago, by all accounts, was nearly boundless. On Monday, Mr. Haun died of lymphoma, a cancer he “caught,” as he put it last week, nine years ago and beat back once. It was his work that most likely killed him. In his book, Mr. Haun described working without a mask and without OSHA rules for much of his life, unloading copper-, chromate- and arsenictreated lumber, still dripping with green liquid, and then going home with his jeans soaked in the stuff. Not that he was bitter. He loved being a carpenter, he wrote, loved the act of creation, and of building structures that were small and warm. Mr. Haun could drive nails in two licks, said Kevin Ireton, the former editor of Fine Homebuilding and Mr. Haun’s first editor there. “One to set and one to sink. I never got a chance to work directly with him,” Mr. Ireton said. “I know he would have shamed me and made me feel like I was totally incompetent. Not that he would have said anything. He would have expressed that with his extraordinary skill.” Building can attract a lot of testosterone, Mr. Ireton added, but Mr. Haun was a gentle man. “It takes a certain brashness to stand up there and look at a piece of bare ground and say, ‘I’m going to build this house,’ ” he said. “Larry had all that skill and confidence, but there’s no brashness about him. He’s just
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Larry Haun, the Carpenter’s Carpenter - NYTimes.com
quiet and humble, which made for a remarkable combination, the likes of which I had never seen.” In his book, Mr. Haun interweaved his own history with the history of building houses in this country, and in so doing chewed on topics that run the gamut from production building and its implications to immigration and bigotry, the emotional and environmental consequences of waste, and the wonder and gifts of the natural world. “How have I been shaped by the houses I’ve lived in?” he wrote. “Who and what would I be if I’d been born in an upscale mansion, or a shack by the river?” In his long life, Mr. Haun lived in a trailer, a three-family collective and a condemned house once owned by a hoarder who had filled her own house with so much stuff that she was living on the porch, a victim of her own shopping. When Mr. Haun and his first wife, Renee, divorced, they had two children, Eric and Risa. He married his second wife, Mila, nearly 29 years ago, and she had three of her own, Dario, Sarita and Ninay. Theirs was a blended family, which they folded into a 950-square-foot house with three bedrooms and one bathroom. Mr. Haun’s renovation of the house illustrates his priorities: he built two rooms on the porch, but not bedrooms; instead, one was a quiet spot for homework and the other was a hang-out room lined with carpeting and pillows. His mother, Elizabeth, was born in a “soddy,” or sod house. Like many families lured to the plains by the Homestead Act, which drew settlers west with the promise of free land, his mother’s family built the oneroom house with the materials at hand: earth and grass, otherwise known as Nebraska marble. She went to school in a sod house, and after college, came home to teach in a straw bale, the kind built without a timber frame. (The tightly compressed bales were load-bearing, a building method known as Nebraska style.) She taught her five children (Mr. Haun had two brothers and two sisters) how to sew, garden, bake bread and stick up for themselves. Mr. Haun was 5 when the local Klu Klux Klan burned a cross on his family’s front lawn. “What do you do when there are no Jews or blacks around as the focal point for your frustration and hatred?” he wrote. “That’s an easy one. We were the only Catholic family in the entire county.” His mother’s reaction was typical of her. After the riders left, she followed the gang to the local coffee shop armed with a rolled up newspaper, with which she whacked one Klansman across the face. In the mid-1950s, Mr. Haun moved to Southern California and set up a construction company with his two brothers, Jim and Joe. They arrived in the middle of the postwar housing boom, when the promise of the G.I. Bill and new building technologies and materials, like pneumatic nailers and Drywall, had jump-started a construction revolution. He and his brothers learned to build a lot of houses fast. IT was about a year and a half ago that Peter Chapman, the executive editor of Taunton Press, Fine Homebuilding’s parent company, received an e-mail from Mr. Haun telling him that he had started to write
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Larry Haun, the Carpenter’s Carpenter - NYTimes.com
another book. It was about his life, and his relationship with different kinds of houses. Would Mr. Chapman read the first chapter? “I told him we’d never do a book like that,” Mr. Chapman recalled. “And then he sent me Chapter 2, and then Chapter 3, and it was gut-wrenching.” Mr. Chapman persuaded Taunton’s president, Sue Roman, to publish the book. “There was this wellspring of feeling in the company,” he said. “Everybody who read it found something in it. I knew Larry was a good writer who could clearly explain how to install a step. But I kept wondering where this other stuff was coming from. It’s a very spiritual view of the world.” In his book, Mr. Haun wrote about attending the University of California, Los Angeles, and the loneliness of being a farm boy living in a teardrop trailer (the 20th-century progeny of a sheep wagon, as he points out), “shopping” at the Goodwill drop boxes and stumbling over a history assignment to write a thesis on the difference between Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy. “I had no idea what a thesis was, let alone how to write one,” he wrote. You get the sense he figured it out. He also wrote admiringly of the cheap philosophy he had learned from bumper stickers. In New Mexico, he once noted the ubiquitous “Born Again” stickers, and was thrilled to finally see one that announced simply, “Born O.K. the First Time.” Did Mr. Haun have a favorite bumper sticker? He had a hard time speaking to a reporter last week, but sent his answer by e-mail a day later: “Save the earth. It’s the only planet that has chocolate.”
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