Any boy in the southeast Bronx in the late 'forties, early 'fifties, could
do amazing things with a hammer and a wooden orange crate lifted from the
local fruitstand.  Take it apart, save and straighten the nails, and you
could create a machine gun on tripod, say, along with a couple of neat
rubber-band pistols.  Add a length of scavenged two-by-four, and an old
skate and you've got the makin's of a really neat scooter...etc....etc.  No
limit to the ingenuity we developed with a hammer. (Undertstand this is
still the case, but the hammer tends to be used on other people rather than
old crates.)

Went to Berkeley, Ca in 1954, when my beatnik uncle who lived out there
invited me to get off the street and try university (hadn't been thinking
about it) and I thus became a student out there, utimately staying in that
salubrious state (both meanings) until 1966. Al, my uncle, never completed
his architect's degree, but he designed houses and furniture, anyway.  Alas,
he frequently under-estimated his bids and ended up having to do a fair
amount of work himself, flooring, trim, built-ins. Some summers, and
sometimes during panic periods, he'd get me to help. This experience added
screwdrivers, drills, and lots of other stuff to my hammer expertise.

Can't say I was a neanderthal, tho.  Al owned a craftsman contractor saw
that he loved, a four inch jointer, along with skillsaw, power drill,   and
a few other tailed apprentices and it never occurred to him, nor to me, to 
use hand tools when these machines could do it faster. My name was Walt and
I was a Normie before there was a Norm. 

(jump cut to 1993-1994)  I'd been building or repairing furniture and doing
other stuff with wood for thirty years while raising a family, working a
university job, and making a life. When I retired, I built a workshop and
decided to spend most of my now free time in that sanctum, free of other
demands like work, young kids.  Fact is, that shop was (and is) equipped
with a wide variety of old tools, but they were nearly all  stationary power
machines salvaged from scrap or bought at second hand stores or thru want
ads and repaired and restored.

So, how'd I get to be a part-Neanderthal, you ask?  Mainly because I was
bored and ashamed of myself for doing a terrific job making things that I
would choose because they COULD be made with power tools. I had early fallen
in love with American colonial and federal and wanted cabriole legs, bracket
feet, arched pediments, carved fans, and all that other great stuff.  And
those machine-made "repros"  available from ads in the mags were all pretty
crappy and ugly and expensive and just looked "wrong".

Didn't know where to start and didn't have the courage to just give it a
shot.  Until (enter irony), the most sophisticated power tool I own entered
my life.  The computer brought me rec.woodworking and rec.woodworking
brought me the old tools listserv, and the rest is history.

In the past three or four years, I've learned how to put a razor sharp edge
on virtually any cutting tool, semi-mastered the plane and the chisel,
gotten into carving, and filled my house with the things I've always lusted
after.  Got me a cherry tripod candle-stand, a walnut bracket-foot sugar
chest (after Carlyle Lynch),a slant-front Mahogany secretary,  a walnut
Massachusetts highboy,  which stands seven feet and occupies the place of
pride in my house and some amazing toys (a large Mack truck cab built nearly
entirely by hand from scrap, an articulated front-end loader) for my
grandson in New York, along with sundry chippendale mirrors, assorted self
designed jewel boxes (based on federal styles) for relatives, and lots of
other things I can't even recall to catalog here, now.

I remain a pragmatist and confess that my six inch p***r j*****r, Unis*w,
and other things with tails still play a major role in my woodworking life. 
But I have learned to love a well tuned plane, and am still amazed at what
the chisel and scraper can do.  And I now have a pretty good collection of
user oldtools/handtools alongside my recently-manufactured stanley low angle
block plane.

And, gotta say this, I owe it all to you guys, especially the few I met
early on in rec.woodworking and those who helped me along with tools or
techniques. So, with special thanks to PL and BM and lots of others,  here's
another dossier (ambiguous, I guess) on sources of oldtool fundamentalism.

Yours,
Walt