Part III · Worth keeping

The Gray Rocker

There is a gray rocking chair in my living room in Philadelphia. My father bought it broken in about 1961. It was old when he bought it. Call it somewhere north of eighty, probably near a hundred. Nobody has ever dated it and nobody ever will. Of the four things a person can sit on in that room, it is the one that gets used when there are people around. A rocker invites a body in a way an upholstered thing does not. This one tends to start a story.

A few years ago my parents were downsizing. They did the sensible thing and asked which of their four children wanted what. I claimed the rocker. It was not, at that moment, in good order: one arm was dangling and the other was loose, because my father had, for the first time I could remember, left a repair unfinished. I did not claim the chair in spite of that. I claimed it partly because of it. The chair was the most vivid object I knew for my father's essential character. The unfinished repair was the last brushstroke.

Even as a boy I had mistrusted one joint, the spindly connection where the arm meets the rear stile of the back. It always felt uncertain under my hand, and the chair's own record backed the feeling: that joint had carried more of my father's interventions than any other part. So when the chair became mine I decided to make that one joint bulletproof. I conceived a small bracket. I chose a chunk of hard maple. I cut the shape first in balsa foam, a dense modeling board that sands like a hard cheese, and tuned its fit against the chair with a few passes of sandpaper. Then I reproduced the tuned shape in maple.

I picked a heavy wood screw with a black-oxide finish and left it showing. There was no reason to hide it, and sixty years of precedent not to.

The chair I was working on was a core sample of my father's hand. Under the gray paint were earlier colors, ghosting through where the top coat had worn. There was a stratum of plastic wood. There was one very long drywall screw I could date to his late period the way an archaeologist dates a layer by its nails. I added my maple bracket to the sequence and left the older strata where they were. The strata were the point.

The whole thing took a Saturday afternoon in my shop and delivered the particular satisfaction of a small problem completely solved by dinner.

I knew my parents would want to see it, so I photographed every step and wrote the build up in an email. My father corrected some of my facts. My mother corrected my father. My father's friend John weighed in.

My father, Gael D. Ulrich, grew up in Devils Slide, Utah, a cement company town folded into a canyon. He was a Yankee at heart, which in his case meant that he never threw anything away and that nothing pleased him more than returning a found object to use. In graduate school he made pocket money pulling washing machines off the curb, repairing them, and reselling them. He became a serious researcher on a narrow and genuinely hard subject, the formation of particles in flames. He did that front-edge work in a laboratory full of ancient instruments he had repurposed for it. He was a combustion engineer, and his first love, he would tell you, was burning things. He once said the only possession he wanted to carry into the afterlife was his South Bend lathe.

The Christmas I was eleven, he gave me a chemistry set. Not the toy kind. It was university-surplus glassware: a condenser, an Erlenmeyer flask, a stopper cutter, glass tubing. Handing an eleven-year-old a Bunsen burner troubled even him, so my heat came from a hot plate he had built from a clothes iron turned upside down on a wooden box. What it taught me, before I had words for it, was that a serious instrument can be made from salvage.

Here was a man whose profession was oxidation, the conversion of solid matter into heat and smoke and fine particles, and whose deepest private instinct was to keep. He died in 2023. The gray rocker had been in his care for sixty years.

Later in the same year I repaired it, my father told me the acquisition story by the fire in my parents' house. (He was a combustion engineer; a fireplace was his natural habitat.) Around 1961, at a church white-elephant sale in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he and his friend John Romish both bid six dollars on a broken rocking chair. They flipped a coin; my father won. Decades later, John weighed in on my repair email with his own side of it.

John bought a different chair. The one he lost he replaced with a proper antique, a Boston rocker he bought for sixty dollars, ten times the price. When he took it to a furniture repairer in Boston, the man refused to touch it, "fearing its real value would be threatened." I do not know what happened to John's chair afterward. My father kept repairing ours, and when it came to me I felt free to add a bracket of my own. The six dollars he paid had not measured what the rocker would become worth to him or to me.

The rocker was not his only recurring repair. We also had a set of six oak chairs we called the Growly Chairs. Each had a carved beast's face in the back, its mouth open wide enough to hold a napkin or serve as a handle. My father rebuilt them more times than anyone counted. They were eventually given away as a set, still working. I remember the faces more readily than any particular repair. Someone else got both the furniture and the next opportunity to fix it.

A family could account for the repairs to the chairs it had kept. For much older furniture, I had to ask what kind of survival I was looking at.

In 1936, excavators from the Metropolitan Museum found a chair in front of the entrance to an undisturbed tomb in Thebes. It belonged to Hatnefer, a private woman, the mother of a court official. It is boxwood, cypress, and ebony, joined with mortises, tenons, and pegs, and its seat, a web of woven linen cord, is original. It was made around 1490 BCE. It is a household chair, the kind of object this project is about, and thirty-five times older than my name for it.

But thirty-five centuries of survival were not thirty-five centuries of sitting. Hatnefer's chair had been buried, removed from the ordinary succession of use, damage, repair, and disposal. Its survival made me wonder what an excavation a thousand years from now might turn up from our own time.

Perhaps a monobloc, the familiar inexpensive chair molded in one piece from plastic. There are so many, in so many places, that they have an enormous number of chances to end up somewhere favorable to preservation. I can imagine one surviving forgotten in a sealed storeroom or buried in debris. I do not know whether its plastic would remain intact for a thousand years. But I would hesitate to bet that the chair representing us in a distant excavation will be our finest furniture.

The common fossils are mostly marine invertebrates, not spectacular dinosaurs: shells and the hard remains of creatures such as trilobites. They had numbers, durable parts, and places where sediment could bury them. Abundance alone does not ensure preservation, but it gives chance more specimens to work on. Finding an ancient chair tells me that one survived. It does not tell me how likely its companions were to do so.

My father's rocker had taken a different route. It had stayed among people who used it and noticed when it needed work.

Westminster Abbey's Coronation Chair offered another kind of survival. Made of oak in 1300–1301, it was used at Charles III's coronation in 2023. It had acquired repairs and replacement parts, including its gilt lions. But a chair cared for as a national ceremonial object had advantages I could not supply with a drawing and a pile of boards. I was asking what might keep an ordinary chair in somebody's room.

Thonet's chair No. 14 of 1859 had sold fifty million by 1930. It had numbers on its side too, but its continued manufacture offered something else: a design could remain in use even as individual chairs wore out. A newly made No. 14 belongs to that long history without being an old chair.

I wanted people to be able to make further examples of my chairs. For the ones I had already built, though, I wanted something closer to the rocker's life than Hatnefer's: a place in somebody's room, followed by another person's room, with repairs along the way. Remaining recognizable in an excavation would be a different achievement.

That ambition gave me three questions. Would someone want to keep the chair? Could that person understand how it was made and how to take it apart? Could the repair be accomplished with accessible materials and skills? I called those qualities lovable, legible, and maintainable. They were things I could work on, not conditions every ancient survivor had met.

The encounters with my chairs make the first question difficult. A person can understand the construction and have no wish to keep the object. Someone who loves it may still lack the room, money, tools, or time to repair it. My father's rocker had acquired its place through years of use and repair; I could not give a new chair that history in advance.

For legibility, I wanted the construction to be understandable without my explanation. The keel was one response: it concentrated the geometry in a member someone could inspect. Documentation could help, but I could not assume my website or a particular supplier would always be available.

For maintainability, I wanted accessible fasteners and replaceable parts. My father had kept glued furniture going for decades. I hoped to make the next person's repairs easier.

I had encountered a less obvious repair dependency while fitting drawer fronts. The hardware was excellent: prefabricated boxes, smooth runners, adjustments that let me line everything up. I would use it again. But the front attached through a fitting whose screws expanded plastic inserts inside bored holes in the oak. They did not simply cut threads into the wood. If that fitting failed after its maker stopped supplying it, the next repair might require inventing a new attachment rather than finding a larger screw. A wonderfully convenient assembly today could leave a specific little problem for someone later.

I had already taken one of my own chairs apart and put it back together. The maple chair of the thirty-first of August was a week old when I rebuilt it. I restained the keel, remade the tie in twelve-millimeter stock, replaced the seat, and swapped every bracket. Nothing had to be drilled out or cut off to reach anything else. Taking the chair apart and putting it back was fastener work. It came off the scale afterward at 16.3 pounds against 17 before. I had a shop and fresh knowledge of every connection, advantages a later owner might not have. Still, I had rebuilt the chair in an afternoon without sacrificing the parts I wanted to keep.

But being able to repair an object does not settle whether to keep repairing it.

In a fit of optimism, I had furnished my Park City home with a few pieces from Design Within Reach. I especially liked the Noguchi coffee table in walnut: a rounded triangle of glass resting on two curved wooden pieces joined at a pivot. The house also hosted vacation renters.

First the wooden base broke. I suspected beer pong at a bachelor party, though I did not witness the event. A furniture repairer glued the wood back together and fashioned a new pivot pin from a turned-down piece of steel rebar. The repaired table lasted another five years. Then our longtime housekeeper texted me. She had tipped the glass off the base, and it had shattered into little pieces.

I balked at the replacement top, which I remember costing about as much as a new table. I put the walnut base in my shop. A couple of weeks ago I looked at it again. I could still replace the glass, perhaps through a local fabricator. Or I could cut two keels from the walnut and make a Keel Panel chair. I had not yet done either.

Replacing the top would keep the table in use. Cutting keels would end this particular Noguchi table while keeping its walnut useful. I liked the table, but I was also interested in the wood. My father's rocker had stayed a rocker through all those repairs. Here I was considering taking apart a design I admired to make something else. Would I object if someone eventually looked at one of my chairs and saw a supply of good lumber?

Sometimes I wanted to keep an object without knowing anything of its history. On a walk at dusk in August, before the September rebuilds, I found an unexpected candidate for repair. Within fifty meters of my own door I passed four chairs set out on the verge: a white stool and two blocky wooden chairs I found frankly hideous, and, at the end of the row, an orange one. A plain vernacular library chair, a slatted back and clean, balanced lines, painted orange somewhere along the way. My father made pocket money hauling washing machines off exactly this kind of curb. It seems I cannot walk past a good object left for dead either. I turned it over all the way to the park, decided I had to have it, started to worry someone would beat me to it, and came back for the prize.

Up close I could see how it was made: every joint screwed through a milled pocket, driven at an angle, the same move the K uses.

I expected to be able to repair it, but I doubted it would find a place in the house. It went to the shop, where it displaced a molded deck chair.

The rocker is in my living room, with a sheepskin pad on the seat now. It is sat in whenever there are people around. It still starts a story or two, this one among them. The chair is still being kept.

A chapter of The Hundred-Year Chair, drafted and refined in public. The same text lives in the book; the interactive tools and the fully-sourced technical notes live here. home · the book · the technical notes · hundredyearchair.com