The Evolving Archery Endeavors

This passage, from Dad’s essay “Man’s Leisure Time,” seems to sum up why Dad had turned to bow-and-arrow making as a favorite hobby in the late 1920s. Archery became a family enterprise. Dad loved to hunt, and we all grew up participating in hunting and archery practice at or near the Shack as well as further afield. And it turned out that Mother particularly had an extraordinary talent and skill for tournament archery. My father was a skilled carpenter, and probably learned from his father, Carl Leopold, who was skilled with hand tools. Dad’s father was the president of the Leopold Desk Company of Burlington, Iowa, and all of Dad’s siblings became expert in woodworking. Dad started making bows and arrows in 1926, when someone gave him a bow stave of yew wood. In Madison he began to shape this stave, and later ones of Osage orange or yew, into beautiful bows. In the basement he kept his giant toolbox of carpenter tools, which he had transported from Albuquerque. We still have that great box and some of his tools—planes, squares, chisels, files, saws, and such. In the basement he also set up a German-style workbench, with a wood vise on the right side, a metal quick-release vise on the left, and a series of peg holes down the middle to hold a block in place for using a plane. Dad placed his giant staves of Osage orange or yew in the vice and shaped the bow with a sharp drawknife and a wood file. The midsection, where the grip was located, was carefully shaped and made oval to fit the hand securely. To gauge the symmetry of his sculpturing of the bow stave, he hung up a large sheet of brown paper on the wall and placed a hook high at the top, hung up the bow, and, with the bowstring attached to the sculptured bow tips, pulled the string downward so the bow bent, and so he could see if the curve of the drawn bow was evenly symmetrical.