photo by Nadia White

Ed Tomicek checks a joint on a historic editing table he retrofit for high-tech Don Anderson Hall.

The table (re)turns
An historic editing table finds new life in Don Anderson Hall

by Nadia White

Like an elephant, wood never forgets. It may be bent and braced into the functional embrace of a barrel or the level plane of a table, but deep inside, year after year wood remembers it was once a tree.

So it was that when University of Montana carpenters disassembled the legendary rim table at the start of this winter, they unleashed a fir tree that had been pent up for 72 years.

“It started to warp and twist until it decided it had moved far enough, and it stopped,” said Art Gayvert, carpentry foreman for the University.  And that’s when moving an old table “got really, really tough.”

The rim table was no ordinary classroom workhorse. A beast of a bench, its 36 feet of straight fir stood on 22 solid oak legs as it arched in a horseshoe shape around the room it was built in.

The table was built in place in room 212 in 1936, the year the building now called Old Journalism was finished.

“It had to be,” Gayvert said. “There was no way a table that was 11 foot by 23 foot would fit through any doorway.”

For six score years it supported the educational efforts of collegiate reporters, editors and photographers who streamed through the University of Montana School of Journalism. Then, in the fall of 2007, the school moved and left the table behind.

Jerry Brown was dean of the School of Journalism at the time. The table, he insisted, had to move with the school.

“It ties the past to the present and to the future and it remains a symbol to many alums of their halcyon student days,” Brown said later. But for a semester, the table stayed behind.

By December, Old Journalism’s new occupants wanted the relic gone. It had no sentimental value for geographers. Brown’s successor Dean Peggy Kuhr, agreed it should be installed in Don Anderson Hall, Journalism’s new high-tech home. She envisioned faculty meetings around the rim, where modern multimedia journalism could be supported by the traditional values of the craft.

It proved more than a matter of calling the movers.

“Just thinking about how we were going to take it apart so we could put it back together was quite a project in itself,” Gayvert said. “I spent a lot of hours scratching my head, trying to figure out what we were going to do.”

The carpenters were busy and didn’t have time for a Chinese puzzle. They went in with a plan and a saw.

The rim table was cut into eight sections, six-foot long or so, and stored. It was in storage on campus over break that the table’s inner tree remembered its roots.

“Wood is a dynamic material,” Gayvert said. “It stays the way it is because it’s all held by the other forces in it. Once you cut it and release those forces, then it starts to move until it reaches an equilibrium again.”

The schedule cleared and the University’s top cabinetmaker had the table hauled in his workshop.

“We brought it out and all of the sudden it wouldn’t go back together the way we had planned,” Gayvert said. The level top had twisted and bucked, throwing off years of domestication.

“You can see what you’re going to do” Gayvert said. “But you can’t foresee all the problems that are going to arise.”

Ed Tomicek is a man who sees the world as a series of solutions, and speaking as an opportunity for understatement.

When bids for a fancy table for the round Native American room in the new journalism building came in too high, Tomicek built it “in house.” He worked in a previous life on the restoration of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He built a12-foot high straight back chair that’s too big to be indoors, just because it made him laugh.

Gayvert asked him to make the rim table whole again.

“It was really no big deal for me,” Tomicek said. He had years of practice as a cabinetmaker, extensive experience with architectural millwork. “What I had to do was put a bunch of bracing underneath so it could be bolted back together.”

And that was that. In mid-January, laborers moved the table, part by part, into Don Anderson Hall.

Tomicek used metal dowels to align the tops, hidden metal joints in the cross beams for easy installation. It took all of a 10-hour day, but the table went together. Tomicek schooled an uppity joint with a rubber mallet off and on for an hour or so, then packed his tools.

“I did the best with what I had,” he said, admitting he was a perfectionist at heart. “I’m satisfied, but it could always be better.”

Then he dropped down to the third floor and paused directly below the faculty meeting room.

 In room 310, he entered the maw of another curved table, rubbing his hand along the solid cherry trim, tapping the glass he had requested to protect the matched grains of the cherry veneer top.

photo by Nadia White

After rebuilding the historic rim table on the fourth floor of Don Anderson Hall, master craftsman Ed Tomicek checks in on the circular table he designed and built for the Native American room on the third floor.

As Tomicek tells it, the table of the Native American room has a 12 foot 6 inch radius, and a 32-inch opening at one end. It is a special table for a special room, surrounded by eight rough-hewn pillars not far removed from the days when they were trees.

The circular shape acknowledges the importance of the cardinal directions to native people, and the spirit of equality embraced by a circle. The rough tree columns and stone floor are reminders of humanity’s relationship with nature.

“Now this,” he said with a smile of familiarity at the table he designed and built. “This was special. This was a lot of fun.”

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