By Brian D’Ambrosio
Throughout many years, woodworker Sam Bair has completed many tasks and fulfilled many orders. He has made countless bed frames and bookcases. He’s made just as many desks and benches. However, the 90-year-old has a sentimental favorite that he still most enjoys creating: backgammon boards.
With more than 50 years of making backgammon boards to his credit, and at least 60 years of woodworking practice to his résumé, Bair has never tired of talking about or promoting one of the world’s oldest games.
“Backgammon is a combination of skill and luck,” said Bair, who meets with a backgammon club Tuesday nights at the Violet Crown Cinema near his home in Santa Fe. “The skill comes in knowing what to do with the numbers you get on the dice. The luck comes in getting good numbers on the dice.”
Born in Wisconsin, Bair enlisted in the Marines for two years before enrolling in college at Illinois State University in Bloomington, where he graduated with an art degree. His first “shop”-teaching job was in Glenwood, Ill., and he later taught other hands-on woodworking classes in Waupun, Wis.
Bair moved to Colorado in 1972, and helped build the Aspen Community School in Aspen out of three-sided logs, also known as D-logs. After the school was built, Bair stayed and developed a woodworking program for it. He bought a bunch of tools and learned how to make furniture.
He also formed a friendship with another woodworker who introduced him to the joy of backgammon and to the art of making game boards. His buddy, Jared Foster, was a competent player, and soon Bair learned how to hold his own in friendly competition with him. Foster was equally skilled when it came to woodworking. Under Foster’s tutelage, Bair would build the basic board frames and create game pieces and dice cups. Foster would finish the rest.
Bair fondly recalls the long “wood trips” that he and Foster took together in Colorado, gathering hunks of beautiful bird’s eye maple. They’d then try to sell boards in the Midwest, in cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee, and at places such as nightclubs and social clubs.
In 1976, seeking a more artistic community and greater warmth and sunshine, Bair moved to Santa Fe, where he expanded his professional and business skills.
In the early 1990s, he opened a furniture store Bair Woodworking in Albuquerque, where he specialized in cabinets, tables, and chairs. The store closed during an economic downturn in the early 2000s. Among his most memorable commissions since then, have been the dozens of pieces of furniture he made for the Red River Lodge in Red River, N.M.
Believing that the charming sensibilities of his craftsmanship would appeal to those who were looking for a neat blend of utilitarianism and unbridled artistry in their furniture, he started to exhibit and sell his creations at Santa Fe galleries.
Though Bair doesn’t make nearly as many pieces as he did at the height of his production 30 years ago, he is still enamored with the special beauty, design, and function of a hand-crafted backgammon set and board. Bair’s boards can be found at Canyon Road Contemporary Art.
“The only difference between the ones I make today and the ones I made 50 years ago,” Bair said, “is that the boards have a rectangular point design today. The boards had a triangular point design to them back then.”
The spry nonagenarian even incorporates woodworking into his daily health practice. He starts working at 8 a.m. in his shop, which is adjacent to his home, before heading to the gym at 9:30 a.m. He usually stops at the local senior center for lunch, and then he is back at the shop for a couple more hours. Quitting time is generally 4 p.m.
“Not much has changed in woodworking over the years,” Bair said. “It all looks pretty much the same in every shop. There is less sanding by hand today, so some of the sanding and finishing has changed. But it is all the very same techniques and tools.”
Bair said that he believes in the law of reciprocity when it comes to his tools: Take care of them, and they will take care of you. His main drill press is at least 30 years old. Some of his chisels, hand tools, clamps, planes, and hammers are even older than that.
Any woodworker worth his weight in sawdust carries the battle scars to prove it. No matter how cautious, the occasional accident is inevitable. Bair lost the tip of a finger in a mishap with a joiner several years ago.
His son, Louis Bair, who once worked alongside his father at the store in Albuquerque, said that while he is sometimes concerned for his father’s safety, he has faith and trust in his dad and strongly respects his connection between longevity and activity.
“It’s a little scary – him working with power tools,” Louis Bair said. “But it is what has kept him in good shape. His daily activity is what keeps him going.”
Shortly before the end of our visit, Sam Bair demonstrates the purpose of some of the tools in his shop, sanding and buffing a few game pieces. There is no doubt a lifetime of memories in even the smallest actions. Parting ways with woodworking, he said, would be difficult.
“I don’t know what I would do without a shop,” he said.
