It’s a warm afternoon in Tempe, and a former Arizona State University professor is showing off his collection of antique hand tools.
DUANE ROEN: We’re looking at over a hundred handsaws here, I’ve restored most of them, some of them still need to be restored, like, some of them date back to the 1800s.
The saws are mounted on the garage wall, and what stands out about them are their carved wooden handles. A lot of them have these ornamental flourishes — at the top, there’s this rounded piece of wood that juts out. It sort of looks like a bull’s horn. It’s technically there to brace the saw against your hand while you’re sawing something. But it also makes it easy to hang the saws on hooks.
ROEN: The saw horn is what keeps it in place.
SAM DINGMAN: Right — that’s right, yeah, they’re all sort of locked in position.
ROEN: Works out well when you’re a pathological collector the way I am.
I’m Duane Roen, I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, which is where I got the start in all this.
As Roen says “all this,” he gestures towards the wall of saws. The workshop is also scattered with various chisels, mallets, and hatchets — many of them, he says, more than 100 years old. Some are family heirlooms, some come from estate sales, others from thrift stores. He spends countless hours out here almost every day. So far, he estimates, he’s restored at least 1,000 antique tools.
Roen shows a sawblade he’s working on — it’s covered in rust.
ROEN: There are lots of ways to remove rust. You could use vinegar, but restorers don’t use vinegar because vinegar is aggressive. It’ll eat not only the rust, but it’ll eat the metal.
Roen prefers a more tactile approach. He pulls out a brand new razor blade, and begins carefully scratching clumps of rust from the surface of the blade.
ROEN: The goal is not to make them look new, the goal is to make them look 100 years old, but well cared for.
Many of these saws were originally manufactured by a company called Disston, and if you look on eBay, a well-restored vintage Disston can fetch over $100. Which means Roen's got a small fortune hanging on his garage wall.
DINGMAN: And what do you do with the tools that you restore? Is the idea to keep them in your own collection, or do you then sell them?
ROEN: I haven’t sold any. I just … a couple things. One, once I’ve restored them, every time I look at that tool, I think about what I did with that tool. And I’ve got a lot of nostalgia. For everything. Nostalgia for things that I did 10 minutes ago, even.
Roen opens a drawer and pulls out an old pair of pliers.
ROEN: When I was a kid, we did fencing. This is the exact same kind of fencing pliers that my dad owned, and that we as kids used every day.
DINGMAN: So if I’m hearing you right, Duane, at least part of the reason that it feels good to hold on to these things is the story they contain.
ROEN: The story, yep. Yeah. When I work on these tools, when I use these tools, when I look at these tools, it reminds me of my dad, it reminds of my Grandpa Roen.
Later, inside the house, Roen shows some artifacts from the family farm that he’s restored. He’s got an old wall-mounted telephone that you dial with a hand-crank, a pile of old wrenches and a cattle-milking machine.
On a shelf above the landing of a staircase, Roen pauses in front of a well-worn canvas bag. It’s a feedsack that belonged to Roen’s grandfather, Melvin. Melvin used it to harvest wheat.
ROEN: And it’s got this this little patch on it. And this little patch, my Grandma Roen put on there. So every day when I walk by here, I touch the back of my knuckle to that. So I’m making a physical contact with my Grandma and Grandpa Roen.
Duane heads into his study. On his desk is another antique tool - a round, flat blade with a worn wooden handle.
ROEN: You know what this is?
DINGMAN: I don’t know what that is.
ROEN: It’s a leather cutter.
DINGMAN: A leather cutter! Ok.
ROEN: And so this leather cutter, my Great-Grandpa Christian Christianson Roen used, my dad used, and my grandpa used, so this sits on my desk and I handle that every day, too.
DINGMAN: So you’ve mentioned a couple times now, Duane, this practice of handling these old family objects a little bit every day. The leather cutter, and also the patch on the feedbag. That seems somewhat like a ritual that’s important to you.
ROEN: It is a ritual.
Roen, as you’ve heard, is not shy about romanticizing the past.
ROEN: If I could turn the clock back and live on a farm in the 1950s, I would do that.
That’s actually how Roen’s life might’ve gone, if it weren’t for something that happened when he was a teenager.
ROEN: We had a fire when I was in eighth grade. Almost died in the fire, and then my dad sold the farm, bought a Ford dealership. And we went to town. And my whole world changed.
Before the fire, Roen says, life was pretty simple. He spent his days helping his dad fix fences and milk cows. He went to school in a one-room schoolhouse.
But once the family moved into town, Roen met a teacher named Joyce King, who inspired him to want to become a teacher himself. He studied literature and rhetoric, and got a PhD. He wrote a dissertation called “The Effects of Selected Text-forming Structures on College Freshmen’s Comprehension of Expository Prose.”
Roen got a job teaching high school, then college, rising all the way to dean and eventually vice provost at ASU. Duane loved his life in academia. But he could never quite shake the question of what might have been.
ROEN: Now if the barn had not burned down, and if my dad had continued to farm, I think I’d probably be a farmer today. So maybe I wouldn’t have so much nostalgia if the barn hadn’t burned down.
He knows there are parts of the experience he’ll never fully understand. His grandfather, Melvin, was sick with Alzheimer’s for most of Roen’s youth. So when he touches his knuckles to that feedsack, or restores a tool like one Melvin might’ve used, he’s doing his best to fill in a story that will always have a few holes in the plot.
But as much as Roen Duane loves these physical artifacts, what he really cares about is what they represent.
ROEN: When we think about our ancestors, we are making a connection with them. When we tell stories about our lives and our ancestors lives, we’re helping, especially the younger people in our lives, in our family, feel like, “I’m part of this family’s narrative.”
Roen has kids and grandkids of his own now, and he’s determined to leave behind as little doubt as possible about his own story. In the living room of his house, there’s a bookshelf lined with row after row of blue notebooks.
ROEN: So we are looking at over 21,000 pages of daily journal entries.
These daily journals, Roen tells me, started in 1978, after the birth of he and his wife’s first child. For the next 47 years, every night before bed, they’ve made a new entry — what happened in the family that day, and what happened in the world.
ROEN: It is an addiction. You know, when we first started, we had to work at the habit of writing every day. Now I cannot imagine going to bed without writing in the journal.
I ask if Roen would be willing to read me an entry from one of the journals. He pulls down the very first book on the shelf, and opens to the very first page. The entry he chooses is actually written by his wife — a recollection of the day their son was born, starting with the moments just before they went to the hospital.
ROEN: I felt somewhat anxious. How would things go? Would I be able to handle everything? What would the hospital be like? But I was also excited, because I knew that within 24 hours, our baby would be in the world. And I was eager to know whether, whether we’d have a Nick or an Emily. And I was eager to let the grandparents and uncles and aunts know.
Standing there listening to Roen read, I watch him experience something more than nostalgia. For a few minutes, it’s like this treasured moment from his past is happening to him again, right here in the present.
DINGMAN: That’s wonderful - thank you for sharing that, I really appreciate it.
ROEN: Yeah - that’s about as intimate as we get in the journal, but…yeah.42:41:
DINGMAN: If I may Duane, that strikes me as sort of a microcosm of what you’re doing more broadly with these tools.
ROEN: Exactly.
