Couple’s love grows through their art

Special to the Green Valley News

Hollywood might call this Chuck and Helga’s great adventure.

When they met, she was widowed; he was trying to survive a costly divorce. He was a skier; she’s a hiker and wild mushroom hunter. Both love to SCUBA dive.

She was a junior high math teacher; he was a college professor.

He sings, she whittles.

She’s five feet tall; he’s 6-foot, four.

Helga Kivisto met Chuck Taylor when he appeared in the doorway of her Sahuarita custom furniture woodshop three years ago.

She was expecting him, after responding to a Yahoo personal notice on the internet modestly describing the sender as “a handsome, skilled, professional woodworker and retired educator searching for a soul mate.”

They had been corresponding via email since Helga’s reply to the personal notice, and today they acknowledge “something sparked” as they eyed each other through the doorway on that bright January morning in 2006. It was, they agree, the beginning of “the partnership of a lifetime.”

“As I stood outside the shop it looked as if she might be as tall as I am,” Taylor recalls. “But, when I stepped inside I realized she wasn’t.”

The ground outside the shop is at least a foot lower than the shop floor, notes Taylor.

Today, the two retired educators keep busy making and repairing fine furniture at Sahuarita Custom Woodworks. While both hold graduate degrees, their backgrounds in the art of designing and building furniture are quite different.

From the time he was in junior high school Taylor has been around woodworking, fine tuning his skills when he was in college and beyond. Helga, a former math and science teacher from Vermont, was drawn into the craft as an apprentice with her late husband, Norm, who died unexpectedly in 2004 while they were vacationing in Mexico.

Helga and Norm moved to Green Valley from Colorado in 1999. She had relocated to Colorado after receiving a Bachelor of Science degree from Castleton State University and teaching high school math for two years. Helga received her master’s degree from Colorado State University and taught in the state for 25 years.

“Norm taught me everything from the ground up ,” Helga notes. “I began by building bird houses, carving art pieces and doing finish work on Norm’s projects. He trained me to run the business. Eventually I did all the measuring, estimating and talking with clients.”

Helga and Norm designed and built their workshop and she assembled most of the equipment.

“I didn’t even know what the machines were for when they arrived in big boxes, but I could read directions and put them together,” she laughs. Today, she operates all of them.

Among her first big jobs was building maple furniture for the Sahuarita Justice Court.

“We built the judge’s bench, witness box, clerk’s desk and other furniture,” she said. “We got the bid in November and the job had to be finished for a January opening. We put in a lot of 20-hour days.”

Taylor received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from Trenton State, now known as College of New Jersey.

“It took me 12 years to get my undergraduate degree,” he notes. “While I was in college I worked as a plumber, electrician and in construction, as well as a service manager for a Chrysler dealership. I also did cabinet work.” He also taught woodshop classes in inner-city schools.

Taylor taught industrial education at Trenton State while studying instructional technology at Temple University in Philadelphia and joined the faculty at University of New Mexico after receiving his doctorate. He retired in 2002, after 25 years at the university.

He was operating a small cabinet shop in Albuquerque when he was inspired to send out the personal notice which caught Helga’s attention. “He does beautiful work,” Helga boasts, “his finish work is unbelievable.”

With the addition of tools and equipment from Taylor’s Albuquerque cabinet business, the couple created a state-of-the-art woodworking shop. While they are engaged in crafting fine woodwork for clients throughout Santa Cruz Valley, Taylor also dedicates time to Green Valley Community Church, where he sings in the choir. He’s also a member of the Just for Fun Singers, a group that entertains at local convalescent and retirement communities.

A year ago he designed and altered a pew to accommodate wheelchair-bound worshipers in the church sanctuary. He recently completed a 10-foot high wooden cross, which has just been hung in the sanctuary and will be dedicated in May. The cross, with a six-foot cross arm, is made of laminated red oak, inlaid with bloodwood and finished with four coats of lacquer, rubbed out to a rich patina.inWhen they’re not turning out furniture and other projects, the couple enjoys SCUBA diving, visiting favorite locales in Cozumel, Grand Caymans and Hawaii. “We were married on the beach in Cozumel in 2006,” Taylor said. “Mexico’s a little scary right now.”

Taylor abandoned skiing for diving after suffering knee injuries.

Bad knees also keep him from joining Helga in her hiking endeavors.

“She once hiked the Grand Canyon from rim to rim to rim,” Taylor said. “Down one side, up the other and back to where she started all in a day.”

She’s also keen on hunting wild mushrooms and makes a couple trips a year to the mountains of Colorado to collect them.

“She’s quite a mycologist,” boasts Taylor.

“I’m just an amateur,” Helga responds.

Jerry Schultz is a Green Valley free-lance writer. He can be reached at jerryschultz@cox.net.