Benchmarks: Kevin Rodel—Growing a career with Fine Woodworking
Dec 04, 2020
My earliest interest in furniture making happened to coincide, fortunately, with the initial publication of Fine Woodworking in 1975. I had graduated from LaSalle College (now LaSalle University) a few years earlier and was still living in Philadelphia. I needed something to look forward to in my free time, something that my humdrum social work job did not provide.
I realized that throughout my childhood I had always worked with my hands: Lincoln Logs, plastic bricks, Erector Sets, balsa wood airplanes. I needed to get back to that rewarding hand/mind interaction. Building my own usable objects—that is, furniture—seemed a logical connection. But where to begin? There was a bookstore in downtown Philly that I frequented called the “Do It Yourself” bookstore. That is where I came across Fine Woodworking #1. I eagerly devoured every article in each issue from those early black-and-white years of the magazine’s publication.
Those…
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