Production of “Applause” on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up on “Applause”, we're on the road again, this time to Tuscarawas County to meet a local legend of watercolor.

We sit in on a guitar class that's all the rage at a New Philadelphia high school.

And share the story of Dover's master woodcarver who everyone knew as Mooney.

Hello and welcome back to another round of “Applause”.

I'm Ideastream's Kabir Bhatia, and I'm in front of the Tuscarawas County Center for the Arts.

You know, they have a lot inside here.

They've got a gallery space, they've got a performance space, they teach classes.

So let's go meet all the people involved.

Jeannine, thanks so much for having us here today.

I am so pleased that you're here at the Tuscaroras County Center for the Arts.

Welcome.

This used to be a seed company.

This was the showroom for the seed company?

Correct.

This is a showroom for Liberty Seed, which was acquired by the community in 2002 to create an arts center.

How important has this been here over the last few decades to have a centralized place for so many different media?

This has been hugely important.

This has been a catalyst for the creation of many other arts organizations, small and large, that have happened in Tuscarawas County.

So people can come, they can check out the library, learn about different artists.

What if they want to learn art or how to paint or how to sculpt?

You have a whole space in the back just for that sort of thing.

We do, and we do classes for children and adults.

We do photography workshops, painting, drawing.

We have a whole building for ceramics.

One of the teachers here who kind of is the, the Johnny Appleseed of watercolorists here in Tuscarawas County.

That's Bill Koch.

He's been with the Art Center since its inception.

This is completely community-funded, and it was done with nickels and dimes and large donations and small donations, and anybody that ever had a hand in donating a book or art supplies helped make this place happen.

Bill, thanks for letting us come in and observe your class and this great facility.

How long have you been teaching here?

Well, I've been here for about 20, 25 years at least.

I always came, but I was never a teacher or facilitator here.

I do a lot from images and life experience, and that's what I try to teach my artists to do.

It's about the artist's experience you paint, and that's what you paint.

If you take and copy somebody else's piece, That's fine, because that teaches you.

I should do it this way, or I shouldn't do it this way.

But to say it's yours is not— it's not fair.

It's not.

It's somebody else's.

So your idea has to come from within you.

It's something that you were given.

And when you do things, you should know if it's right or wrong.

You should feel that.

So the rules and the guides that people want to talk about, They're just there to help you.

If you do it this way, chances are it's going to be right, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the only way to do it.

Just that color there, and just maybe let's put a little bit of it here.

Tell me a little of your life experience.

You were born in Steubenville, you grew up in this area, of course, you worked at Diebold.

Tell me some of that that shaped really what leads to the artwork that you create and what you're trying to convey.

Steubenville was an industrial town, and during school there was no art instruction.

But my senior year, we had a class that opened up that was called Certified Cooperative Training, which is SkillsUSA VICA today.

And I wanted to be an artist, and I couldn't get in anywhere because I had no art experience.

But the Hub Department Store said, hey, we can use him as a helper in trimming windows.

That's what really got me started.

I learned spatial.

I learned like interior design, how to set up 3-dimensional.

From that, I took drafting, and that's how I got started, basically.

If there had been a dedicated art space at that time like this building, that might have really changed things for you.

How important is it to have this building here in Tuscarawas County?

Well, I think it's very important because this building that we have here is not necessarily in every county or in every city.

You know, we get people from Cincinnati and places like that and say, we really don't have a facility like this to help artists.

I think, I think art has taken the back seat to a lot of things, but creativity And being able to think outside the box is what art teaches, and if we lose that, we're in trouble.

So the art center here gives a chance for young people to come and learn.

Well, Bill Koch, thanks so much for talking to us, letting us come in and observe your class and see this amazing facility.

Well, I want to thank you for coming in and doing that because we need to spread that art is important in our society.

The Tuscarawas County Center for the Arts has events throughout the year.

From performances to gallery shows to art classes.

Well, I'm about to jump into the Idea Mobile to head up the road to Dover, where we're going to see an important piece of Tuscarawas County history.

It was once the home of a wealthy industrialist, and fortunately for us, it's been preserved.

No, I am not talking about Stan Hywet.

Try to keep up.

That is Summit County.

Before we all get very confused, let's check out the latest installment of “What It Was” This building right here, what it was, was the home of the Jeremiah E. Reeves.

Now here in Dover, iron and steel put this town on the map, and the businesses owned by the Reeves family were the main reason.

Jeremiah was born in England and came to America in 1867.

Eventually, he bought a mill in Dover and made galvanized steel and sheet metal.

Later, he opened a bank, owned a hotel, donated land for the hospital, and even owned the streetcar line.

Reeves and his wife died in the 1920s, and for the next 50 years, the home was inhabited occasionally and maintained by his descendants.

Finally, in the mid-'70s, it was acquired by the Historical Society and restored.

Fortunately for us, the family saved many of their furnishings and belongings.

So now you can visit the Reeves Victorian Home and Carriage House.

If you have an idea you'd like to share for our What It Was series, send an email to arts@Ideastream.org When you're here in Dover, you'll probably hear a lot about Ernest “Mooney” Warther.

He was known for his commitment to his home here in Tusc and for his wood carvings.

Now this is a museum dedicated to the work of this 20th century master craftsman.

He knew no strangers.

He had a big booming voice.

He talked to anybody about anything and you could hear him a mile away.

One time Abraham Lincoln said that if you intend to go to work, start right where you are, for there is no better place He was kind of a showman.

We're a small town.

He kind of had to advocate for his own art.

And so I think that personality helped sell his art to others and kind of get that popularity.

His hair was bigger than the rest of him.

He was only about 5 foot 8.

He was rather small.

A lot of hair.

He always said you could tell what direction the wind was blowing based on which way his hair was blowing.

Was going that day.

So his story really begins in 1885 when he was born here in Dover to parents who just came from Switzerland in 1883.

Now unfortunately, when he was just 3 years old, his father passes away in an accident, and that leaves his mom with 5 kids.

And so as soon as he could, started working, and that was at age 5 as a cowherder.

So he was born originally as Ernest Warther, no middle name, but that cowherding job earned him the nickname Mooney, because in Swiss, Mooney means bull of the herd.

And as he collected the cows, everyone kinda joked because he was the little leader of all of these cows, taking them out to pasture each day.

And that just ended up sticking with him for the rest of his life.

Taking the cows to pasture one day, he finds a pocket knife in the dirt, picks it up, starts whittling to pass the time watching those cows.

And he never stopped.

When you come into the lobby, his workshop is attached to the lobby, so you can see where he started with his carvings and where he accomplished all of it.

We have the big picture windows.

You can see out to the gardens and where the Button House is.

And the first room that you come into is their early years when they got married and was raising the family and his work in the steel mill for the first 24 years.

And some of his original tools that he used in carving.

Replicas of the steel mill that he worked in here in Dover was the American Sheet and Tin Plate.

He worked there for 24 years, and then after the mill was torn down and moved out of Dover, then he carved it about 15 years later, and it's a scale replica, and all the little parts move and operate.

So you can see how the men worked the steel.

He grew up along the railroad tracks, so it was a good place for him to hang out, and the hobos would come into town, and that's where he met the first hobo with the pliers.

So the story of the pliers really begins when Mooney's about 10 years old, and he meets a stranger who cuts him a pair of these pliers out of a single block of wood, hands them over, but doesn't tell him how he did it.

And of course, Mooney was enamored with whittling at this time, and so while he took those cows to pasture, he figured it out.

And he found out that if he makes 10 cuts in a single block of wood, he could make a working pair of pliers as well.

From there, he masters it.

He'll go on to carve about 3/4 of a million of those in his lifetime.

He would hand those out to schoolchildren, anybody he would meet.

A lot of people would challenge him and say, you know, I don't believe that You can do it that fast because he could guarantee you a set in 20 seconds or less.

And then in 1965, he was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and he clocked his fastest record at 9.4 seconds for a single pear.

So less than a second per cut.

And of course, the single pear wasn't enough for him.

He began experimenting with multiples.

The theater contains the Plyer Tree, and that was his first big item that he carved.

In 1913, coming home from the mill, he visualizes the block of wood that he needs to shape out and the tree that he'll ultimately create.

And then he places in that block over a 64-day period 31,000 cuts, and that unveiled a tree of 511 pair of pliers.

Then he started with trains.

There was a rail line that passed his home, and he was able to go down and look at the engines and started memorizing them.

And then he'd read in the encyclopedias about different things that happened in the stages of history of steam.

So he'd carve something, and then he'd read about another one and how the steam developed over the years.

1913 is when he began the evolution of the steam engine.

Completely his idea.

And it started with 250 BC and it goes around the room up to 1942.

So he wanted to make sure that when he carved the evolution of the steam engine that he was capturing them in their full essence, and that also included mechanizing them.

And so they're all run off of an electric motor with a leather sewing machine belt.

That's how we continue to run them today.

They're all press fit together, they're not glued.

So they all have a tight fit and they're solid.

The evolution itself is carved across 40 years.

You can think of it as, as probably about 35 pieces in there for the most part.

So none of the works in the museum took him longer to do than a year.

And he knew that he could carve about 1,000 pieces a month.

I would say his average is about 6 months' time of actual carving time.

Most of them are right around that 6,000 The smaller engines obviously are fewer pieces, but then you get something like the Erie Triplex, and that's over 9,000.

He was considered an artistic genius as well as a mechanical genius to be able to operate them like that.

Frieda was very fun-loving and very artistic.

Frieda Warther, originally born Frieda Richard, She was one of 13 children.

She was born in Switzerland, immigrated here with her parents when she was just a young girl.

It was a European and particularly Swiss tradition that the oldest daughter would receive her mother's button box.

So she got the idea that she could make jewelry out of buttons.

And so as she was wearing these, everybody was like, oh, she likes buttons.

So then she just started acquiring buttons from everyone.

Lots of buttons.

She had boxes of them everywhere.

Even under the steps she had boxes and up in the attic and she had strings of them hanging in the dining room.

Frieda and Mooney married in 1910, built the family home, and all this while she's just collecting buttons.

Just word got out, small community, and eventually after the kids were a little older, she had some free time finally.

She was like, I'm gonna go through all these buttons.

And then that really sparked the idea for putting them into patterns.

So the button house, she put all of her buttons in there.

Grandma had started the gardens when the kids were little for vegetables.

And then she canned a lot of that and stored it.

Eventually it turned into flowers.

At the age of 68, he retired because he'd finished the evolution of the steam engine.

So for 4 years he didn't carve, but he was restless.

So my dad and him sat down and they discussed and they came up with the idea of carving the great American events in steam history.

So that was things like the Lincoln funeral train and the driving of the golden spike.

The John Bull was the first passenger train in the U.S.

Then we have a new display that we opened last September, and it shows the evolution of the knife making because he started making the knives for carving, and then it developed into kitchen knives during World War II.

The commando knives he made—he would contribute 1,100 commando knives for World War II—and so he was nicknamed the smallest defense plant in the United States.

Most years we average about 70 countries throughout the world.

We keep a registry that people can sign in.

There's kind of like, I guess, groupies.

There's people who really get, really get into Mooney and the history and everything that he created.

Our biggest method of advertisement is word of mouth, people telling other people about it.

He had opportunities, he had offers for quite large sums of money at that point in time, but he turned them all down.

And that's why, thankfully, I have a job and we're all still here and all the carvings are still here.

But he felt it was very important to have everyone come to the city of Dover to see his carvings, and that's why we have such a great relationship with the city.

People are just fascinated and amazed that someone can actually do this from scratch.

And with only a 2nd grade education.

It's not like he was mimicking someone else who had done it already.

He had all this idea in his own mind.

So it's truly amazing.

And now back to Motown Philly— I mean, New Philly— for what's arguably the most popular guitar class in town.

Now, when this program started more than 20 years ago, there was maybe a handful of students, but today more than 100 fill the classes every semester.

I always tell kids the first week of school, people buy the guitar because they— oh, that looks awesome, that's gonna be fun, I'm gonna impress my friends, impress girls, I'm gonna make music, make my favorite music.

And then they try it and realize Oh boy, this is hard.

I just thought it was just like a couple chords makes a song, you know, but there's so many different ways you can play it and there's so many different styles of music and it's like, it's just like goes so in-depth.

I just didn't really, I didn't really know that when I started playing it.

My dad has played since high school.

He and my sister, my older sister, they both knew how to play before I did and tried to teach me, but it was a lot harder than I was expecting, so I kind of wimped out at home until this class.

I had been in choir and that type of stuff, and I've always kind of liked rock music, and one year my parents got me an acoustic guitar for Christmas, so that's kind of what prompted me to start seeking out how to play the guitar.

I knew I kind of wanted to do something.

I didn't really want to do the band, and when I was going into high school, I saw that guitar was there, so I kind of got into that, and I'm really glad that I did that.

Mr.

Roberts started with just a few students, a few guitars, and over the years has done a lot to get extra instruments into the program, has revamped his classroom space to make it more appropriate for guitars, and now it is a situation where he teaches all day long and his classes are pretty much full all day long.

Everyone from 7th grade up through seniors in high school.

We have 7 periods a day of guitar.

At any time I might have 150 to 170 kids a year involved in learning how to play an instrument, many of which have been with me since, you know, that are seniors in high school have been with me since 7th grade learning and improving and learning the great skill of playing the guitar.

So this semester I've got 2 different middle school beginner level classes, 2 different high school beginner level classes, and then we have 2 different guitar ensemble performing groups, and then an advanced guitar ensemble group.

Arpeggios louder.

We start with a foundation of basically 2 different types of guitar playing.

Students learn how to manually manipulate each of their individual fingers on individual strings.

That's like playing melodies, playing lead parts we call that.

And then we also learn how to strum the guitar strings and play different chords with different rhythms.

So we start kind of learning both skills at the same time.

As a guitar player, like, it's kind of a rare thing to have a class for it in a school.

I can imagine it would be kind of difficult to actually be able to play anywhere without these classes as a teenage guitarist.

I know it's unique because when we talk to other principals about courses and schedules and we say that we have a guitar course.

Nobody else has a guitar course that I, that I've spoken to.

It's one of a kind, and it gives the kids a great opportunity to get involved with the school.

It helps build self-esteem, confidence.

My first ever experience with like performing was here and was with Mr.

Roberts.

It really helped my confidence and like built like my character, I feel like.

'Cause Mr.

Roberts helped me and he was talking to me and he's like, you can do this.

And ever since then I've been able to, you know, continue and grow and get better, and I'm very thankful.

I've really enjoyed how Mr.

Roberts is always pushing us to learn like harder material and improve us, and we're always learning new things and we're always preparing for the next concert and things like that, so we're always on our feet and And it's always just really fun, and I like being in here with all my friends, and it's just a good class, yeah.

Students love his class.

You know, this gives some students their purpose for coming to school.

It's an outlet.

Students who maybe don't feel like they fit someplace else fit with guitars, and then they have developed this cohort of guitar lovers and guitar players.

And all students are looking for a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, and guitar class has provided another opportunity for some of our students to find that.

There's a lot of opportunities to do solos or play the bass or sing, and it definitely stood out to me how much you can kind of make the class your own.

You can, you can play just in the ensemble and kind of not stand out, or if you want to take advantage of those extra opportunities, you can also do that.

Music helps me a lot, like being able to play the guitar, because it's very emotional for me at least, like being able to pick it up and just play how I feel.

And it helps me in a lot of different, like, situations, and I'm really thankful for it.

A lot of kids nowadays don't— just don't have patience.

They don't have patience to learn a new skill because it takes time.

It takes lots of failure before you can be successful.

Having it every day in class, they don't have a choice but to tackle those struggles and, and possibly fail.

And the most important part, getting to the other side of failure and seeing success and developing a skill that if they didn't have this class, I'm not sure they would get otherwise.

So I think it's more than just about music.

I mean, music's certainly the heart of it, and it in itself is definitely worth our time.

Giving students the skill to recreate and to connect with music is invaluable to them as a person, but along with that, they're learning a lot of life skills as well.

On the next round of “Applause”, Cleveland Arts Prize winners in the spotlight.

A performance artist.

I'm trying to leave it all on the stage.

A paper artist.

You had paper chamber pots, you had paper furniture, you had hats.

And a master of collage.

I want people to walk away with a big smile on their face.

We celebrate Northeast Ohio artistry on the next round of “Applause”.

Let's say goodbye to Tuscarawas County from Sugar Creek, where we're with the world's largest cuckoo clock.

Sorry, Carrie, we're not going to fact-check that one.

I'm Ideastream's Kabir Bhatia, and what rhymes with Tuscarawas?

Well, I've written words to the theme for “Applause” to let you find out.

Enjoy.

Production of “Applause” on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.