MILFORD, Maine — Euclide “Joe” Lavoie sits in a rolling office chair of unknown vintage, scoots forward and reaches for the tin can and begins to, well, get down to brass tacks.
The can is full of those tacks, essential in the trade of making hand-crafted cedar strip canoes.
And the 93-year-old canoe-builder, who has spent more than 70 years honing his craft, knows more than a few things about brass tacks.
Lavoie scoops up a small handful, pops them in his mouth, and holds the tiny daggers there, mumbling to his adult daughter, Ann Richard, who sits across the model canoe they’re working on.
“I like when he has tacks in his mouth, because he doesn’t get mouthy anymore,” she says with a laugh.
Lavoie pops the tacks out of his mouth again so he can answer a question: In 70 years of pounding tacks into cedar strips — and storing them in your mouth — have you ever swallowed one?
He laughs.
“Yeah,” he says. “They don’t come out so bad.”
In fact, Lavoie says that in one of his former jobs, a co-worker at Old Town Canoe was a notorious tack-swallower and always kept an emergency loaf of bread on hand, just in case.
Bread?
Lavoie said canoe-builders believed that eating a slice of bread immediately after swallowing a tack encased the sharp object and kept it from inflicting too much internal harm.
“The old man [at Old Town Canoe], he used to go so fast, he’d swallow one [tack] a week,” Lavoie says. “They’d keep a loaf of bread around. [He was always saying], ‘Give me a piece of bread.’”
Lavoie laughs again — regular laughter is a staple inside his Milford garage while he’s working with his daughter and telling stories — and eventually decides story time is over.
He picks up the tin can again and rattles it, making hundreds of tacks dance loudly.
Richard is used to the rattling and says she hears it quite often. In fact, it’s the playful way her father signals that time for talking has ended.
“That means, ‘Get to work,’” she says, smiling at her dad.
And work, they do.
A life spent creating
The Great Depression was tough on the Lavoie clan, and after Lavoie graduated from eighth grade, he left school to join the Civilian Conservation Corps.
He began building canoes in the late 1940s, after serving in World War II. He returned to his native Milford, found work at White Canoe in Old Town, and spent 20 years there. After new owners bought that company, he moved to Old Town Canoe, where he worked another 20 years before retiring in 1987.
Lavoie also began building those models so that each of his three children could have one.
Richard says her canoe ended up in someone else’s home.
“People got wind of [Lavoie’s canoes], and he [learned] he could sell them if he wanted to,” she says. “I said, ‘Well, take mine and sell it, but you have to replace it.’”
He did. But it wasn’t until after he’d turned 80 that he decided to return to making model canoes for money and ramp up production on the 48-inch and 30-inch model canoes that he loved to build.
And he really didn’t have much of a choice.
“The thing is, my wife and I, together, we weren’t making a living, a big living [in retirement],” he says. “The government don’t pay too much [in Social Security].”
When his wife died 12 years ago, he was faced with a tough decision. He didn’t make enough money to live on, so he had to go back to work.
“So I started making these canoes … so I could stay here in this little house,” he says. “Otherwise, I’d be with the old people in [those] homes.”
Luckily for him, Lavoie had valuable skills, and he could produce a product that people wanted to buy. A couple of friends, including local businessman Tom Thornton, began showing off his canoes during trips outside of Maine, and customers began buying them. Since then, Lavoie said word has spread even farther; he recently sent a canoe to a customer in New Zealand.
Before long, Richard was pitching in.
“It’s probably been 10 years that he’s been showing me how to do it,” she says. “He said, ‘I’m not going to leave this [boat-building] stuff to you unless you know how to build them. So there you go. I had to learn.”
There is a rhythm and pattern to building canoes the old-fashioned way, with cedar strips, cedar ribs and canvas, and Lavoie and Richard are comfortable with the process.
Sitting across the canoe from each other, they take turns pounding tacks, bending ribs and turning raw wood into a work of art.
Richard remembers her role in getting him to begin building canoes again.
“I nagged him, because he had this [uncompleted model canoe in the garage],” she says. “I said, ‘Dad, you ought to finish this.’ He said, ‘I have a mold, I can make a new one.’”
Now, the two work together. Father and daughter. Master craftsman and accomplished apprentice.
“She’s better than I am,” Lavoie says, grinning across the canoe at Richard. “My fingers are not as good as they used to be.”
Richard smiles back, shaking her head. She’s made three model canoes by herself, she points out. Her dad has “174 or 175” under his belt.
A man named Joe
Joe Lavoie wasn’t always Joe. For years, he went by his given name, Euclide.
Then he went into the Army during World War II, and that changed.
“In the Army they used to call me ‘Frenchy,’ because, actually, I was pretty French,” Lavoie says.
His family grew up speaking French, and he remembers writing letters to his mother in the only language she could write: French.
But that changed when he returned from the war, possessing the boat-building skills he learned while working on large wooden landing craft.
A co-worker at White Canoe who regularly worked with Lavoie, planking canoes, decided he needed a name change.
“He says, ‘I can’t pronounce Euclide. … You were overseas fighting [Japanese Gen. Hideki] Tojo. So I’ll call you Tojo.”
For 20 years at White Canoe, Lavoie answered to “Tojo.”
Then, when he got to Old Town canoe, co-workers dropped the first syllable.
“Up at Old Town, they called me Tojo, but they left the ‘To’ off,” he says, laughing again. “So they called me Joe.”
And Joe he has remained, ever since.
Rules of the shop
It doesn’t take long for a visitor to learn the rules of Lavoie’s shop.
Expect to be asked to drive a tack or two, whether you’re good at it or not. It’s Lavoie’s way of teaching.
Fiberglass is a curse word in the world of cedar strips and canvas.
“Don’t say fiberglass,” Lavoie says, still smiling.
And when in doubt, sandpaper is your best friend.
“If you think you’ve sanded …” Richard says, prompting her dad.
“Sand again,” Lavoie says, completing the sentence for her.
Lavoie downplays what he does.
“There ain’t much of a secret,” he says, before admitting that learning how to hide mistakes is a valuable skill to possess.
But his daughter isn’t willing to let her father off the hook so easily.
Aside from the tack-rattling and the good-natured ribbing, Richard maintains that her dad is a very special man.
Growing up, he was just her dad, the man who came home from work smelling like wood and varnish. Now, she sees something different.
“I can’t even think about [how lucky I am to be working beside him],” she says. “It makes me tear up. I’m really lucky to have dad. Lucky.”
Richard says she was especially close to her mother, and when she spent time at her parents house as an adult, much of her time was spent with her mom. Lavoie was often in the garage, working.
“I had never paid much attention to dad,” she says. “But when Mom passed we got really close. He is such an artist. Every canoe he builds is a work of art. I’m just glad to have the legacy.”
