Recycle ... Anything!
Crayons, sneakers, wine corks—even one man’s tool collection—can be put to good use in the right hands
DAVE MERRY and his tools have been through a lot together. When he was 19, he built a model airplane with a real working engine that won first prize at the South Dakota State Fair. That was an especially sweet moment. Dave’s big brother, George Merry, who’d helped him build his first plane and taught him everything about tools, had died by suicide four years before. George was only 21. Maintaining the connection to his tools was a way for Dave to keep his brother’s memory alive.
And the tools built new memories too. They helped Dave, now 80, renovate and repair his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he and his wife, Annette Merry, lived for 46 years and raised three children. The table saw, the jointer plane, the drill press, and the dozens of other power and hand tools had pride of place in his meticulously organized workshop. “I had a whole setup, and it was beautiful,” says Dave, a retired technical writer, test engineer, and minister.
But then Annette experienced a bout of seizures that left her relying on a walker to get around, and the Merrys decided to move into assisted living. Dave’s workshop was obviously a minor consideration given Annette’s condition, but the family knew that giving it up, on top of everything else, would hurt.
“My parents lost so much that we really didn’t know how to help him lose this, too,” their daughter, Sharon Macfarlane, told KARE 11.
It was the Merrys’ pastor who came up with a possible solution.
The founders thought it would take a year to collect enough tools. It took one day.
He’d heard about some people who were setting up a tool library— a nonprofit facility that would lend out tools just as a regular library lends books. Might Dave be interested in donating his?
“I said yes,” Dave says.
The people creating the St. Paul Tool Library were thrilled. They had expected it would take a year to collect enough tools to make their facility fully functional. Instead it took one day: the day Dave donated his. The library’s founders drove over to the Merrys’ house and picked everything up themselves.
The library is housed in the basement of the long-shuttered American Can Factory. Members pay an annual fee (from $20 to $120) for unlimited tool use and a varying number of visits to the workshop. And they get an extra benefit: Dave Merry.
“Almost every time we’re open, Dave’s here,” says one of the founders, Peter Hoh. Dave comes as often as he can to offer his expertise to aspiring woodworkers, space-challenged Diyers, and anyone else needing a place to work on a project. “It means a lot to me to be able to go and use my tools,” he says. “But it means just as much to help somebody else use the tools properly.”
As Hoh puts it, “This is his workshop now.”