The Tidewater Turners gave Myron a surprise party for his 95th birthday. It began with members raising their drop-nose scrapers to salute his arrival.
	Myron and his wife, Sue Barton Harris. He absolutely adored her and always called her his greatest teacher.
	Myron’s favorite tool was a round-nosed drop-nose scraper. Here, he’s using one to shape a piece of hickory.

Myron W. Curtis, 1920-2021

Myron W. Curtis, whose long career in woodturning included the founding of one of the oldest and most active chapters of the AAW, died on September 17, 2021 in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He was a few weeks short of his 101st birthday.  

In 1987, Myron helped establish the Tidewater Turners of Virginia and was the chapter’s mentor-in-chief and lodestar for the next 34 years. Among many other things, Myron developed the chapter’s signature tool: the drop-nose scraper. Nearly every club member uses one—typically, one he or she made on joining. In 2016, when the chapter hosted a surprise birthday party for Myron, members hailed his arrival by lining the driveway and raising their scrapers in salute.

Although he began woodturning as a youngster in 1935, turning was not Myron’s only career. He enlisted in the Navy in 1939 and spent twenty-one years in the service—first as an Aviation Machinist’s Mate and then, in 1943, as a Chief Petty Officer. His final assignment was Flight Engineer on the Lockheed WV-2 Super Constellation. Following his naval career, he spent two decades teaching woodworking at a high school in Virginia Beach and drafting at a vocational tech school. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in vocational education.

In the early 1970s, he developed the drop-nose scraper out of necessity. The students’ turning tools had been sharpened to stumps, but the school couldn’t afford new gouges. Myron reground some cutters from a metalworking lathe and had them brazed to the end of the old tools. Over the years, he arranged to make and give away more than 350 drop-nose scrapers to beginning woodturners in the Tidewater chapter and places where he taught.

In the early 1980s, Myron and his wife Sue Barton Harris built an Asian-inspired house in a secluded area of Virginia Beach that adjoins a wildlife preserve. Myron did the building (he was the son of a carpenter), Sue did the designing (she was an art teacher in the Norfolk schools). She also designed many of the balusters, bedposts, columns, and other products that Myron produced in his career as an architectural woodturner. Sue survives him, along with sons Alan and Michael.

Bedsides his production work, Myron demonstrated at eight AAW Symposiums and taught at the Arrowmont School of Craft. Myron once said of his teaching at Arrowmont: “I’ve taught there ten or eleven times, about ten times I’ve been an assistant, and about eight times I’ve been a student. All of that was learning, and from day one, it has been a continuous thing. My students have been some of my best teachers.”

Myron enjoyed the kind of calmness and easygoing good humor of someone whose life is well focused and centered. A Tidewater colleague termed him “the ultimate gentle teacher.” He called teaching his main purpose, saying “the other purpose is the wife.” He regularly used words like “blessed” and “lucky” to describe his marriage to Sue, and he always called her his greatest teacher.  

His supply of yarns that he called sea stories was as deep as the piles of shavings littering the floor of his shop. For many years, he hosted regular sessions with members of the Tidewater chapter, who came for storytelling sessions and time at the lathe. Myron hosted his last turning session a few months before his death. One of the participants remembered it this way: “A group gathered in his shop to make Scandinavian shrink boxes. He sat and watched some of us struggle, and finally got his favorite drop-nose scraper and showed us how to deftly cut some wood.”

–David Heim