ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 26, 1996 TAG: 9612260015
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: DUBLIN
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
To this day, woodcarving artists Tan Tooker and Juanita Hopes have no idea how the White House heard about them.
But last summer, the Pulaski County couple received a letter from the White House social secretary asking that they create two wooden Christmas tree ornaments based on the ballet "The Nutcracker" for the official Christmas tree in the Blue Room.
The couple had moved to the northwestern part of Pulaski County about five years ago, building a home on two acres of woodland near where Tooker's sister and brother-in-law live almost 10 miles from the Bland-Pulaski county line. They included a woodworking shop with separate work areas for each of them.
Tooker used to be a jazz musician. "I quit playing and starting doing this," he said, gesturing at some of his abstract pieces scattered around their living room. The room also contains two of his paintings, but he said he does not do that anymore.
"I went to the Art Academy in Cincinnati for one year I guess it was about '57. I did not study any sculpture at that time," he said. "That just sort of came later."
The wood sculpture came in a gradual way. "I did the first piece with a pocket-knife. I kind of liked the results of that. So I borrowed some chisels from a friend of mine who was a cabinetmaker and did another piece. And I kind of liked that," he said.
Now he has an entire set of wood-sculpturing tools in some of the wooden cabinets he made for their workroom, just off their garage. Sometimes, when one of them is commissioned to do a larger piece, they have to move their work into the garage.
Hopes is a computer programmer, and now works part time at that job at Radford University. But she also does woodwork, specializing in realistic colored life-size bird figures as contrasted with Tooker's more stylized and abstract pieces.
Tooker differentiated their approach this way: "She counts the feathers. I count the wings."
"He got me into it," said Hopes, who met Tooker at a YMCA in Ohio. "The first thing I ever did was whittle."
Tooker has done a few birds of his own. When the couple lived in Hamilton, Ohio, the Dayton-based National Cash Register Co. commissioned him to do 57 eagles to be awarded to selected employees who have since scattered all over the world.
Since moving to Virginia, the couple has shown work at arts and crafts shows, galleries and shops. They are often commissioned to do work, usually by someone who has seen or heard about their work. "Somebody's bought something, someone else sees it," Hopes said.
As for the White House commission, Tooker said, "We have no idea how they got our name." He and Hopes accepted an invitation for a White House holiday tour Dec. 14 to see the tree on which their ornaments were displayed.
The theme for the ornaments, which they were asked to keep secret until this month when First Lady Hillary Clinton announced it, was based on the popular Christmas ballet in which the Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, has performed.
It took them about two weeks. Hopes' painted ornament shows one of the Sugar Plum Fairies in a ballet position. Tooker carved the character Drosselmeier, featured in the ballet's story within a story.
They had to do some preparations first. "We went out and rented a couple of videos of 'The Nutcracker,'" Tooker said.
"And we got a couple of books about 'The Nutcracker' I even got a book on ballet," Hopes said. "I wanted it to be real."
At the White House tour, Hopes learned from a page that requests for ornaments had gone out to about 100 woodcarvers. There were also letters to 325 needlepoint artists, including 84-year-old Minnie LaRue of Abingdon who contributed a Christmas stocking with Nutcracker symbols. And all of the participants were invited on the White House tour, with up to three guests.
"There was a ton of people there," Hopes said. They toured the building and got a look at the selected 181/2-foot White House tree - "Sort of like the Oscar of trees, I guess" - but never did get to photograph their creations on it.
"We couldn't even see our pieces. The Secret Service guy kept pushing us out because they said they had a reception in a very few minutes," Tooker said. "We never had a chance to find them, let alone shoot them." Nor did they glimpse any members of the First Family.
But the tour was fun, all the same. "As we entered, they had a madrigal chorus singing Christmas carols," Hopes said. Later there was a nine-member gospel group from South Carolina serenading them.
And they did have the foresight to take pictures of their pieces before sending them to Washington, even though they could not show them to anyone until after the White House announced the theme of the decorations for the year.
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PAUL DELLINGER/Staff. 1. Tan Tooker and Juanita Hopes atby CNBtheir work benches. The couple carved two pieces they designed for
the White House Christmas tree based on "Nutcracker Suite" ballet
characters. 2. Tooker did the man with the eye-patch (right), the
character Drosselmeier; 3. Hopes did the ballerina Sugar Plum Fairy
(above). color.