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Many lean on his handy canes

Vern Fuller knows how hard it can be to get around, so he's always prepared, with his handcrafted specialty, to help others.

By ELENA LESLEY
Published August 20, 2006

HOMOSASSA SPRINGS - In the wood shop, Vern Fuller is an eight-and-a-half-fingered wonder.

The first digit to go, his left pinky, was sliced while he was making a bowl with a power saw.

"They took me to the hospital and I told them, 'Cut the damn thing off,' " he said.

Then, while he was using a table saw for another project, a piece of wood flew out, hit the top half of his middle finger, and "shattered it like an eggshell," he said.

But Fuller, 83, is resilient - "ornery," he likes to say. And even though he's lost a few appendages and doesn't generally get around too easily anyway, he's still always sawing, sanding and polishing. If anyone in the neighborhood needs something made, they know where to come.

"He made half the furniture in my house," said Mona Elliott, a friend and neighbor. "He made a toybox for my grandkids and a cane I sent to my mother in California."

Canes are Fuller's speciality. He has different designs he crafts by hand and gives out to strangers who seem to need help.

"I've always got one in my car," he said. "Then if I see an older lady or someone who's having trouble walking, I give it to them."

Most people accept the offer graciously, but not all.

"I see this one guy every now and then and he has this old, dilapidated cane," Fuller said. "I've offered three or four times to give him a cane, but he says no, he wants to stick with the one he's got."

Fuller knows what it's like to need a good cane.

With his arthritic hips and back, it's hard for the former weightlifter to even carry his garbage down the driveway.

"I'd have to run for a chair," he said, shaking his head.

A World War II veteran, he tried to get an electric scooter from Veterans Affairs, and was incensed when they turned him down, suggesting he undergo surgery.

"You know what I told them?" he asks, eyes gleaming. "I said, 'Thank you. All the doctors I've seen with all their equipment couldn't figure this out, and you figured it out just by taking my blood pressure and temperature.' "

He smacks his hand on the kitchen table.

"I didn't spend three and a half years in New Guinea and the Philippines for them to tell me whether I have a sore back or not."

With doctors saying he's too old for surgery, Fuller gets by with a scooter he borrowed from his neighbor. And of course, the canes.

"Look at this cane," he instructs, thumping one of his creations on the ground. "Stable. You can put your weight on that."

Even though it takes a few hours to make a single cane, Fuller wouldn't switch to store-bought ones. He's used to work.

"I was born and raised on farms," he said.

Fuller's mother died when he was 9, and he started work as a farmhand in Illinois a couple of years later. By the time he hit 15, Fuller said, he was running a 200-acre farm owned by a man in the pharmaceutical business.

He signed up for the Army at 17, and met his future wife, Alice, just a few weeks before shipping out.

"She was there waiting for me when I came back," he said.

He had a number of jobs - at General Motors, as a painter - but did woodworking in his spare time.

"I was always interested in wood," he said, describing how he made go-carts out of boxes and roller skates.

In 1968, he and Alice moved to Citrus, where Fuller worked as a carpenter and builder and eventually owned a real estate office.

But when he retired in the mid 1980s, he went back to woodcrafting. And he did it for free.

"He won't take money," Elliott said. "Sometimes I at least try to help him out by buying materials."

Fuller made most of the furniture in his house, and thought up creative ways to display Alice's ceramic projects. Some rest on handmade shelves and headboards, others hang from the ceiling in birdcage-like contraptions.

He doesn't believe in waste.

"Whenever I have little scraps of wood, I sit around and start thinking, 'What can I do with these?' "

Often he makes toys, little carousels that spin back and forth with rhinos, giraffes, elephants.

"I guess that's what happens when you get old," he jokes. "You get eccentric and start making toys."

Since Alice's death three years ago, Fuller spends even more time in the shop. He misses her, and knows it's good to keep busy.

"I've been on my own my whole life, ever since I was a boy," he said.

Wearing his favorite outfit, a gray T-shirt and black suspenders, Fuller shuffles to his shop on a recent Thursday morning.

"Couldn't you have put on something a little nicer?" Elliott teases.

"What?" Fuller barks.

"I swear," Elliott replies. "After my mother died, I kept that cane so I can hit him on the head."

Fuller grumbles and gets back to work. He sketches the outline of a cane on cherry wood - because it's the best kind - and starts the sawing and sanding.

Every couple of minutes, he has to sit. The cherry wood is tough, but he's tougher, and he shoves the saw through the board's knots, sweating as the day gets warm.

In a few hours, he'll have a cane to hand out to some unsuspecting person.

"Whatever they need, I'll make it for them," he said.

Elena Lesley can be reached at 564-3627 or elesley@sptimes.com.

[Last modified August 19, 2006, 21:16:57]