The Washington Post
Norm Abram, on location in Manchester, Mass., always crafts a custom-built accessory for whatever fix-up home appears in "This Old House."

TV's high priest of home repair is woodworker at heart

STEVE HENDRIX, THE WASHINGTON POST

Originally published Sunday, March 3, 2002

BOSTON -- Here is the most heartening fact you'll learn today: Norm Abram has a plywood staircase in his house. It's a rough-cut, bare-bones skeleton of a stairway, good for a warehouse, maybe, or a toolshed, but surprising in the otherwise finely crafted foyer of America's most famous carpenter. And it has been there for six years.

"Well, I do have some of the wood stockpiled, some reclaimed heart pine," Abram says in a voice that's lightly sheepish and heavily New England. He pronounces it "hawt" pine. "It's just a matter of finding five or six days in a row to finish it. I'm like a lot of people. I'm a homeowner and I have a lot of chores to do."

Norm, Norm, Norm. You're not a homeowner like a lot of people. You are the uber-homeowner. Someone who gets mail addressed to "the Master," who has verse written about him on Internet poetry sites. You're a shaman with a cordless drill, an icon of unachievable perfection.

Thank goodness for the lame staircase. It means we don't have to hate you.

For almost 7 million television viewers a week, Abram's the Saturday afternoon pastor of do-it-yourself excellence. Next month, he'll wrap up shooting on his 22nd season as master carpenter on "This Old House," the PBS home restoration series with 4.6 million weekly viewers that helped launch the do-it-yourself craze when it debuted in 1979. At the same time, he'll start taping the 15th season of his own spinoff series, "The New Yankee Workshop," a woodworking solo act with 2.3 million viewers that is part how-to and part performance art with power tools.

It's a run that shows no sign of wearing thin. The show is now in broadcast syndication and on cable's HGTV network. If anything, interest in Abram and his fix-it genre has increased in the nesting boom following Sept. 11. His personal appearances at home shows are packed. And last month, media behemoth Time Warner -- which debuted This Old House magazine in 1995 -- purchased the entire "This Old House" operation from Boston PBS station WGBH. Its producers promise that the series will continue to appear on PBS in its same folksy, underproduced form. But media synergy has finally reached into the side waters of public broadcasting.

"I'm not sure you'll be hearing the 'This Old House' theme played by U2," says Russell Morash, creator and executive producer of both of Abram's shows, and the man credited with inventing television's how-to format. "But yes, anything is possible. We might do a series of home expos. At the very least, I'd look for a line of serious books."

In any case, Morash assures, Norm will still be Norm. "He's unchangeable."

By all appearances, there's not much to change. He's just a woodworker, right? But what other woodworker has been on "Late Show with David Letterman" four times? Abram has played himself in a Warner Bros. cartoon, Steven Spielberg's late "Freakazoid" series on WB and the Cartoon Network. He shows up in more reruns than any public broadcasting personality short of Big Bird. And when WGBH needed star power for a fund-raising campaign last year, it trotted out Diana Rigg, Yo-Yo Ma, Anna Deavere Smith and Norm Abram.

What exactly accounts for the international appeal of a guy who is more shop teacher than sexpot? With a bit of a belly over his tool belt, an imperfect smile and myopic safety glasses -- Abram breaks all the rules of TV stardom. But there's something about his soft Yankee accent, his kindly eyes and his lumberjack beard that is inexplicably telegenic, mesmerizing even, as he emasculates armchair handymen with his display of wizardly skills and do-it-right-the-first-time discipline.

"He's not as scary as Martha Stewart -- it's easy to imagine her whacking you with a ruler," says Robert Thompson, professor of media and pop culture at Syracuse University. "But Norm could have been over for meatloaf the night before. He's got high standards, but you don't feel like he's going to be disappointed in you."

Women -- at least women suffering ever-drip faucets and never-budge husbands -- look at Abram and see the answer to their Mr. Fix-It fantasies. Men see the same thing. They watch slack-jawed as Abram builds a Chippendale dresser in a half-hour. "I never knew it could be like this," they murmur, ogling the technique, coveting the tools.

"A lot of secrets of our specialized American society spill out of these shows," says Thompson. "To people who went straight through college and right to work as doctors and lawyers and in front of computer screens, the very idea that you could actually do some of this stuff yourself is an alien concept. It's entertainment."

But on a rainy January morning in Manchester, Mass., it isn't entertainment. It's construction. Abram pulls into the muddy job site of the current "This Old House" season. The producers do their best to keep the location a secret, but a steady stream of locals has passed through to watch the televised rebirth of an 1880s shingle mansion.

Contractor Tom Silva walks by. Abram buttonholes him and they talk in tradesman shorthand. Then he works his way back to the rank of shelves he's building around the living room fireplace, a floor-to-ceiling masterpiece called an inglenook. Abram crafts a custom-built accessory like this for every "House."

In the old days, when Bob Vila hosted the show, Abram served as general contractor. But in 1988 when he and Morash launched "The New Yankee Workshop," Abram graduated to contractor emeritus and Silva took over as contractor alongside replacement host Steve Thomas. Abram now kibitzes about the work, builds his custom contribution and even conducts some of the show's signature homeowner-in-the-headlights interviews. ("Yes. Norm. We. Are. Really. Excited. About. This. New. Copper. Duct. Work," says Bob the Homeowner. "Say. Who. Is. Paying. For. All. This. Anyway?" You are, Bob. Owners may get a break on materials donated by sponsors, but otherwise they foot the whole reconstruction tab.)

Abram is a second-generation builder. He worked summers on his dad's crew until he went off to the University of Massachusetts for engineering studies that he never quite finished. Instead, he started his own construction company in Boston. After he built a small barn for Morash, the WGBH producer asked him in 1979 to run a renovation project in Dorchester that, incidentally, the station wanted to film for a new local show on home restoration.

"He didn't hire me to do TV," Abram says. "He hired me to fix this house up. At the most, I thought I'd get a cameo carrying a 2-by-4 in the background." Instead, Morash stuck a Betacam in his face and said, "Tell us what you're doing, Norm."

The show was a hit in Boston, and within a year the series went national.

Not that Abram sees himself as a performer. It's clear that as much as he enjoys his fame ("restaurant owners are extremely nice to me," he says), the table saw is more important to him than the camera. Here's a happy truth: In the television age of empty celebrity and blow-dried personality, Abram is famous because he's a nice guy who's good at building things.

He really is just a woodworker.

And pay attention. He really does expect viewers to follow along.

"There's enough information in the average show for someone to follow through and finish a project on their own," he says, standing in his workshop on a day off from the Manchester project.

It's this workshop that makes the amateurs howl. Ask the average Home Depot duffer about Norm and you'll hear: "Nobody in the real world has a shop like that. If I had those tools, I could do what he does."

"Yeah," Norm says. "I get a lot of teasing about the workshop and the cost of the equipment." He estimates the value of his setup at about $20,000. How much to adequately equip a more average home shop? Half that, he says.

Norm's workshop is in a secret, groupie-proof location in a Boston suburb. It seems smaller than on TV, of course, and less daunting. Except for two klieg lights hanging from the ceiling, there's nothing to suggest the intense filming schedule.

Most of the many, many tools here are gifts from hopeful sponsors, although the labels are covered in accordance with PBS's noncommercial sensibilities. Countless clamps and jigs line the walls, and no fewer than five cordless drills line one shelf. Against a wall is a laser-guided miter saw.

"I have a laser-guided miter saw," Norm acknowledges. "I'm an admitted power tool junkie."

The Olympian Copyright 2002

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