Bearing a remarkable resemblance to his creator, Dave Chantler, this haughty butler fetched $2,600 at last summer’s West Parry Sound Health Centre (WPSHC) foundation auction, and elicited smiles from dubious beverage patrons as he made the rounds to promote the event.
“He’s a conversation piece, kind of distinctive,” says Dave, “I tried to make him look snooty, that was on purpose. He was supposed to be looking down his nose, saying: ”I would just as soon not be serving these drinks.”
Staff at the Foundation office, Lynne Atkinson and Cathy Knox, immediately smitten by this supercilious figure, named him Humphrey McDougall after the nearby village, and municipality served by the local health centre.
“With the ladies, he is every woman’s dream,’ comments Lynne, who is the executive director of the WPSHC Foundation. “He’s handsome, distinguished, impeccably dressed and ready to serve.”
“We traveled him around in gaining momentum for the event,” she explains. “So he actually was at the Stockey Centre greeting people during the first few weeks of the Festival of the Sound, getting much acclaim there. He travelled by boat, from Pointe au Baril out to the Ojibway Club, for the artist’s weekend. Then he spent some time here at the Health Centre greeting guests. So it was really fun to watch reactions.”
Dave, a modest Nobel senior has no idea how his butler wound up looking like himself. He claims it certainly wasn’t intentional, and he doesn’t appreciate references to the mutual resemblance, as being particularly flattering.”
Humphrey is the fourth in an impromptu series of loveable life-sized characters, emerging from his shop during the past 20 years.
There, Dave takes a pine log, and his own mischievous brand of humour and carves, whittles and refines characters innately capable of prompting smiles from faces of passersby.
Initially, he didn’t see the personality in his butlers,
“But you watch people come by and look – and ooh and ahh,” he says. “Then you know it’s working.”
This whole woodcarving hobby started, oddly enough, through hunting.
“When I was in my twenties, I started carving decoys,” he recalls. “That’s how everyone that I know, gets started carving. You’re a duck hunter, so you carve decoys. And then, by and by, you get carving small birds because it’s a challenge, and then you get sick of doing that.
“A lot of people start carving smaller and smaller, and I tended to get bigger and bigger because I used the chainsaw a lot anyway.” says Dave, who owned Deerhorn Lodge at Sans Souci for 35 years. On the remote Georgian Bay Island, being handy with a chainsaw was an asset.
“The way I really got started carving was while bringing people into the lodge,” he recounts. “We used to pick up people all day. That was about a half hour boat trip from Sans Souci to Twelve Mile, and I would have three or four trips a day in our busy season. Between trips you couldn’t get involved in any job, so I just carved for an hour to kill time.”
Gradually he became quite adept, and one spring, his sons Derek and Jeff, just back from the Toronto Sportsman Show and its decoy-carving exhibit, offered him some advice.
“They said ‘Dad you know you’re a heck of a carver but you can’t paint worth a dam,” Dave remembers. “They’d seen the big exhibition down there and thought I should go learn to paint. So I went and sure enough, they were right, there’s a lot to painting the subtleties. So I got involved in it and with people who were carvers and I learned a little bit.”
Over the years, he’s carved pieces as intricate as a humming bird in an apple blossom, and as large as the Deerhorn Lodge sign, which featured a hillbilly with a crock of whiskey under his arm, reeling in a whopping 14-foot musky. He’s created a fawn from an elm, a bear cub from a chunk of black walnut, an awkward golfer, a humourous figurine of a fat lady shooting her scale as alternative to dieting, and a reclining Miami Beach bull frog complete with bikini, sunglasses and her own lily pad.
His first life-size character was carved for a family who had a cottage in the area and wanted their own “Mr. Belvedere” from television acclaim.
“I had no idea what Mr. Belvedere looked like,” Dave shrugs. “So they described him, I did a couple of sketches, which I showed to them, and they said ‘fine’.”
It was in the 80s when former Panamanian General Manuel Antonio Noriega, was frequently on the nightly newscasts and – somehow – the budding wooden manservant began appearing, more and more, like this notorious military dictator
“The wife said ‘that’s great, it looks like Mr. Belvedere,” and her husband said “No it’s not, it’s Noriega,’ the carver recalls, smiling. “And we realized it was just the power of suggestion.”
Fancying the idea of having one’s own life-sized wooden butler, Dave’s next character was a custom-made prime minister to stand inside the door of his lodge to welcome guests. With an exaggerated Brian Mulroney broad jaw, there was no mistaking this caricature of Canada’s eighteenth prime minister.
“And if I knew you were coming, your favourite drink would be on his tray waiting for you when you arrived,” Dave recalls. “With a note about gratuities being accepted.
That guy was around a long time, but eventually his popularity began to wane. Brian had had his day, so Dave decided to help the Health Centre Foundation by donating him to the 2005 auction.
Today, Brian is a conversation piece greeting guests in the front foyer at the home of Bruce Hatherley on Gordon Bay.
The idea for the haughty butler “Humphrey” arose at the urging of an unsuccessful bidder on Mulroney.
Initially Dave wasn’t too keen on following up on the suggestion, but he did happen to discover a felled pine on Bayside Drive near his home, that seemed to ooze some inherent personality. Then, all it took was a cluster of rainy days that summer, and Dave quickly found himself back in his shop, immersed in the creation of Humphrey.
Arriving between Brian and Humphrey, however, was St. Francis, the bird saint.
“I made that one because I wanted a bird bath,” Dave explains quite simply.
Clad in a hooded monk robe, this amiable fellow carries a tray with birdseed on it.
“Then my daughter (Brenda Mair) decided she wanted to have him, so he’s gone out to Long Lake Estates. He’s working hard out there.”
Each life-size character begins with a pine log, which Dave trims with a chainsaw. Next, he begins refining the piece with smaller dremel-type tools.
“Whatever works on a piece of wood. I might use just saws, I might use just chisels, I might be able to sand it to get it to come down. I’d dynamite if I could, to make it go faster,” he says, joking about his shortage of patience with his works of art.
To continue to support the Health Centre Foundation auction, his next idea is for a little old lady with knobby knees, sitting on a log, holding a pair of binoculars and wearing Grebb boots, She’s a typical bird watcher, he suggests. That’s the current picture in the artist’s head.
“I’ve been hanging around too many nature club types,” he comments. “I’ve pictured this being life-sized. It would be nice sitting on somebody’s dock.”
As for the duck hunting that started all this carving in the first place, well, Dave still buys a license every year. And every fall, he heads down to Sans Souci with Derek and Jeff, and sometimes granddaughter Kaitlin.
“For old times sake, I go and freeze to death for half a day,” he says. “I don’t shoot anything. It has more to do with nostalgia than hunting.”
