BY SAMUEL PICCOLO The VOICE
Paul Ryan, who is 79 and lives in Fonthill, is often in his basement workshop, and was there last week.
“I haven’t been told that it looks like Santa’s shop,” he said. “But I have been told that it’s a mess. It’s a good mess though.”
Behind where Ryan was standing, his head barely clearing the low ceiling, was stacked a pile of wood pieces up to his shoulders, and two feet deep. On a table sat part of the train station that Ryan built for the Christmas display in Peace Park. The windows were without glass.
“This is part of the NTS—Niagara, Toronto, St. Catharines—station,” he said. “I’m just repairing it now. Some kids busted the whole thing up, knocked off the shingles and everything. I’ve got the whole building in the garage and am fixing it bits at a time.”
Ryan has been building miniature structures for the Peace Park display for 15 years. The arrangement is organized by the Rotary Club, not the Town, and Ryan said that he’s always been happy to help.
“I’ve worked with all of the service clubs. But I’ve never joined any of them. I don’t like meetings, and I can’t sit still. I don’t take orders well, either, but I do like to work on stuff.”
In addition to the miniatures, Ryan also assembles 500 “swags” each year, the pine boughs tied together with a red bow and affixed to hydro poles in Pelham.
Over the past decade and a half, Ryan has built in miniature an Anglican Church, Sharpe’s and Klager’s Delis, the library, the bandshell, and Keith’s.
“The closest I’ve got to doing this professionally was doing some work on houses going up,” he said. “I’m just a dumb dirt farmer.” Though Ryan, who also cut meat at both Sharpe’s and Klager’s, may be self-effacing, the sophistication of his work makes it clear that he is not “just” anything.
“When I was a kid, I had a neighbour called Dick Leavens. He was a carpenter, a blacksmith, and everything else. If I was good, he would let me come over and teach me—he taught me how to cut wood and temper steel. If he caught me running in my mother’s garden chasing a baseball, he wouldn’t let me come over for a week.”
What Ryan learned from his neighbour more than six decades ago has remained with him his whole life.
“I was taught to always be able to do things with my hands,” he said. When his kids were young he built toys for them—wooden trains and planes—and afterwards he made hundreds of the toys for the Pelham Fire Department’s toy drive. (Ryan was once a volunteer firefighter in Fonthill.)
“Kids now are not taught to work with their hands,” he said. “So they do this.”
He mimed holding a phone and texting furiously. He blamed this lack of handiness for the vandalism of his Peace Park displays.
“They’ve been set on fire before, too. There are cameras, but they don’t have any film in them, I guess. If they tried to catch them, then they’d have to write up a report. But it’s too bad, because it always happens. It’d be nice if the police could get on it,” he said.
Ryan speculated also that he was busier as a kid, growing up in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
“The only time that we’d be standing around town is if we were playing Kick the Can or Retrieval. All the rest of the time we were playing hockey or baseball in the street.”
In the 1990s, Ryan was in a serious car accident and was left in severe pain.
“I had to learn how to use power tools then, since with my shoulder I couldn’t push a planer.”
Two years ago, he had a shoulder replacement, and since then has acquired a second childhood.
“It was the first time in decades that I could raise my arms above my head,” Ryan said. “I feel great.”
He is certainly as busy as he ever was as a kid. This year, Ryan built 600 birdhouses for Habitat for Humanity. In addition to the miniatures and swags, Ryan also creates wreaths that he gives away to friends and family.
“A lot of people help me out, so I like to give them a wreath back at Christmastime,” he said.
He looked at a half-finished wreath that was sitting nearby the NTS Station parts under repair. He kicked a piece of wood out of the way and picked it up.
“We grow the holly here,” he said, pointing to the red berries.
Most of Ryan’s other materials are donated, and the wood in particular comes from a window and door shop in Parry Sound, where Ryan has a cottage.
“They throw it all away, but it’s not junk wood. I go in every Friday to pick it up. There’s cedar, walnut, pine—everything.”
Ryan doesn’t do much wood work at his cottage, though he said that he does do stonework while there.
“I just put the wood in the bug house—I don’t know why we call it that…it’s just something to call it—and then I bring it back here.”
Ryan looked again at the big stack of wood.
“This is a good place,” he said. “I come down here, do my work, and listen to my music. Fifties music. Isn’t that the only kind of music there is?”
