LYNN – After more than half a century working as a furniture repair artist and master craftsman Ron Trapasso, 74, will be leaving his business, the Attwill Furniture Company in late October.
Walking into Trapasso’s shop on Essex Street Thursday, the smell of sawdust and wood varnish overpowered the air. Trapasso has worked at the shop since 1969, after he finished his trade school education at the North End’s North Bennet Street School.
“Graduating high school, I really didn’t want to go into college, even though I applied to a few, but my guidance counselor recommended that I go check out the school so I did and I loved it so I went there for about two years all together. They were very gracious to me at the time because you used to have to pay for it as you go, and they let me take two months off in the summer to get a job so I could stretch it out two years,” Trapasso said.
In 1977, when the store’s previous owner passed away, Trapasso, who was in his mid-20s, bought the business and ran it. Only a few weeks after Trapasso moved to a Lynnway location, the fires in 1981 burned down his shop.
“We moved it over to the Lynnway, just before the Lynn fire, the great fire. About a week or two before the big fire, I got a call in the middle of the night from one of my clients at my home number, and he said ‘your place is burning down,’ I say ‘oh God, no, I just moved in,’” Trapasso said.
On a tour of Trapasso’s shop, filled with hand tools and little to no electric machinery, he explained the history and artistic craftsmanship behind each of his restored pieces — a candlestick holder table designed to be lifted to block out a draft, a photograph of a chair built for the Speaker of the House, and the first million-dollar piece of furniture sold in the U.S.
“It’s the secretary desk you work at bookshelves off the desk, it’s got a great big Harry Potter foot on it was attributed to his Boston cabinet maker, and who it is here before I worked on it, and did to be what we did all this belongs to a guy that was the first guy in the country to buy a piece of American furniture for over a million dollars,” Trapasso said.
He also mentioned working on the restoration of Andrew’s Chapel in Swampscott, “It was a mess, it was terrible,” he said. “They found all kinds of dead things underneath the floor.”
Walking away from half a century of service, Trapasso said that he plans on going back to teach carpentry at the very place his career began: North Bennet Street School. He said that out of the thousands of furniture pieces he’s restored by hand, what he enjoys most about his trade is the sense of completion he gets after restoring or building a piece of fine wood furniture.
“It’s a sense of completion, you know, start from the beginning, and go forward right to the end. And when you step back and look and say, ‘Well, look what I’ve done,’ you know, it’s pretty neat. That’s the most rewarding part of it,” Trapasso said.
Trapasso’s departure doesn’t spell doom for Attwill, as he sold the business earlier this year. But, Trapasso said, he was unsure what the new owners would do with the decades-old shop.
Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at [email protected]
