A letter from Elliot Sayward

Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, Inc., The, Jul/Aug 2004 by Sayward, Elliot

(The following remark by Elliot Sayward recall his early involvement with the EAIA's publication committee and other tool organizations. This is part one of two parts, which will conclude next issue.-Ed)

One day I noticed that things had changed in my lifetime. In operation were such persons and institutions as Henry Mercer, the Williamsburg Restoration, and the Early American Industries Association. The EAIA was making an effort to recover artifacts, the hard evidence of those changes and developments that had almost died, unnoticed, as our present became our past.

Many of EAIA's founders were more than mere collectors. They saw or were trying to see the meanings of the artifacts they gathered as evidence in the understanding of our history.

In 1967 I followed my friend Jack Kebabian into EAIA and immediately discovered something. The organization's appetite for workers knew no bounds. I had hardly learned how to spell EAIA when Bill Ackroyd grasped me firmly by the lapel and recruited me to serve as chairman of the publications committee.

Being on the publications committee meant working closely with Dutch Wetzel, a great guy and several times EAIA president who did a fine job but didn't really want to be president, that office being a very demanding one. I learned early in my EAIA life that there was a great deal to do and few to do it during the periods between meetings. At its meetings, the board would assemble, begin its review of recent activity, and continue in a hard-at-work mode until somebody announced, "Hurry up, we're going to miss the bus."

Scheduling improved over the years and the board spent more time at its work. Unofficially, I constituted myself EAIA's chief suggester. Although my efforts sometimes made extra work for others, it more often redounded to me. That's how I got into the long range planning business. I had pointed out that having a second class of membership rendered a lot of people second-class members and they didn't all like it. Further, I noted that we were not totally aware of what our membership thought of the services we provided and seldom gave thought to what other useful things we could do to carry out our mission and provide for the needs of all members.

That gave me and my wife, Mary Jane, a new spare time activity-designing the Long Range Planning Questionnaire for the two classes of membership, arranging a PO Box, and printing the questionnaire. Analyzing the responses was the most work and even more fun. Responses came from an unexpectedly large proportion of the membership.

The rest is history. I would have liked to have seen the survey happen every five years or so, but there was really too much on my plate to add another little dainty.

Other chores did get added from time to time because they fell into my publications job. What started as a committee chairmanship soon reduced itself to a one-person band because the committee's mandate was to publish without delay!

Publishing was something EAIA had done only once before by hiring an outsider. Initially my assignment seemed hopeless. Working with a committee of volunteers by telephone or mail proved unfeasible. We were unable to accomplish anything. Things fell between the chairs-weeks elapsed, sometimes months, with no progress. Procrastination, reluctance to work independently, and avoiding final decisions or commitments created frustrations.

To approach the goal line, I became, with approval of the officers a do-it-yourself publisher consulting with committee members if anything outside normal day-to-day business came up. I hasten to add that for some publications I had the help of very good and talented EAIA people. Some of our publications were done in partnership with other tool groups and this often reduced my workload considerably.

Other things fell into the purview of my publications job. For example, one of our authors, an EAIA member, was accused of plagiarism by another author, also a member. I spent the best part of a summer vacation reading the two works in question, one against the other, searching for the unspecified plagiarism of which we were to learn when the threatened suit was instituted. Outside of the fact that both were written in English and dealt with similar subjects I could find no instance of a copying. We continued to offer our publication. No suit was instituted. It turned out that the complaint was based on a single word, one in common use by collectors, that both had employed to characterize certain groups of tools. A different potential claim was resolved when we promised not to publish again a nineteenth-century catalog of a company whose modern incarnation was anything but ordinary industrial tools and hardware.

Altogether during my tenure in charge of publications the EAIA published over forty works. These ranged from substantial books and significant manuscripts to important reprints with valuable historical commentary. Many publications came from members of the association who volunteered them or who fell victim to my wiles. Some were done in partnership with other organizations such as the M-WTCA, ETC, Fraunces Tavern, and the Chemung County Historical Society. ETC was the acronym for the Early Trades and Crafts Society, an early regional tool group I helped start on Long Island.