Ralph Alvarez ’71: Woodworker Extraordinaire

On any given Thursday evening, you always know where you can find Ralph Alvarez ’71. For the past 38 years, Alvarez has offered free lessons in his home workshop to anyone interested in learning woodworking and wood carving.

For the second academic year, the St. Joseph native and alumnus has been sharing his love and his immense knowledge of the craft with Missouri Western students by teaching a Tools and Techniques course on campus.

Alvarez is pleased that he is teaching a lifelong skill to the students. “It’s like riding a bike; once you learn it, you know how to do it. I hope I inspire them to do it on their own.”

He began creating things out of wood when he was in grade school, and as a high schooler, Alvarez got interested in building muzzle-loading rifles.

There was no woodworking class at his high school, and Missouri Western wasn’t offering one when he was a student either. So he taught himself both woodworking and carving. Alvarez also learned how to work with iron when he was building the muzzle-loaders, and he has a blacksmith shop alongside his woodworking shop.

All comers are welcome to the Thursday night lessons, he says. For the first project, you can use his wood and tools. For subsequent projects, you have to provide your own wood, but you can always use his tools. And if you have your own tools, you can sharpen them in the blacksmith shop.

There’s no set number of lessons for his Thursday-evening sessions; Alvarez says one man has been coming every week since 1979. Others come for just a few weeks or a few months. And there are new students all the time, ranging in age from middle school to over 90. Lessons usually last two hours, and his shop can handle up to 15 budding woodworkers.

The adjunct professor can’t decide if he likes woodworking, wood carving or iron working best, and sometimes, he says, he works with all three in the same day. When you’ve been an artisan with his skill for more than 50 years, it’s also hard to pick a favorite project. But he did mention carousel horses, a cigar-store Indian and a carved podium for a local church.

Alvarez spent his career teaching high school and adult education classes. He graduated from Missouri Western with a physical education degree, and began teaching that at the Dekalb, Missouri high school.

At the time, he says, he had never heard of industrial arts classes, but once he did, he began teaching that to high school students. He has retired from teaching high school full-time, but will still sub for an industrial arts class when he is called.

And what’s the first thing he teaches his students? Safety. “Never forget that these tools will bite you.”

Thanks to Alvarez’s connections with the St. Joseph Woodworkers Guild, that group donates high-quality wood for Missouri Western students to use. The students make decorative boxes that the Guild in turn donates to the St. Joseph AFL-CIO for its Christmas Adopt-a-Family program. Some of the items students made have been used in Guild auctions as fundraisers, and Alvarez noted that the Missouri Western student projects brought in almost $1,000 last year.

By the end of the semester, Missouri Western students will have made a decorative box for the Guild, a cutting board, and a final project of their choice.

“It’s only limited by their imagination, and these students come up with some pretty remarkable things,” he said of their final projects.

For now, Alvarez plans to continue teaching his craft both on Thursday evenings and at Missouri Western.

“I really enjoy teaching young people how to do this. I’ll quit when it feels like work.”