Tom Campbell

by Fred Ellis, Maintenance Supervisor

What do you get when you transplant a talented southern California carpenter to the UW Friday Harbor Labs? If he’s Tom Campbell, you get very, very, lucky.

Tom came to us six years ago from a carpentry career in the Santa Barbara area where he lived with his lovely wife Jane, built exquisite houses, grew avocados as big as cantaloupes, surfed, and played jazz piano. The move north was transformative. Avocado farming and surfing weren’t going to transplant well, and were replaced respectively by a burgeoning bed of strawberries and a sixteen-foot racy little GlassPly boat. Building grand houses got traded in for building FHL's race-track flume enclosure, the platform and stairs for the Flow Lab flume, and the flagstone patio at the Director’s house. Jazz piano survived the move intact, Tom has a perpetual twinkle in his eye, and sometimes when Jane swirls into the maintenance shop to see him, she’s walking on air.

Tom's stairs leading to lower units of FHL's Apartment building A.

One of Tom’s latest works is a flight of stairs at FHL's apartments, from Cantilever Way to the ground floor units of Apartment A. For decades, we avoided building stairs to the lower floor because it was just too hard; the ground was rocky and had a lot of side slope. Tom’s solution was to perch the stairway in a manner that made it appear to be embedded. To soften its angular quality, he gave the stairway a gentle curve with matching curved cedar bannister. The effect is almost fluid (see photo).

Tom also did a beautiful rebuild job on the stairs leading down to FHL's boat fuel shed, making them much more regular and safe than they were. He's been replacing deteriorated pier planking too, which requires a different effort. Rather than pay a mainland supplier an outrageously high price for the lumber, Tom stayed local and had planks milled from trees that were felled at FHL during the "Greening Up" project last year. I invite you to stand or stomp on the areas he’s repaired...they're rock solid!



Tom's stairs down to FHL's boat fuel shed.

From early this morning, Tom has been prying rocks from the muck and disintegrated remains of generations of sea life deposited over the last 50+ years in the touch tank below the stairs in Fernald (see Pema's article about the move). He rinses each rock clean and finesses it gently onto the rim of the tank in a way that minimizes damage to the attached flora and fauna. Using a shovel as a pry bar, he begins levering up another big one. As it begins to move, an eel-like Rock Prickleback darts for the drain and Tom draws on his transformative talent once again: what had appeared to be a lowly shovel becomes a catch net. It flashes. A deft, true movement of the hand, and the fish is rescued from certain death and safely deposited in a specimen bucket. Oblivious to how those around him marvel at his range, Tom wrestles up the next rock…and whistles another jazz tune.