Gordon Nichol can’t smell wood anymore.
As far back as he can remember, Nichol has been in a wood shop. The sawdust scent has become so second nature he can’t distinguish it from pure oxygen unless he’s away from the shop for a few months.
Nichol is one of sixty BYU physical facility employees who worked on the Tanner Building Addition. Specifically, he was asked to help design and carve two moveable lecterns that would serve as focal points in the addition’s large assembly hall. The podiums, which took four weeks to complete, are a blend of classical Greek and early-Victorian style. He constructed them out of cherrywood and flamed walnut, two of his favorite woods. Nichol’s stunningly detailed podiums also conceal a mass of cables, plugs, and high-tech controls used to bring a presentation to life.
In his thirty years as a BYU cabinetmaker, he’s created podiums, furniture, display cases, and benches for the university. “There’s probably not a building on campus that I don’t have something in,” he says.
Nichol works with three other full-time cabinetmakers on campus; they oversee an office on the southeast corner of campus filled with timber, several large saws, dust, and seven student employees. “The best part of my job is the people I work with,” he acknowledges. “They are all very competent, capable cabinetmakers.”
Like any job, being a cabinetmaker comes with some occupational hazards. “I get splinters daily,” says Nichol, who majored in industrial arts at BYU. “And I’ve become very good at removing them.”
Nichol considers it a great honor to have built podiums that prophets have stood behind. “I was given a few talents, and I feel it’s my responsibility to develop them,” he says quietly. “I probably wouldn’t do well as a math teacher or an administrator.”
Coming from a long line of wood workers—his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather—Nichol has traveled to Europe a few times, snapping pictures along the way of “anything that looked like it ought to be in a podium,” and buying select wood. He also studied hand carving in Scotland, which skills he put to use when helping create the organ case found in the Provo Central Stake Center.
In addition to building furniture, Nichol also is a local luthier, specializing in constructing violins, violas, and cellos. He’s created hundreds of instruments in the past thirty years. And while he was studying in Scotland, he picked up bagpipe making, another avocation of his. His bagpipes, actually, are in greater demand than his stringed instruments. “There are more bagpipes in the United States than in Scotland,” he relays. “Playing the bagpipes is a growing trend here.”
And just in case you weren’t convinced that Nichol was the hands-on creative type, a few years ago he, his wife, and their six kids built a forty-one-foot sailboat in their backyard and sailed it from San Francisco to Alaska.
At least he could smell the ocean.
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Article by Emily Smurthwaite
