It was a huge leap of faith when Barry and Natalie Golden decided to move to Prescott.
Barry, a college professor, was working in Washington state and was unhappy.
“I was teaching at a school up there and hated the environment I was in,” he said. “I quit my job and we decided to come back to the Southwest. My wife is from Tucson. We came here as a destination and had no job.”
Now retired from Yavapi College after 22 years, one of Golden’s pastimes is making beautiful wooden cooking utensils for his business, Stir Crazy.
“I make wooden spoons out of local wood. I like to cook, so I make implements that help cooks, like wooden stir sticks for use in woking, stir fry or rice,” he said.
He also makes cutting boards, handles for knives and chopsticks. The wooden spoons come in a lot of different sizes. They are all different because they are handmade.
“Certainly I could do it for a living if I devoted more time to it, but I am retired,” he said.
Now his creations are made just for the fun of it. He thinks he makes a couple of hundred spoons and stirrers a year.
“That is just a guess. I don’t really know,” he said.
He sells his woodenware at the Prescott Farmers Market because he likes the face-to-face contact.
“I sell stuff and get to talk to interesting people,” he said. “I enjoy meeting people.”
His interest in this form of art was born from fire.
“We heated our home with solar and a wood stove. For many years, I threw all that beautiful wood into the fire,” he said. So, he began making wooden stirrers, then various sizes of spoons.
Golden needs permission from the Forest Service to salvage the wood in the form of a “dead and down firewood permit.” This allows him to go into the forest and cut anything on the ground. He says he enjoys spending entire days out there.
Golden has 22 years of experience teaching anatomy and physiology at Yavapai College and in schools in Georgia and Washington state. At the time of the move, he says he wanted to build a house.
“I did that. I built my home out of scavenged material. It took me about two years. I built it with my own hands.”
He also was helping people remodel their homes. “I finally got a job at the college,” teaching part-time for about a year and then a position opened up at the Verde Valley Campus where he taught for 12 years.
Later, he taught on the main campus for more than a decade.
“I loved being a teacher. I tap-danced to work,” he said.
But he is also enjoying this new chapter of his life.
Through the years he has dabbled in other interests such as wine making with his own label, “Golden Wine.” He also had an Iris business during summers and was one of the founders of the Iris Society in the Prescott area.
The Goldens have been married 34 years. They have two grown children, a son who is a geologist and a daughter who is an architect. It was his daughter who named the business Stir Crazy.
“She told me when I cook, I look kind of crazy,” he said.
Right now, Barry is working with two local woods, Emory oak and Manzanita, both of which are easy to work with, yet hard enough to hold up for years.
“Using local wood is the essence of what I do. People who live here say the items are so beautiful they don’t want to use them. That always amazes me.” QCBN
By Patty McCormac
Quad Cities Business News
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