Spring 2008

Doug Strickland
By Courtney Jones

In the back of Doug Strickland’s garage, you’ll find his tiny rectangle of a woodworking shop. Above the blocks of wood, lined plaintively like the ducks they aim to be, dangles a cord with an electric hand piece, a vestige of his earlier life. Now it’s just one of the many tools he uses for wood sculpturing that resemble the ones he used in the department of operative dentistry for over thirty years.

The woodworking gives him something to do with his hands now that there are no teeth for him to fi x. It’s a creative outlet, untapped for most of his life. What started out after he retired in the mid-1980’s as “something to do with all that time” has transformed the Strickland’s home into something of a showplace with his ribbon winning ducks lining the shelves amid his wife Lynn’s photograph-quality paintings on each wall.

Woodcarving isn’t a far cry from dentistry, and it makes sense that the fingers that once flipped the pages of The Art and Science Operative Dentistry would ache and twist for small wood craft. The attention to minutia is what makes the ducks so life-like. “A dental assistant once said of one of my ducks, ‘How do you glue all those feathers on?’” recalls Dr. Strickland. There are no glued feathers, but the detail in the carving makes it hard to tell.

The judges of the East Carolina Wildfowl Guild Carving Competition obviously agreed they awarded that piece the Best in Show in the intermediate division.

Most of his ducks sit in an office paired with their corresponding show ribbons. Blues, reds, yellows and purples color the walls like flags. Some competition ducks are “gunning birds” or hunting decoys-smooth, but decoratively painted and bottomed by a keel to make them sit up in water. Others are in the decorative category-each tiny feather with its quills, barbs, ridges, and curves the end product of 50 to 150 hours of carving and design.

Each one starts as a block of tupelo wood and is given a two-dimensional pattern and then cut broadly with a band saw. “Then, you take off everything that doesn’t look like a duck,” Dr. Strickland says with a straight face. You can tell it’s not that easy. In that office, the artful ducks peek out from any surface fl at enough to hold them. Hands in his pockets, Strickland remarks almost to himself, “I think I’m going to run out of room.”

This second phase of life has brought a completely new circle of friends to Strickland. Every Wednesday, he and his carving club gather in the wood shop of their “guru” Mark Strucko in Apex where they carve and chat for three and a half hours before going to lunch. As for Strucko, a carver who makes his sole living from his wood carving, “We feed off him.” Though Strickland has sold his ducks out of his home and at the seasonal store Something Special at Northgate Mall in Durham, he’s quick to say, “I’m not carving for the money.”

So far, he and his ducks have brought home countless ribbons, and five Best In Show titles two in the novice and then three in the intermediate category. This year, he’ll go on to compete at advanced levels for the first time. “Now I’ll be up against the professionals,” he says.

Seventeen years of award winning carvings would seem ‘professional’ to many, but maybe not to a man who’d already spent 30 years calling himself a professional of a different sort. And with four major competitions a year, including the Ward World Championship Wildfowl Carving Competition held annually in Ocean City, Maryland, Dr. Strickland had perspective on winning and losing: “Every ribbon is worth the trip,” a motto that comes right after the one about taking off everything that doesn’t look like a duck.

This article appeared in the North Carolina Dental Review, A Publication of the University of North Carolina Dental Alumni Association, in the Fall 2006 Issue. Our thanks to the Editor, Kelly Almond, for allowing us to use the article.

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