The Haiti Woodcarving Story

                

                                                             The Haiti Woodcarving Story

                                                                                1970                                          

                                 A true story about my venture into importing Haitian woodcarvings

                                                    Written in 2010 and Re-written 05/13/2016

                                                                         Howard Yasgar

      In late 1970, I returned to Haiti.

      Nothing had changed in the country, it was still the same impoverished place that I had been introduced to in 1967 by my friend Lou Gladstein.

      Lou had asked me to come to Haiti to help him disassemble and sell the Haitian railroad which he had bought from the government.

      Once I was there in Haiti, I met a lot of interesting people and I saw a lot of what I thought were good opportunities, so I became involved in several different ventures, not all were good.

      Some of them were quite interesting, like the story I am about to tell you about my dealing in Haitian woodcarvings.

      To start with, if you ever travel in the Caribbean or the West Indies, as a tourist, everywhere you go, you will see dark mahogany looking wood carvings usually with an kind of African look about them.

       they all probably came from Haiti, regardless of what ever name you see written on them.

      Carving wooden objects is a home grown industry in Haiti, and there are several  stores there that specialize in selling all types of carved wooden items to the tourists.

      Some of the items they sell are very nice and really professional looking, others are not so nice.

      Some of the items come from very small one or two person carving shops, other items are carved in the peoples homes, some items are carved by adults and some are carved by children.

      Whenever I was walking around down town Port Au Prince, I always went into the woodcarving stores just to look and talk with the owners.

      On occasion I would buy small items as gifts for friends back in the States, but trying to find a suitable hand carved wood item in Haiti wasn’t easy, as most of the wood carvings they sold, no one would ever want in their home, unless of course you lived in Africa.

      There was one item that the stores had very limited quantities of, it was a salad bowl set that looked professionally done.

     The salad bowl sets usually came with a fourteen inch, or fifteen inch diameter, mixing bowl and with six smaller individual salad bowls. It also came with a large wooden spoon and fork for mixing.

      Each woodcarving store had a only a few salad bowl sets for sale.

      I was told it was because finding large diameter trees to carve in Haiti was now almost impossible,

as most all the big trees in Haiti have been cut down.      

      One day, when I was back in Miami, I mentioned to my partner about all the wood carvings that were available in Haiti, and how they could be bought for very little money.

      I had brought a few items back with me to show him. I did it because I wanted to get his opinion, and see if he thought we could make any business selling the stuff in Miami.

      My partner usually didn’t like any of my ideas about entering into different ventures, but this time I saw a glimmer of hope.

      My partner had once worked for the Winn Dixie food stores in Florida and he still had some friends working there.

      He thought he could possibly talk to them about carrying a line of Haitian wood carved items in all the Miami Winn Dixie stores.

      So one day we took the samples and showed it to them.

      Believe it or not they said yes. They said we could put some Haitian wood carvings in several of their stores, but only on consignment, and if they sold, they would pay us for what was sold. 

      Now back in Haiti, I had a cab driver and friend named Toni Richmond, I had met Toni in 1967 and we had become good friends.

      I used Toni to do various projects for me in Haiti when I wasn’t there.

      Toni enjoyed doing all the different projects for me because it made him look like he was a businessman.

      So when I told Toni I would be interested in buying  Haitian wood carvings he became very excited.

      I knew why Toni was excited  because he knew that whatever price I negotiated with the store owners, he would be able to squeeze them for an additional commission for himself.

      So when I returned to Haiti, in 1970, Toni was anxiously waiting for me, and we both went shopping in the woodcarving stores.

      Toni introduced me to several store owners, and I learned that different stores specialized in different kinds of woodcarvings. Some stores specialized in carved statues, some specialized in African style masks, and some specialized in ashtrays candy dishes and assorted bowls.

      Unfortunately none of the stores had many of the large salad bowl sets that I wanted, those salad bowls always seemed to be in short supply in Haiti.

      After talking to several stores, it soon became obvious to me that there must be only one guy in all of Port Au Prince Haiti, that was carving all the salad bowl sets.

      Toni said he thought he knew who the guy was.

      So the next day Toni took me on a trip to see the guy he thought was making all the salad bowl sets.

      We drove to the outskirts of  Port Au Prince and eventually stopped by a small cement block house

with all kinds of logs piled up crazily all over the place.

      As we walked between the logs towards the house, I heard a generator set running and I saw an older Haitian man, bent over, he was carving a wood bowl on a rusty old lathe.

      The lathe he was using was so old and antiquated, it looked like it came out of a junk yard somewhere.

      It had a motor on it that looked like an antique.

      There was an electric cord coming out of his house,

it looked like it had been repaired and patched 100 times.

      The elderly fellow looked up at us and smiled, I think he only had one or two teeth left in his mouth.

      Sure enough  he was carving a salad bowl on the old lathe and he was doing it free hand, there were no measuring devices or any modern tools around.

      I had Toni ask him, how many bowl sets he made every  day, and he said the wood carver told him he made one every other day, and that was only if he had electricity.

      After watching him, I determined that if I bought all the salad bowls from every store in Port Au Prince, it would take them months or possibly years for the stores to replace them.

      So the next day we returned to the wood carving stores in down town Port Au Prince, and I bought every salad bowl set they had, for eight dollars each.

      I also bought a big selection of ashtrays and candy dishes, as well as a load of assorted typical Haitian African style carved statues ranging all the way from six inches tall to two feet tall.

      Toni said he would personally make sure the shopkeepers got everything packed up and  sent to the Air Port for shipment to Miami.

      I had spent $385.00 that day, which in 1970, probably made me the biggest buyer of wood carvings in the entire country.

      I returned to Miami to await the shipment.

      About a week later I received a call from Air Haiti that my shipment was in, so I went to the airport to get it.

      At the Air Haiti warehouse I found a huge bundle that was all wrapped in sisal burlap, it was tied together with every sort of mismatched piece of string and sisal rope imaginable.

      It looked like a shipment that had come from darkest Africa.

     The bundle was too big to put in my Astro Van, so the Air Haiti people helped me unpacked it right behind their office and I filled the van  up.

     Everyone in the cargo area of Air Haiti came over to look at the load of strange wood carvings.

     They were all shaking their heads negatively, so I started to wonder myself, if I had done the right thing bringing all this stuff into Miami.

     At our warehouse, we had already set up some metal shelving in preparation.

     So we unloaded the van making  lots of stacks of similar items on the shelving. 

     A couple of days went by, and I noticed there was a pile of sawdust under a stack of carved wooden ashtrays.

     It was Caribbean boring beetles, a wood eating insect worse than a termite, they had bored their way through the entire pile of ashtrays in just two evenings. Not only were the beetles eating the ashtrays, but they were in the carved statues as well.

     I became very concerned as I had brought two large statues home with me and I now saw that they had boring beetles in them also.

     I called the local exterminator and they told me to bring it all in to them and they would gas it all overnight, I did what they said and it cost me another $150.00. 

      A week later the boring beetles were back, the gas didn’t kill them.

      At this point  I was ready to throw everything into the dump before the beetles ate up my house and my warehouse.

     It was then that a Haitian friend said I should freeze everything by putting it in the refrigerator so I did and it worked.

     The Haitians knew all their  wood carvings had boring beetles and they used shoe polish to plug

the holes.   

     We did put quite a few pieces of our woodcarvings in the Winn Dixie stores, and every Friday my partner and I would get in our car and make the rounds of several Miami stores to see what was sold.

    I have to admit, the stuff was selling. In one store alone they sold $12.00 in carvings, making us a $6.00 profit, and in another store they had sold another $8.00 worth. After three weeks of  our wasting our Friday’s going from store to store we just gave it up.

     We were not even earning $1.00 an hour, so we left all the inventory in the Winn Dixie stores for free and we never went back.

      As I was sitting in my office contemplating on different ways of how to dispose of all the Haitian

Wood carvings, a customer came in and he saw the salad bowls. He said they were beautiful and his wife would like one so I gave it to him.

       About a week later he called me up and he said that he was the head pilot for the Kroger Stores which was one of the biggest  food and drug store chains  in America.

      He said he had used one of my small salad bowls to serve peanuts to the Kroger buyers who he was flying around the country.

      They asked him where he got it, and he told them that it came from his friend Howard in Miami who was importing them from Haiti.

      He said they told him to call me and find out if their purchasing people could talk to me.

      He called me and I told him sure, have your purchasing department call me.

      About a week went by and I received a call from a young lady who said she was in purchasing at Kroger Stores, and she had a sample of one of my Haitian wooden bowls in front of her.

     Yes I said the bowl was part of a salad bowl set that we had imported from Haiti.

     She said, how much does the salad bowl set cost?  I had calculated each salad bowl set cost us about $8.00 ea. landed in Miami,  so I told her I could sell them to Kroger for $10.00 per set.

     Good she said, I would like to place an order for 8000 salad bowl sets, to be delivered to Kroger by September, in time for our Christmas special.

     It was July, that meant she wanted delivery in two months.

     I told her that in Haiti the old man with only two teeth couldn’t produce 8000  bowl sets if he worked on it the rest of his life.

     Also I said there isn’t enough trees on the entire island of Haiti to make 8000 salad bowl sets.

     I told her even if I hired the entire population of country of Haiti they couldn’t produce 8000 salad bowl sets.

     I knew she didn’t understand what I was talking about, but I declined to take the order.

     However not everything was bad that day, a fellow came in and said he worked at all the flea markets, so I sold him all the Haitian wood carvings for one hundred dollars, and he took all the stuff boring beetles and all.

     So that’s the story, of how I got in and out of the Haitian woodwork business.