The only thing he was good at in high school was woodshop, says Ed Mazuroski. Out of high school, he worked in a dollhouse factory and then in a laminate factory.

"My mom saw I was going nowhere," he recalls. She insisted Ed further his education.

He attended the North Bennet Street School in the North End of Boston, studying furniture and cabinet making. He went on to work for Peckham Corp., which had launched a custom furniture division, and Chapman Architectural, a millworker and conference table builder, both in Massachusetts.

On July 6, 1988, Ed joined WallGoldfinger in Vermont as a woodworker. At the time, WallGoldfinger had no in-house veneer department. Instead, custom veneer panels were purchased from outside vendors. But, says Ed, "The quality wasn't there. A lot times they would come in and they were sanded too far." Or the panels were the wrong size or the layout didn't quite match.

Ed had done a little veneering in the past and picked up two books on the topic. He read up on vacuum veneering, a process that involves large bags and a vacuum pump to adhere veneer to a substrate. "I said to myself: 'I can do this.'"

And he did.

He made a bag, bought a vacuum pump, bought some maple veneer and put together a sunburst pattern. "It came out perfect," Ed recalls. "I was like, 'this is it; this is all we have to do.'"

Ed created himself a bit of space in what was then the second floor of WallGoldfinger's former Northfield, Vt., factory, and with a radial saw, a table he built, six bags he made and the vacuum pump, the veneer department at WallGoldfinger was officially founded in 1990.

"Slowly, I bought more equipment," says Ed.

A beam saw was added in 1993 to cut veneer. A stitcher for adhering pieces of veneer together was added in the mid- to late-1990s and then replaced with a veneer splicer around 2000. And finally, a hot press was added in the early 2000s to replace the vacuum system.

 

The quality of that equipment - still in use today - and manufacturing techniques used by WallGoldfinger make the company's veneer a standout, notes Ed. But it is also the collaboration that takes place with the company's CNC (computerized routing) team, the quality of the veneer purchased - only the best in the world - and the love of the craft that place WallGoldfinger ahead of its competitors.

 

"The biggest thing that made me successful is the love of the job," says Ed, who is quick to express his pride in the decades of work he performed for WallGoldfinger and the mark he left on the company both literally (his artistry fills the walls of the veneer department) and figuratively.

 

Ed retired in December of 2014 due to health reasons. But he didn't leave before teaching long-time colleague and current Veneer Supervisor Scott Munger everything he knows.

 

"I left it in good hands," says Ed, whose hope among the trend toward metal, glass and stone is to see the beauty of veneer live on in custom furniture.