By SANDRA WALSH
After a morning of work at his furniture restoration shop, Sonny Bishop Jr. is ready for some lunch.
He lives just a few steps away from his shop on a grassy waterfront plot overlooking Wallace Creek on St. Helena Island.
Bishop steps through the front door of the farmhouse where his wife Mary is pulling out fresh baked bread from the oven with a kitchen towel.
Chicken salad, homegrown tomatoes and peach cobbler are spread out on a table in the den in front of a big window overlooking the creek.
A lone egret glides on a horizontal plane parallel to the green marshwater — a sight slightly obscured by bluish green moss dangling from a contorted oak.
Bishop is moved by the beauty he sees outside his window, despite the fact that he’s been looking at it for 72 years.
Maybe it’s because he’s a third generation Bishop to enjoy the view: His grandfather bought the land from a cotton gin company where he worked until it went bankrupt in the late 1920s and later churned into a family crop farm that Bishop’s father continued to live and work on.
“See that sunny spot over there — that’s where the house I was born in used to be,” he says pointing his index finger toward a grassy spot in his neighbor’s lawn, slowly moving his finger like a compass needle toward the water. “See those boats over there — that’s where the dock for the gin was.”
Bishop followed in his family’s tradition and took over the farm with his younger brother from 1957 until 1969 when they decided to call it quits.
Bishop kept 20 of his grandfather’s original 300 acres to raise his own family on and embarked on a career at Beaufort Academy where he taught science and math for two years and then became assistant headmaster, a title he kept for 8 years before deciding to go back into business for himself.
Working with his hands again, he started building furniture for children: tiny tables, chairs, and rockers made from ponderosa pine and brightly colored Formica.
“Pretty soon, people found out what I was doing and started bringing in chairs and other things that needed to be worked on,” he says.
Gradually, he got out of the furniture building business and moved into what is now Bishop Enterprises Antique and Furniture Restoration.
“I do just enough business to keep me busy and give me a reason to get up in the morning,” Bishop says. “It’s almost like a hobby, but at least I make money doing it.”
The chemical smell of shellac envelopes Bishop’s little shop dirtied with sawdust, two-by-fours, old furniture, paint cans and tools for pounding, hammering, sanding, sawing, jigging, painting and spraying.
Bishop spends the morning in the shop with his four-man crew, a combination of old and new workers with varying skills.
“As long as they worked with their hands, mechanics or plumbers — I can work with them, they have eye-hand coordination,” he says. “But I won’t hire an office person; I did that once and it didn’t work out.”
He once hired an autistic man who used to mold “strange little faces” out of epoxy and stuck them on a workshop wall.
All that is left now of the mural is a rough remnant that looks like a collection of dried bubble gum on the underside of a school desk.
A lot of Bishop’s business comes from furniture stores who hire Bishop to fix damage on new furniture caused by delivery men at customers’ homes.
Once a week, he travels to Hilton Head Island, Bluffton and Sun City to make house calls and do touch-ups on furniture.
Once he replaced a finial on a chair that was part of a set of four elegantly functional Shaker chairs that later sold to an antique dealer for more than $300,000.
On Thursday, he spends the morning lacquering a pine furniture set that suffered water damage after firemen hosed everything down during a house fire.
A regular customer interrupts the job to drop off an antique chair that needs to be fixed and inquire about a desk that she has seen at the shop for years. She wants to buy the desk.
Bishop tells her he’ll have to call the owners.
He says that you can’t be too careful — once he thought a piece of furniture had been abandoned, but the owner turned up in the obituaries section of the newspaper.
After the freshly lacquered furniture finally dries, the crew helps to load it up in a trailer attached to an SUV. Bishop hauls the furniture to a storage unit per the owner’s request.
Bishop takes two of his crew members with him on the voyage to town: Michael Armstrong, 21, who has been working at the shop for two months, and J.J. Walker, 41, who has been working with Bishop for more than five years.
As he drives through the islands, he tells stories about how much everything has changed and grown.
Bishop points out places that he has lived in, ponds he used to play in as a child and new structures that have replaced old haunts he loved and no longer exist.
But somehow, like a mahogany table stuck together with animal hide glue, Bishop has stayed true to form, despite the changes around him.
