By SANDRA WALSH
\nAfter a morning of work at his furniture restoration shop, Sonny Bishop Jr. is ready for some lunch.
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\n He lives just a few steps away from his shop on a grassy waterfront plot overlooking Wallace Creek on St. Helena Island.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Bishop is moved by the beauty he sees outside his window, despite the fact that he’s been looking at it for 72 years.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Working with his hands again, he started building furniture for children: tiny tables, chairs, and rockers made from ponderosa pine and brightly colored Formica.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
Gradually, he got out of the furniture building business and moved into what is now Bishop Enterprises Antique and Furniture Restoration.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Bishop spends the morning in the shop with his four-man crew, a combination of old and new workers with varying skills.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
He once hired an autistic man who used to mold “strange little faces” out of epoxy and stuck them on a workshop wall.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Once a week, he travels to Hilton Head Island, Bluffton and Sun City to make house calls and do touch-ups on furniture.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, he spends the morning lacquering a pine furniture set that suffered water damage after firemen hosed everything down during a house fire.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Bishop tells her he’ll have to call the owners.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
As he drives through the islands, he tells stories about how much everything has changed and grown.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But somehow, like a mahogany table stuck together with animal hide glue, Bishop has stayed true to form, despite the changes around him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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