George Snyders’s magical creations collected the steady fall of raindrops, filling the air with a dampened wood fragrance and orchestrated soundtrack as customers examined the knights, rooks, and pawns.
People passing by rummaged through the game pieces, whittled from nearby oak and ash trees, while observing the zigzagged tiles on a handcrafted chess board. Tossed haphazardly aside was the native Michigander’s homemade price sheet.
Five feet away, Snyder twirled a gnarled walking stick, motioning like a magician as he chatted with a laughing boy and his father.
“He calls these his ‘wizard staffs,’ sometimes, and waves them around. He’s quite the storyteller,” laughed his wife, Lenore Snyder.
After living in six different states, working for both NASA and Xerox, and spending a year abroad to work on a computer that controlled all of the electronic power in Taiwan, Snyder settled in Hillsdale.
He began creating walking sticks in bulk after a friend with a foot infection used one and advised that George sell them. Since then, he’s tailored his woodwork for friends and visitors to the family website and expanded his business to the Hillsdale Farmer’s Market this fall.
George cuts pieces of trees to size, trims off the branches, sands, stains, applies a coat of polyurethane, adds a rubber tip, and a wizard stick is formed.
“This is where the magic is,” he said, pointing to the root ball at the end of the stick. “In the chess pieces and walking sticks, I like to leave blemishes in the wood for character.”
The couple uses the walking sticks when they stroll alongside the stream by their house. They met in California after Lenore returned to the U.S. from teaching missionary children in India for more than two years.
“I drove a full competition, road rally car out to California,” George recalled fondly. “My barracuda was identifiable from a mile away.”
George proposed to Lenore two weeks after their first date, which was spent wandering around Disneyland. Forty-one years of marriage, three children, and six grandchildren later, the Snyders retired in Hillsdale because the town is conveniently nestled between each of their hometowns, Coldwater and Jackson, Mich.
“We live in the trees,” George said. “We didn’t want to live in the city. I’ve spent too much time in cities.”
During his tenure overseas, serving in the United States Air Force, George lived in Germany when the Berlin Wall was under construction.
“I was one of the lucky ones that didn’t fly. The ones who flew planes never came back,” he said. “You remember Gary Powers, right? He flew his U-2 plane too low over Russia and…” Snyder trailed off as he gestured to indicate the plane had been shot down.
“We didn’t have heroes, just Cold War veterans,” George sighed as he adjusted the walking sticks so that they stood upright.
Glancing at the scene, George said, “The important part of my job is to make sure that each wizard buys a staff with the right amount of power for him to handle.”
