©This story is property of The
CyBurr, the online version of The Burr,
Spring 2004
Life, Love and Taxidermy
One couple’s hobby grows
into a 30-year business
Story by Jamie
Carracher
In between the hills and browning
trees of
Forty-eight-year-old Tom’s hair is dark brown and short. Concealed under his jacket is a tattoo on his arm, alluding to his days as an amateur tattoo artist. He quit because of the liability.
Tom tries to open the door, but it’s locked, and he knocks but his wife Vivian doesn’t hear right away. He’s been married to 47-year-old Vivian for about 30 years. He says they were grade-school sweethearts. Now they work together at home when he’s not at his full-time maintenance job at Swagelok Co., an area fluid system component manufacturer.
Vivian opens the door, smiles and moves to the side as Tom grins proudly at their showroom.
The room is tall and slightly dark, the wood paneling stained lightly as sunbeams stream down from high windows, setting the stage for two floors of animal mortuary – two floors of animal heads and feet, glued and attached to wood, hung from walls. Inside the room are mounted lions, buffalo, deer, fish, feet, frogs, legs and heads. At the bottom of the cathedral-like room, innumerable gaping mouths and blank eyes cast faces and stares back down from above.
“We have everything out there,” Tom tells prospective customers. “We have lions, tigers and bears.”
In the beginning
Tom and Vivian are part-time taxidermists, people who take the skins of animals, pull them over a mold and attempt to make them look alive again. They’ve been doing it for 30 years, ever since Tom took a class through the mail that he found in the back of an issue of Field & Stream magazine.
It’s is a craft both husband and spouse relish. It’s a craft that’s much different than most people think.
“Everyone goes, ‘Ew, taxidermy. Ew, gross,’” Tom says. “But we don’t get into guts and nasty stuff.”
“Most of the time,” Vivian adds with a sly smile.
They operate Edsall’s Taxidermy Shop out of a two-story barn in their back yard. Tom spends a few hours most every day after work immersed in his passion, he says. Vivian, who does a great amount of work herself, puts in about six hours a day, starting in the early morning.
“You got to have a love for it, got to have a passion for it, or it don’t happen,” Tom says.
The couple married when Vivian was 17 and Tom was 18. Tom says jokingly that he “robbed the cradle” in high school.
Tom’s interest in the taxidermy started as a young hunter. After killing his animals, he’d try to mount them himself with the help of then-girlfriend, Vivian. Soon he was doing the work for friends and relatives. Later the husband and wife started a business.
“She was the brains, and I was the brawn,” Tom says. Vivian, he adds
with pride, is one of the few women in the field, and he thinks she’s one of the best taxidermists in the area.
Misfortunate lions
Vivian has been doing taxidermy as long as he has. She has never killed anything, and although she’s not squeamish about the idea of seeing the animals dead, she does prefer them alive.
“To me, I like animals. I didn’t want to kill them,” Vivian says. “If they’re already dead, it’s OK.”
Because she focused on making the animals look nice from the start, Vivian says dealing with their skins didn’t faze her.
“I was like that tomboy person,” Vivian says. “So it didn’t really bother me.”
And she doesn’t mind tackling the hard jobs like birds, a meticulous task that entails arranging the feathers and body. Tom hates working on the birds.
“Me, I like the weird stuff,” he says. “The bigger, the better.”
He mentions a lion they have in their showroom. It was being used for a television commercial several years ago and got loose.
“Misfortune came to him. And we got a lion out of the deal,” he says. “Poor guy.”
These days Tom doesn’t have much time to hunt as he’s focused on the ever-increasing workload that stretches on all year long, from season to season. There are hunters from around the area counting on them to mount their animals. For a hunter, the mounted animals are trophies, and they are important, Tom says. While hunters are “out playing,” Vivian and Tom are inside working.
The barn where they do the work is sparse with skins tacked to the walls and tools arranged tidily. It’s cold as winter nears, and Vivian leads a tour, standing in an enveloping, puffy blue winter coat.
Upstairs, she will cut notches into poly-urethane molds that will soon hold deer antlers. Near the saw, Tom opens a drawer of eyes lined on paper that they purchased from a company that makes glass eyes for people.
“The eyes are the window to the soul,” Tom says. “They’re the hardest thing to do.”
In a dark cubbyhole on the first floor, Tom paints fish.
“You’re the eccentric artist,” Vivian says to Tom. His little corner is lined with paints, brushes and labeled pictures of fish. Over the years, he’s learned just the right techniques and colors for each specimen.
Service with a smile
For customers, the appeal of the Edsall’s taxidermy has been their affordability and ease of access.
“They’re very competitive as far as the marketplace goes,” says Bill McConnaughey, a 42-year-old hunter from Streetsboro.
He came across the shop accidentally about eight years ago, he says. He was looking to get a deer he killed mounted, but he didn’t want to pay as much as other taxidermists were asking. For deer, the going rate for mounting can be $235 and up, he says.
McConnaughey has been hunting regularly since he was 12. During the past few years, he’s taken deer, mink, squirrels and a ram to the shop. And he’s never been disappointed.
“I figured I’d take a chance,” on the shop, he says. “Ever since, pretty much anything I’m going to put on the wall, I take to them.”
The couple shoots straight, McConnaughey says. They are willing to work with financing, and they will give a fair estimation about potential projects.
“They’ll work with you,” he says. “They don’t snub you off like a corporation.”
Tom says he learned that sort of customer service while on the job at Swagelok. Since the beginning, all their business has been word of mouth. They don’t need to advertise.
On occasion, providing that kind of service is hard, though. Tom says hunters sometimes have expectations that are too high. Animals like birds are extremely difficult, especially after being shot.
“God made that bird,” Tom says. “We can’t do what God did to make that.”
George Ann and the
alligator
Inside their tall showroom, Tom is sitting on a large, plush leather couch. Overhead, a stack of gigantic books frame the window and two massive buffalo heads are the book ends. Tom pulls out a book of photos and excitedly turns to a snapshot of him and a FedEx delivery woman posing on his driveway, grinning and holding the head and skin of a dead American alligator.
“What’s her name?” He asks of the
smiling delivery woman. “I always forget.”
“George Ann,” Vivian says.
Tom bought the skin for about $800 on eBay. The delivery woman, who
brought the heavy box to their house, asked him what was inside. He told her they’d find out together, and they opened it and took a picture to remember the occasion.
Tom wants to mount the reptile and
pose it with references to
“It’d be kind of a neat tribute to the Indians,” he adds.
Over the years, people have come to the shop asking for a variety of odd things mounted, Tom says. But there are some things they refuse.
“I don’t dogs, I don’t do cats,” Tom says, explaining that with the molds they use, it’s impossible to recreate such dear friends exactly. The couple won’t mount any “loved ones.”
“That was your best friend for 13 years,” Tom explains.
While the couple has won several awards, one of their favorite winners is contained in a most unassuming container. Inside a wooden and glass case in the corner of the room is the couple’s “frog bar.” It’s just like a human tavern, dimly lighted and festive with bar stools and a pool table – but it’s for frogs. The amphibians take relaxed drinks, and one biker frog, modeled after a family friend, sprawls across a table drunkenly. It was voted “People’s Choice” twice by the attendees of taxidermy shows.
“The actual people would go there and decide what they liked best,” Vivian says proudly.
The quality of a showroom is important, Tom stresses from inside his own finely crafted room. For a taxidermist, the showroom sells people on the product, and it allows customers to see if they like the Edsalls’ style.
“They can judge for themselves because it’s an art,” Tom says.
E-mail: jcarrach@kent.edu
©This story is property of The
CyBurr, the online version of The Burr,