Schoonmaker: a Forty-Year-Old Amateur American Workbench

Schoonmaker is the name given to the briar pipes signed with the surname of American maker Renny Schoonmaker. Behind it stands neither a factory nor a regular workshop; it is a one-man bench that has worked intermittently for more than forty years.

Because the production never became a livelihood, none of the data that normally defines a brand — catalogs, model lines, annual output figures — exists for this name. In that sense, Schoonmaker counts as one of the documented examples of the hobbyist pipe-making that spread across America in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Bench's Origins

Schoonmaker's acquaintance with the pipe came from his family; he acquired his own taste for briar during his university years, with a factory-made bent billiard. His move into making, however, traces back to a shop relationship. Settling in Clifton Park, New York, in 1978, he became a regular at The Smoker, a shop on Washington Avenue in nearby Albany. The shop's sole proprietor, Mel Feldman, was a well-known figure in the pipe circles of the era, and he was also the source of Schoonmaker's first attempt: he suggested Schoonmaker shape a pre-drilled briar block.

The material for later pipes was ordered from outside. Plateau briar and ready-made mouthpieces were bought from American Smoking Pipe Co., the company Mark Tinsky and Curt Rollar founded in 1978, which at the time also supplied material to makers working on their own. Feldman later placed six Schoonmaker pipes in his display case, and one of them went to a customer. Since the sources leave this date uncertain, the episode can only be placed in the first half of the 1980s.