arts&life

p ro f i l e

A Lifetime
Of Innovation

A self-taught master woodworker has

created everything from sailboats to

salad tongs over the course of 75 years.

BARBARA LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER

T

urn to almost any cor-
ner in Harold Kusnetz’s
Southfield home and
you’ll find evidence of 75 years
of innovation and artistry.
A mechanical engineer by
trade, Kusnetz, 93, is a self-
taught master woodworker
whose
ose creations range from

Kusnetz clipped the plans for the
10-foot sailboat from a magazine more
than 75 years ago.

34

August 2 • 2018

jn

simple salad tongs to a full-sized
harpsichord.
Born in Chicago, Kusnetz
learned woodworking at Crane
Technical High School and
honed his craft at the local
recreation center, which had a
wood shop anyone could use
without charge.
He developed a love of sail-
ing through Chicago’s Rainbow
Fleet program, which provided
free lessons for anyone over age
13. On his family room shelf is a
trophy he won for placing sec-
ond in a sailing race as a teen. In
front of the window is a 44-inch
radio-controlled model he made
of the Emma C. Berry, a sloop
built in 1866.
Before he turned 18, Kusnetz
had built himself a 10-foot sail-
boat, using plans he clipped
from a magazine. He still has the
yellowed and crumbling plans,
carefully saved in a box with
other mementos.
He built a bigger boat, an
18-footer, when he came home
from World War II, where he’d

served as an ensign aboard the
U.S.S. Passumpsic, an oil tanker.
Though he was interested
in medicine, Kusnetz knew it
would be faster and easier to
become a certified engineer, so
he enrolled at Illinois Institute of
Technology. A few years after he
graduated, his mother encour-
aged him to make the move east.
She had a friend whose son
was doing well in Detroit. “Davy
is making a fortune!” his mother
said. “Go to Detroit!”
Davy gave Kusnetz some
Detroit leads, and he was hired
by the first company he contact-
ed, Pioneer Engineering, which
paid him the princely sum of
$3.50 an hour.
Kusnetz met his wife, Phyliss,
a teacher, at a post-Yom Kippur
dance in Detroit. They mar-
ried in 1961, and her two young
daughters became part of his
family. Harold and Phyliss, who
died in 2004, went on to have
three more children.
Kusnetz fulfilled his dreams
of a medical career through

his children. Lisa Solway, 61, of
Huntington Woods, is a retired
pediatrician; Ada Kusnetz-
Yerman, 56, of West Bloomfield,
is an anesthesiologist; Norma
Kusnetz, 55, of Orlando, Fla., is a
family practitioner; and Eliot, 53,
of Highland Park, N.J., is a family
practitioner who works in public
health. Only Linda Ginsburg, 62,
of Jacksonville, Fla., bucked the
trend by working in hotel man-
agement. Kusnetz also has 11
grandchildren.
In 1956, Kusnetz and
two partners started Pilot
Engineering, which designed
parts for Detroit’s automakers.
They closed the company in
2008.
Kusnetz still lives in the house
he and Phyliss moved to in 1963,
in what was then a brand-new
subdivision northwest of 10 Mile
and Southfield roads. He built
doors and cabinets as well as a
state-of-the-art stereo system.
Each child had a rolling toy
chest that looked like a circus
wagon, complete with a silhou-

