 If you watch Common Ground online, consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. My name is Mark Beffle, 4th generation decoy carver. I do construction during the day and work on decoys and stuff for my spare time. My son Cole is here working on decoys and plaques that he puts together, so we sit and do this in the evenings and weekends and rainy days if we need a chance. We're not busy doing something else. Fall and winter is the time we do most of this stuff. We use mostly bathwood, some white pine, but mostly this bathwood is what I'm carving with. It's a smoother, easier carving wood. We start out making a Beffle decoy with a blank of wood. I have cut it out on a bandsaw out of a one inch piece of bathwood. I have got a center line down through the center of my decoy, so I know where the center of it is, so when I carve I carve both sides. And I also have it marked for my top, so I know which is the top of the decoy and which is the bottom. And now I will start carving and hopefully in about 15 minutes we'll have a carved out decoy. Everything is done by hand on this part. This is hand carved like my father and my grandfather and my great grandfather did. So I'm just kind of on the bottom, I kind of watch where I'm at so I don't interfere with where I'm going to put the weight later. And I just carve down to that line and then I just round everything down to it. I have already got my center line cut from my back fin inside the decoy. My grandfather and my great uncle, Cyril, carved, my grandfather carved a lot of this decoy stuff. He was a mason, he did brick laying and stuff in a carpenter. And in the wintertime in the fall he would carve decoys to sell, to make enough money to buy shoes for my dad and my brothers and sisters. And then when his uncle, my dad's uncle Cyril would do the same thing, they both would carve. My uncle Cyril was a big fishing guide in the park aviciary. If anybody ever was up here in the 70s knew he would know Cyril Bethel. And so I suppose my dad was little, he never really said much when he was alive, but he's watched his dad carve quite a bit. Dad would come home from school and walk past the shell gas station and would stop in the shell gas station and back in them days your oil would come in a metal can. And he would pick the metal cans up from the shell station and bring home to grandpa, his dad, to make the fins out of. Grandpa would burn the shell cans, you burn the oil and stuff out of them to make his metal fins out of the cans. So dad would always have that with one of the parts that he would do. My grandfather would sit and carve and so my dad turned 52, he retired and went over to my uncle's and started doing some carving and stuff and he would carve decoys. Dad did more animals and he did quite a few decoys, but he was more into the fish on plaques like what Cole's doing and characters and animals and stuff like that. But dad did do a lot of decoys, my uncle Lawrence, dad's older brother, did a lot, a lot of decoys in the area. I'm just trying to see if the edges are rounded enough on this one. This will be a plaque northern that I'm doing, so I try to get them more round like actual belly and stuff, so this one would not get any lead or anything in it. I've got it pretty well carved down on both sides to where I just have to take the sand block here and sand it. The smoother I carve that by hand, the less sanding I have to do, but try to keep the sides both the same up front. If it's off a little bit it's no real biggie because this ain't a high dollar item and real fancy stuff. It'll work, it'll go in the water and it will work. My slogan is my decoys will attract fish or get wet trying. And I'll guarantee they will get wet if you put them in the water. They will go around in the circle and I've yet to take a decoy out to a fish house or know of anybody that took a decoy out to a fish house that did not bring something in. It might not be the right fish, but it'll attract fish. I think when my dad was carving this was a part my mother did a lot of form. It was a sanding down part. Another decoy, fairly. I'll hold the noses together. This one here has been carved out so I kind of know where to put the lead, but it's not going to be in stone. On the top side I got to make it so I can put wires in that you hook your decoy to your string when you put it in the water. That's another one. I want to try to get this edge in a little closer to the main gap and stuff. So I'm just trying to carve it in and then I'll start on this and get this one carved in the same thickness. It used to be a fuller's tackle shop in Park Gravace. The older people would know that watching that they would remember a fuller's tackle shop. That was where my grandpa took most of his decoys to be sold. And either 58 or 59, we don't know for sure what year it was, my grandfather took in some jointed decoys in the fuller's tackle shop to sell in the bait shop. And for some odd reason one of his decoys fell down behind the counter. Nobody knew it was there until Jerry Fuller, the owner of the place, in 1981, got the place back or somehow he was taking and clearing it out and taking everything out of the building, moved this counter away from the wall and there was a decoy laying on the floor, a jointed 10-inch decoy. He picked it up and went down to the grocery store where my dad owned and working and handed the decoy to my father and said, this means more than you than it does to me and I know exactly where it comes from because Jerry Fuller's father probably bought it from my grandfather back in 58 or 59. So that decoy sat behind the counter until 81, never seen water or anything. He brought it back and gave it to my dad and my dad stored it away and now it's hanging on the wall in my mother's house. And my dad has got a jointed one and I am going to get time here one of these days and make one and Cole's going to make a jointed one, hopefully. I'm going to make a display case and put a four jointed bevel decoys together that I've never seen water. And I think that would make a nice little display case that my grandkids can fight over when I'm gone. We have numbers, like this one is numbered 37 for, that's my 37th decoy. In this size I have carved and this is an 8-inch and then on this side it has my initials so it has my first initial and then my last initial. And that, so then we can tell mine versus my dad's. When we go to our shows and stuff I go and see, I just go walk around every now and then and I talk to these older carvers and I get pointers and stuff and they ask me, well, do you carve? I'm like, yeah, I'm a 5th generation carver and Bethel carver and he's like, well I know your grandpa when he came to the shows and stuff and they just sometimes give me pointers or sometimes they don't. They ask me if I have any in the competition or stuff like that so I go and show them my competition and they're like, well that's really good and then they give me more pointers on that. I think when I'm at these shows and the older carvers share more knowledge with me is because I'm a younger generation coming up and they want to keep the tradition moving and want to have it continue on through so they're telling me the tips and stuff. I sometimes sneak them to my dad but I don't really want to and they're giving me tips and then whenever he would walk over they would stop talking and then see if he wanted to buy something or stuff like that. But then once he walked away they would start coming back and giving me more pointers and stuff. I think that you just want to keep the tradition flowing of carving and stuff and that's why I think they give me more pointers and stuff on it and more knowledge so I learn more. When my grandpa was alive I liked going over to his house and I sat down in the basement with him and I learned a little bit from him. I watched him carve and now that I saw my dad pick it up I'm thinking when he started doing it I'm thinking maybe I should try getting into it. I'm getting into it. He caught the bug I haven't yet and that's where we really want to just keep carving and stuff. I haven't caught that yet and I want to catch it somewhat. We start out with the blank, cut out lines put on it and then I go to the stage where I've got it carved and sanded ready to be drilled for lead and wires put in. This one here is drilled out the bottom, wires put in for the top which you hook your lure to. This is basically the same thing but only now it's painted white. I put my base coat of white on and sand it down because it does get fuzzy so that would be just a base coat of white on it. This is the stage where I put the tail fin in and the two front fins are in and then the lead is put in the lead pocket. That will hold these two larger fins in and the wires on top. When that stage is done they come in here and they get the back fins and these two side fins put in. We're at the stage where we putty the bottom, sealed it in with wood putty, sealed that up. Everything gets one to two coats of white base coat paint on it so it's really sealed up with white paint and then from there I do the red or whatever color I want. This will have to be a red and white decoy. That just gets the red in the front and after this stage it comes upstairs and gets detailed. Now the detailing is done by my wife and then she will put the gill on in the eyes and then she details the sides of them. This one happens to be with the yellow and black striped on the side and the other side is basically the same way and then I take it back down and I put two coats of a sealer that seals it up for the moisture and water and stuff on them and then that's what gives them the shine to it too so you shine them up pretty nice and that's basically done for a decoy. If somebody would like to purchase one of our decoys they can find us at our shows or go online to our website called decoysbymc.com If you watch Common Ground Online consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org