Pete Sengenberger recalled his life as a young man searching for a career. His dad wanted him to be an engineer, but Pete wanted to be an architect. So, of course, he ended up with—carpentry.

Creative people see into the world around them; they see elephants in clouds, whales in sand. Pete sees faces in wood; he pointed them out to me several times:

I met Pete at Gregg LaPenna’s boardwalk shack, Lazar’s Glizzy. You might have noticed I meet many old souls there. It’s as if Gregg’s shack is the center of the Long Beach, old-soul universe which they orbit.

Pete had installed a poplar table top at Gregg’s the day I met him, and later several oak tops too. He told me the poplar came from a tree in Orient Point overlooking Long Island Sound; it now overlooks Long Beach sea and sand.

Pete told me, ” People don’t want to take trees down, but they become too old…”or “storms uproot them…they can be hazardous.” He said,”Most of the wood cut down goes to firewood.” But some are not. He loves to harvest slabs of trees bound for a chipping machine, then a landfill.

He said it costs $1,000 per truckload to dump a tree, which could cost seven or eight thousand for a large tree. Pete said, “The problem is most of the wood on Long Island doesn’t get milled anymore. And that’s what I do with just a chainsaw.”

In Long Beach, if a tree falls on city property, the city will remove it; if not, it’s a private responsibility; tree companies call him and ask if he wants it. You might call Pete the tree trunk rescuer.

I jumped at Pete’s offer to see his work at home.

There is no mistaking Pete’s house; artful driftwood greets you front and side.

Pete said, “This is my girlfriend, Lisa Wood; Lisa wood if she could.” I saw Pete was ready for standup too.

Pete is a single guy who does have an actual girl friend. But he lives alone in the house he inherited from his parents; they paid $17,000 for it 1972. Stepping inside is to visit a sculptor’s studio, where the medium is wood.

A stairway greets a visitor made of $9.00 per-foot epe wood, the same hardy, Brazilian epe of our new Long Beach boardwalk. The boardwalk builders had short pieces left over they could not use so Pete harvested the scraps to build his masterwork. He said of this wood, “I feel I found a gift.”

As he spoke, I saw he also—found a gift—in himself. You might agree as you read more about Pete Sengenberger.

Pete said his dad, a pastry chef, also did a lot of carpentry—but he dared not use Dad’s tools.

Pete left his architecture idea behind in High school, then studied business, and got a Master’s in Business from St. Johns University. With his MBA Peter worked for a brokerage firm, Gruntal, for three years.

But one day, he realized the suit and tie desk job was not for him. He wanted out; he needed to work with his hands. He did have some experience in carpentry working after high school in the new homes on Long Island’s north shore.

Eventually, Pete got into the carpenter’s union for the excellent pay and benefits. But that entailed working in NYC with glass and metal in corporate buildings like Google’s. Carpenters work with such material, not just wood.

With the union job, Pete was now working with his hands; he did that for twenty-five years. But now he’s retiring from Gotham’s towers of glass and steelwork to the love of milling, shaping, and finishing woods.

I found a happy man in Pete Sengenberger, a man who now owns—not one suit.

Pete finds carpentry his passion.

He likes to work when precision isn’t so necessary, as it was the glass and steel of corporate towers.

Pete described harvesting stored hunks from a tree felling. He said, “These trees are cut down, (and the wood) has to sit for a while, and it becomes gray. And you strip away the surface; you have almost a brand new object…I take the surface off, and it becomes a brand-new thing. That’s what I really like about it.”

(You can hear Pete’s voice and more about Pete Sengenberger in the Long Beach, NY library’s oral history archives very soon.)

Pete showed me the spacings in the wood of his kitchen table. He said, “You can look at the growth rings of a tree and see: this was a cold year, that was a hot year. The length of the rings and the spacing tell the whole story; it’s a fossil; it was a living creature. The side of the tree facing the sun, that side might grow faster, might have a wider ring.”

Pete said when he works on a table top he thinks “of how it was the first thing people did, like a caveman and his wife and she says, ‘Hey I have to put stuff somewhere.’ and that’s how it all started. Maybe he put a log on two rocks and that’s basically what this is today.”

Pete said, “It’s great to make something from nothing and even better to have someone pay you for it. This is done on my own schedule. It’s always there, and I don’t feel I have to be in front of it when I don’t want to be. I can pick it up at odd times. I can wind up being in front of it for 8 for 10 hours.”

Of Gregg’s Lazar’s Glizzy tabletop display, Pete said, “Gregg suggested putting the tables on the boardwalk; they’d get exposure, and people can use them and buy them.”

Pete continued, “I’m not working for him; he’s not working for me, we’re working together. Our object is to sell one item and work it from there. That’s what the goal is right now.”

Pete Sengenberger gave up the life of what many of us covet, an MBA with a career in finance. But I felt the happiness in Pete as he spoke. The scent of timber filled the air when he said, “I like the look and feel” of wood. He said he liked the curves, the grain swirls, the aroma.

I saw an oak of a man in Pete; a man willing to shed his life of buy and sell, to grow in a new field. A brave man who traded a life of business—for happiness.

I thought Pete found a kinship, maybe a soul-ship in wood when he said, “Wood is an organic thing, it’s made from the same thing as you and I and everything else, it follows the same laws of nature.”

Those words reveal passion—and that, dear readers—is a gift.

Pete’s cell, 917-302-9118 and email: Sengenbergerpeter1@gmail.com

Be well,

Leebythesea