The Adventure of the Folding Chair
For decades, I have searched for an apt metaphor for Teachers Without Borders. A folding chair comes to mind.
Allow me to explain.
After a particularly grueling day of humiliation at school, my mother let me in on a family secret. “Your great-uncle, Tobias Miller of Cleveland, Ohio invented the folding chair.” (He didn’t exactly invent it, though he held a patent for a version.) I was too young to understand this curious attempt at a pep talk, but at least she got my attention. Distraction works.
As an adolescent, buoyed by the notion that I had coursing through my very own veins a genetic blueprint of originality, I chatted up an ample 10th grader on a hayride at summer camp. Not a great plan. She may have found it endearing at first, but as I droned on, she listened patiently, doe-eyed, unreadable. By the time the truck wheezed to a stop, I knew I had failed to impress her. I scrambled out quickly and reached out my hand to help her down. She preferred to do it herself, thank you very much. What was I thinking?
From time to time, I would try to extract from my mother a bit more about my great uncle, but she was unable to produce a shred of tangible or rational evidence that the man ever existed, no less immigrated from Austria, settled in Cleveland, had any connection to our family, or had conceived any such imaginative breakthrough. Her escape clause seemed too airtight and inarguable. She claimed that Tobias was forced to sell the patent to survive during the Great Depression.
For years, I would ask about Tobias Miller. With maddening consistency, the reply was always the same. “Your great-uncle, Tobias Miller of Cleveland, Ohio, invented the folding chair.” The mention of Tobias’s hometown sounded regal, grounded, a birthright. Think Charles, Prince of Wales. Tobias, Prince of Chairs. My Mother, Queen of Tales. She stuck to the story until the very end.
In my twenties, it dawned on me that my attempts to derive meaning from a thin branch of our family tree were futile, if not pathetic. Why did I keep asking, and why did she so persist in sticking to the script? Was this about pursuing ideas just out of reach, even if they never culminated in a patent? Was she saying that inventions are not as important as inventiveness? The thought buzzed about, as John Updike would put it, “like a bee in a glass jar.”
In my thirties, busy with a career and family, my mother once offered an unsolicited compliment that I had “exceeded her expectations.” My optimistic wife took that statement as a mother’s lovely expression of pride. My take was far less sanguine. In the car on the way home, I muttered, “Wow, that felt like school. Her expectations must have been pretty low.” I thought, “Did she think I have always been addled?” My wife looked straight ahead with sense enough to wait it out, preferring not to give it any more attention than it deserved. From that moment on, I the Tobias Miller story took on darker tones. No longer an apocryphal anecdote about an invention by a fictional relative, it felt like an expectation to step up my game. I did better than she thought, but I wasn’t exactly a Tobias Miller.
In my forties, I like to think that I kept up a steady pace of meeting, or even exceeding, expectations. No need for a pep talk. An occasional reference to Tobias Miller. And yet, I remained curious.
It became increasingly difficult in my fifties to probe her for more information about Tobias or, for that matter, very much any subject at all. Feeling sunny, she might retell the story (still, word for word) with a certain gusto, but then clouds of dementia would move in and her lips would curl into uncertainty and her eyes turn a shade greener and more vacant, as if she had just twisted the door handle of memory but had forgotten where she was going. I knew we needed to start anew and so I would ask her, enthusiastically, to tell me about Tobias Miller, as if it were for the first time. By this time, I was well-rehearsed at appearing surprised and pleased to hear this interesting bit of family history, despite feeling a bit sinister, as if I were conducting a cognitive-capacity assessment without the subject’s permission.
“Mom, you once mentioned someone named Tobias Miller What did he do again?” Near the end of a commercial break for her favorite TV show, “The Mentalist,” in which a former “psychic” becomes a discerning and prescient consultant to the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI), I ventured forth again, fully aware of the irony. Triggered, she read from her mental teleprompter: “Your great uncle, Tobias Miller of Cleveland, Ohio, invented…” but before she could finish, the dashing Simon Baker returned as Patrick Jane to solve the case by identifying simple cues that had eluded everyone else. She would swoon. All was forgotten — again. I would hold her hand and we would watch the rest of the show in silence. I had long ago coached myself to let it go and give her credit for having kept the story alive for so long.
Nevertheless, I reserved the right to daydream about what actually might have gone on in Tobias’s basement. I imagined him easing his small frame onto a newer, reinforced wood-slatted version, not entirely confident that it would hold up under pressure. Or folding and unfolding the chair to test the pliability and endurance of the hinges. Or testing the strength of his prototype by weighting down the seat with burlap bags filled with potatoes, as if to simulate a corpulent worker seeking relief after a long day on the assembly line. I imagined Tobias constructing a folding chair out of a picket fence left behind at a demolition site, then standing on the seat, careful to hold onto the wall at the same time, just in case the hinges gave way and trapped him between the seat and the backrest. I a pictured him at his workbench, bending the squeaking spring-loaded arm of his combination magnifying glass and desk lamp to detect manufacturing flaws. Folding and unfolding his invention, replacing a double hinge with a pivot hinge and a spacer to keep the seat from wearing through the leg finish or scrapping the designs that showed promise just two hours prior, now reduced to kindling. Undaunted, Tobias certainly would pick up the challenge another day. What tenacity! What vision! I wish I had that!
I had to “get to the bottom” of the Tobias Miller saga. I searched genealogy sites for alternative spellings of his name, just in case an inattentive clerk at Ellis Island had been unable to decipher his Austrian accent amidst the din of anxious immigrants speaking multiple languages, officials barking orders, and exhausted parents attempting to pacify cranky children. The spelling function of these websites tried to be of assistance. “Did you mean Tobias Mueller?” That sounded too obtusely Germanic — wouldn’t work for Austrian Jewish immigrants. “Thomas Mahler?” Maybe Gustav Mahler’s son. True, he was Jewish and born in Austria, but my mother, a classical music lover, would have told me. “Toby Moler?” Too suburban, goyish, clunky. I searched for Tobias Miller of Cleveland, or Tobias Mueller of Vienna, Austria or Mueller of Cleveland, Miller of Vienna. This was a colossal time suck. I chastised myself to stop perseverating.
Undeterred, I supplemented my internet sleuthing with library visits to churn up a weave of microfiche squares from Cleveland newspapers, census data, death certificates, ship registries from Europe to Ellis Island, and voting records to discover some tidbit worth of reporting. If I came up empty, then I could walk away from this family myth with a clear conscience and keep it from cluttering up my adult headspace as it had done so often during adolescence, and you know now how that turned out.
Perhaps I would stumble upon a two-inch news item in the Cleveland Plain Dealer with a photo of Tobias wearing a long coat and a wide grin, resting his hands on his backrest, his name right there in the caption, followed by a comma and the word “inventor.” No luck. I searched old phone books in the archives of a dank university basement. I made cold calls to strangers in alphabetical order: Mahler. Miller. Mueller. At Good Will and the Salvation Army, I fingered underneath folding chairs and checked the hinges for any identifying metal label or branding. Most of these attempts led to splinters.
Research can be a black hole. In my investigation of connections between my family and the invention of the folding chair, my attention turned to the folding chair itself. After all, what is a birthday party without musical chairs and that sadistic host only too ready to snatch one away at the very moment when the needle is shwerpped from the LP? At a public reading in the corner of your local chain bookstore, might we listeners otherwise be forced to sit on our haunches like baseball catchers, just waiting for the guest author’s next pitch? Without the pragmatism and community made possible by the folding chair, how might the facilitator convene the AA meeting or flower-arranging workshop? Sans folding chairs, the string section of the community symphony could not file in to take their seats in the shape of a fan with just enough elbow on the sides to accommodate the string section on the side and in back to leave enough space for the outer edge of a trombonist’s slide tube.
On holidays, we don’t say to a surprise extra guest, “Hey, grab that Lazy-Boy over there and pull it up to the table.” Besides, a fifty-pound leather chair-with-combination-ottoman is too imperial. The person who audaciously chooses to sit there, rather than on a plastic or wooden folding chair like the rest of us, is conspicuously elitist, if not downright weird. Nicholson Baker adds another mysterious dimension to the obtuse thumb of immovable chairs. “Haven’t you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?”
The folding chair began to take shape in my mind as the narrative of progress — an accessible, flexible, immediate, affordable, equalizing prop of democracy — capable of strengthening our fragile social contract with an act of civility. We pull “up” a chair at a moment’s notice. Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman in the United States and advocate for social justice and the disenfranchised, said it best: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” At the political convention, delegates wait patiently for the moment when the candidate’s speech reaches a crescendo, then leap up — exultant, proud, clutching signs, shouting the campaign slogan in unison.
The circus performer wields one leg of an unfolded chair to keep a sneering lion at bay. We chair a corporate or non-profit board or a committee only temporarily in order to safeguard companies and organizations from being subjected to a power grab. Chaired professorships, however, are often endowed positions so that generations of accomplished academics may uphold and extend the legacy of the over-achiever for whom it is named.
When the President of the United States strides up to the podium at the Rose Garden to announce a new Supreme Court Justice, the eight others are seated regally on folding chairs. In the situation room where American leaders tracked the movements of Navy Seals about to assassinate Osama bin Laden, President Obama — formality be damned — viewed the unfolding drama from a folding chair. Without them, our community meeting places would be filled with people just milling about, looking lost.
Folding chairs can be arranged in obedient rows for the lecture and in circles for the more intimate conversation afterward. They accommodate overflow crowds at free-admission, public events.
Folding chairs have not always been viewed so magnanimously. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks constructed folding chairs for commanding officers to plot their next moves. Etruscans used folding chairs during tribunals. From the Romans through the Renaissance, folding chairs were reserved for the ruling class, often shaped like an X: the Italian Dante chair, and the German Luther chair, both covered in silk or velvet. At the end of the 13th century, Edward I was crowned on a folding stool. In Raphael’s 16th-century fresco at the Vatican Museum, “La Messa di Bolseno,” Pope Julius II is seated on a folding kneeling stool.
Let’s put aside all the regal associations and stay focused on representation. Much of the credit for the modern concept of the folding chair goes to John Cram of Suffolk, Massachusetts (patent 1855), improved upon by John Dann of New Haven, Connecticut (patent 1863), followed by Nathaniel Alexander, of Lynchburg, Virginia (patent 1911), whose version included a book rest. Many people invented and reinvented the folding chair, but I only cared about Tobias.
Three years after my mother passed away, I made one final attempt to summon the Google muse, keying in “Tobias Miller, folding chair” in Google images. There it was, along with a set of drawings entitled: “Auxiliary Seat. U.S. Patent 1302828. Tobias Miller. Publication date: May 6, 1919. Cleveland, Ohio.”[1]
My great uncle, Tobias Miller of Cleveland, Ohio did not so much as invent the folding chair, as reinvent it. My mother could neither have known—nor would she have cared—about the 26,700 variations and patents: beach chairs, lawn chairs, deck chairs, canvas tailgating chairs with holes in the armrests for beer cans, fully-upholstered folding chairs, directors’ chairs, tobacco leather butterfly chairs, folding Adirondack folding chairs with indentations designed for butt cheeks. Folding chairs with attached folding footrests, folding barstool chairs, folding school desk chairs, folding high chairs. Folding chairs that evolve as we age: the folding rocking chair for the nursing mother, then the weary bones of a retired laborer, then the retiree. Walkers with folding seats (a compassionate gesture), folding lift chairs, and folding wheelchairs. Tobias seized an opportunity to adapt an idea for service to others. Good enough for her and good enough for me.
But that is the point. Folding chairness is universal. Ideally, Teachers Without Borders is the folding chair of organizations—portable, accessible, affordable, adaptable, rearrangeable, and storable for the next crowd ready to unfold and improve upon. Our members, like the Tobias Millers of Cleveland, Ohio or anywhere else tinker and wrestle with prototypes, construct pilots, and test them out. Some ideas collapse under the weight of our global mission. Others require reinvention until we get it right. Everything we do should begin in hospitality (like offering strangers a chair) and end in gratitude—thanking people for sitting and sharing ideas with us.
I’m fine with that.
[1] US Patent. US #1302828A (1918). “Auxiliary seat.” A47C4/10. Retrieved from: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1302828A/en
