John Wiggers
Furniture maker/designer, environmentalist, Led Zeppelin fan. Born on June 4, 1959, in Whitby, Ont.; died on Sept. 18, 2014, in Beaverton, Ont., of cancer, aged 55.
John's childhood playground was the workshop where his parents, Johann and Ann, ran a custom furniture business. It was located next to their home in Whitby, Ont. From the time he could crawl, he'd often do so on his father's workbench.
As a kid he discovered he could use scrap wood to make toys for himself and his younger brothers, Richard and Darryl. Later, as a teenager, he meticulously crafted wood-encased stereo speakers. This meant his parents had to endure Boston's debut album, and Deep Purple's Machine Head, at 80-watt levels, but they never complained. They were proud he was so gifted.
John earned his bachelor's degree in political science and economics at Ontario's York University, but he couldn't resist the joy of woodworking. Or the determination to marry his girlfriend Teresa Forbes, which he did in 1984. As he often said, "I knew from the moment I met her that I would marry her."
John was eager to expand the family's custom furniture line into new areas. In the early 1980s, he impressed showrooms in six major U.S. cities with his and his father's designs; that led to collaborations with chic collections such as Brueton and Dakota Jackson. Over the next three decades, John employed up to 20 artisans to furnish wealthy customers as far as Russia, the Middle East and Asia.
Most who bought a Wiggers Custom Furniture creation never knew it, though. They were often "private label" pieces. But if the New York Yankees peek under their massive mahogany boardroom table, they'll notice something odd. Before delivering it in 1996, John placed a Toronto Blue Jays sticker there. As he later said, "I'll never know whether George Steinbrenner saw the humour in that."
The pursuit of fame and financial success was never John's passion, however. The environment was. The trigger was the day his eldest son, Brad, saw a children's cartoon featuring a villainous furniture maker who gobbled up rain forests. Brad tried to understand how his father was different from the bad man in the cartoon. His persistent, yet astute, questioning deeply troubled John. "That was the catalyzing point for me to examine my practices and work," he said later.
He subsequently became a pioneer in the movement toward sustainable forest management, working closely with the Forest Stewardship Council Canada and, more recently, the Furniture Society, an international not-for-profit group.
John's lifelong love affair with trees eventually led to meetings with esteemed elders of the Haida, Kogi and Hopi, "some of the last remaining people who retain a true sense of spiritual connectedness to the planet," as he once wrote. This included an invitation, in 2007, into the home of Hopi Grandfather Martin Gashweseoma – "the native American equivalent of the Dalai Lama" as John put it – on the sacred day of Powamuya. John especially cherished that meeting.
But Teresa and their children, Brad, Kevin and Alison, remained his greatest love. "He was extremely sentimental, especially when it came to his family," as Alison noted. "Do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life," John was fond of telling his children. They all heeded this advice, including Kevin, who today makes furniture in his dad's shop.
Darryl Wiggers is John's brother.