Tom Bodett

• The book that opened Tom's eyes to the importance of making things with his hands (26:25)
• Two human qualities that Tom believes set us apart from beasts in the woods (26:19)
• How woodworking helps heal brain trauma, including addictions - and how it helped heal Tom (34:36)
• What changes Tom has seen in his own community after creating HatchSpace (37:06)
• The Crazy Good Turn that saved his life (41:27)

FRANK BLAKE: Tom, this is just a real pleasure and privilege to have you on Crazy Good Turns Podcast. Thank you.

TOM BODETT: Well, and thank you for having me, Frank. I love what you're doing with this.

FRANK BLAKE: So as our listeners are going to learn over the course of the conversation with you, you've had a fascinating and varied life.

Done lots of different things and yet what everybody's going to know about you is seven words. "We'll leave the light on for you."

How does that feel with all the things you've done, you know this is as it were on your tombstone?

TOM BODETT: I know. In fact, I've told my family, if that ends up on my tombstone, I will come back to haunt them in horrible ways.

I struggle with it, I'll be honest, Frank, for a while because when my writing and radio career took off in the mid-80s through NPR, I was really happy with that. It was very exciting.

Motel 6 came into the picture about two years into that and it was a little awkward at first honestly, because the commercial stuff with NPR, but I knew where my bread was going to get buttered.

So, I found a happy balance there and I published seven books and untold audio programs and radio programs, written and recorded hundreds of thousands of words. I only needed seven as it turns out.

FRANK BLAKE: Give our listeners a sense of how that came about.

What's the story behind the tagline? I mean, it's got to be one of the longest running ad campaigns in history.

TOM BODETT: I think it now is. There was Lipton Tea's, Arthur Godfrey's Lipton Tea campaign was the longest running campaign in American advertising for a while and we surpassed it.

I think we're in year 37 now, something like that. So, I think it's true.

I think that it is the longest running campaign in America, which is amazing for something that I literally did for the money once almost 40 years ago and how it turned into a really unusual relationship between talent as they call us and the client, which is Motel 6 and the advertising agency, which was the Richards Group for many, many years and more recently moved to Barclay out of Kansas City.

That three-legged stool has always been stable and that is as coming from business as you do.

You know how unusual that is.

FRANK BLAKE: How did the tagline come about?

TOM BODETT: Well, the way that worked is I got a call from a guy at the Richards Group.

A guy named David Fowler gave me a call and he went on to be the global creative director of Ogilvy & Mather out of New York, a brilliant guy, really funny, born and raised in Waco, Texas.

So, he called me out of the blue when I was about two years into my NPR stint, said, "I've been hearing you on the radio and I think you'd be a great voice for this new campaign we got for this company called Motel 6. Have you ever heard of them?"

I said, "Yeah, I have, but why me for that?"

He says, "Well, you sound like the guy who stays there," which was true.

I actually was the kind of guy who stays there, sometimes living in Alaska and never had much call to.

The thing I was doing on NPR were these little life in Alaska slice of life things once or twice a week on All Things Considered.

It was basically working-man, raising a family stuff. So, I got why that might be his reason.

I asked though, I said, "What does something like that pay?" He told me and I said, "Okay, how do we do it?"

Because it was just going to be a trial. I mean, they were just going to test this.

So, he flew me down to San Francisco first class, which I'd never seen before.

He came up from Texas and we went into a recording studio there. I'd never been in a commercial recording studio and he had a pile of scripts.

We're going through them and there were about three or four other people in suits in the room lingering around, the account people and all of that. It was making me terribly nervous.

The engineer, a guy named Bob Lindner, who's since passed away, he ended up being my engineer for over 20 years, nicest guy.

He came into the booth at one point to adjust my microphone and I said, "Bob, all those people milling around out there are making me nervous. Would it be weird if I asked him to leave?"

He said, "Hey, you're the talent. You're supposed to be weird."

So he carried the message out there. They all left, and frankly they never came back.

To this day when we go into booth, it's me and the producer/director, nobody else.

I think that's part of why the campaign has endured because we've been able to keep it clear, keep it simple, keep the heart of it without a lot of rotating opinion because the executives in advertising, I mean I think they're all on six-week contracts.

They tend to roll through pretty frequently.

So, in any case, we're going through these things. I'm getting relaxed. We're going through.

They didn't have a closing line yet. It was just, and this is Tom Bodett for Motel 6, and that was part of the joke because nobody knew who in the hell Tom Bodett was.

That was part of the fun of it. We recognized that they weren't ending, they just stopped. It is just like it needed something.

So, we're thinking about things we could do. So, see you down the road, take care, we'll leave the key under the potted plant.

I said, "I got an idea. Just roll it. I don't even want to talk about it. Just roll it."

We rolled another spot and it got to the end. I say, "I'm Tom Bodett for Motel 6, and we'll leave the light on for you."

Everything in the room was like, "Oh yeah, that might work." There wasn't like choirs of angels saying, "You're there," but it was natural for me because it's something that your parents would say when you're coming home from somewhere.

Oh, I'm going to be in late, mom.

"It's okay. We'll leave the light on for you."

It just seemed like a natural thing to say. It wasn't something I invented so much as I just pulled it out of my own experience.

FRANK BLAKE: I promise, this the last question I'll ask about the commercial and we'll get into the more relevant things, but why do you think it has connected so well to listeners?

What does it mean to you? What do you think it means to the listeners?

TOM BODETT: Well, I think why it connects is number one, I am a terrible actor.

I've done a little bit of animation work, but I don't get invited back very much because I've got one guy I do.

So, when I'm asked to do something that I'm not feeling, I suck at it.

I've never had training or anything. I know you can learn that stuff. I've just never bothered.

So, I think part of it is I am exactly what you think I am when you hear me.

We've been very careful - and we've had to fight for it over the years as things change - that I keep myself on the same side of the counter as the people listening.

It's not that I'm the owner of Motel 6 saying, "You should come stay with us because we're this."

It's like Motel 6 is great, and here, let me tell you why. It's like I'm speaking to them face to face. Do what you want, but this is a pretty good deal.

It's that thing, the way people talk to each other in life. We never oversell it.

FRANK BLAKE: As a storyteller, I mean, you're just a phenomenal storyteller.

Are there things that guide your approach to telling stories?

TOM BODETT: A lot of them are unconscious, Frank, to tell you the truth. I play by ear, if you will.

I also played guitar, something over the years. I can't read music. That's how I've approached this.

The five-paragraph essay is like a classic writing form that every high school kid is taught.

I learned what a five-paragraph essay was after a textbook used one of my pieces from one of my early books as an example of the five-paragraph essay.

Somebody showed it to me and I said, "I'll be damned."

FRANK BLAKE: You had no idea. That's terrific.

TOM BODETT: I mean, we all recognize it when we see it because we're steeped in it.

So, I think if I had a secret at all or talent if you will, is I'm able to absorb what I enjoy and absorb what speaks to me, if you will, and reproduce it.

There's no real talent here other than I am a great mirror to the ordinary American personality.

That's the way I think of myself. I'm the generic American.

FRANK BLAKE: Not entirely generic. You've had some amazing experiences. How long were you in Alaska?

TOM BODETT: Twenty-three years.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow. Maybe just take to a little bit what those 23 years were like. I know that's asking a lot to be compressed.

TOM BODETT: Right? Well, yeah, I dropped out of Michigan State University after not even two years.

I wanted to be a writer and I wasn't very good at it. You never are at that age.

I couldn't stand Michigan. I grew up in Southern Michigan, this little farming factory town called Sturgis, right on the Indiana border.

Went to Michigan State, which is like 80 miles away. I just was dying to get out of there. College wasn't interesting enough to keep me, and I was seeing all this stuff.

The West was in all the news. This was the early '70s, so it's like all of the back to the land people where the communes and all that nouveau mountain man stuff was going on.

The pipeline in Alaska was in the news that was under construction, and I just couldn't stand it anymore.

I just dropped out of school unceremoniously from about five days after I had the idea to.

I sold my beat-up car, my guitars, and I sold everything. I got a backpack and I headed west with about $200 in my pocket, which was not no money in 1975 and headed out there.

I stopped in Oregon, worked for a while, ended up in the hospital, another story I won't waste time with here, and got over that.

A year later I went to Alaska, still chasing this idea of just doing my Jack London and Jack Kerouac thing.

I just got to go work in a logging camp. I'm going to work on a fishing boat and an oil rig. I did all that.

My first two years in Alaska where I was basically that guy and really, really enjoying it, 21 years old. It's the Wild West.

So, there was so much work, so many people coming in.

One of the jobs I had was working on a construction crew building a cannery warehouse. I had a talent for carpentry because I grew up helping my dad who was a do-it-yourself or fix up our wreck of a house in Sturgis, Michigan my entire childhood.

So, it was easy for me to walk onto a construction job and bluff my way into whatever we were doing.

Then because of the times and the need for people willing to work, when I was 23 years old, I'd been Alaska two years, I built 13 houses.

So, I became an independent contractor for about 10 years and I built a lot of houses, a lot of stuff, and did pretty well at it.

Got married, had a kid, and living a pretty good middle-class life, I'd say. My wife was a schoolteacher.

Then one day, a friend of mine who worked at the local community public radio station, which I had built by the way, as a contractor, he said, "Hey, I enjoy hanging out with you. I've listened to you carry on at the bar," which I used to do a lot.

We're looking for local people just to do some commentary once a week on the news just to add some life to the broadcast. Would you be interested in doing it?

I said, "Well, I don't know, maybe. That's interesting, but what would I write about?"

He says, "Whatever you're doing. What are you doing today?" I said, "I got to take my dog in to have him fixed."

He says, "Write about that." So I did.

So, the very first thing I put on the radio was having my poor boneheaded black Labrador neutered and then it went from there.

The next thing was I had quit smoking. So, I wrote a whole thing about that and the stupid things you go through to do that.

Then I went on a commercial halibut trip with a friend for a weekend outing. So, I wrote about that and it just became a fun weekly habit that I had no plans for other than just enjoying it.

These things made their way up through the Alaska network and they were going statewide, which made me think my career had peaked.

I was as happy as I could be because that was my universe. Alaska was my universe.

So, if you were on Alaska News Nightly, that was the Oprah Winfrey of Alaska. Then they made their way from there to NPR.

Corey Flintoff, who went to NPR himself years later, sent them down and they put a piece that I'd written about that game, Trivial Pursuit, which had just come out.

I remember I was standing on the roof of a house that was being converted into offices right downtown in Homer. We were roofing it and this car roars up in the driveway.

This woman who was their operations director said, "Tom, Ted Clark is on the phone from All Things Considered and they want to use one of your pieces and you need to call them and talk to them."

I thought, "Wow." I think my hammer is still laying on that roof.

FRANK BLAKE: That's great.

TOM BODETT: I knocked off early that night because All Things Considered came on at 2:30 in the afternoon there or something because Alaska time.

I went with three of my buddies and were listening to All Things because you don't know when it's going to come on.

I heard Susan Stamberg introduce me, and I swear I almost fainted. I mean, that was-

FRANK BLAKE: Such a big deal.

TOM BODETT: Oh, it was. From there, the world beat a path to my door.

From the time my first commentary went on the air, Frank, this is not a story to tell struggling young writers, to when I had a book contract from a Boston publisher and an advance that would get me through the winter was six months.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow, that's extraordinary.

TOM BODETT: Isn't that something? Yeah.

FRANK BLAKE: An accidental career almost.

TOM BODETT: It really was.

I think part of the reason that it's been as successful as it has been I never really expected it. I never expected it to grow.

At any step, every time something new would happen, this is great. This is as good as it gets.

So, there was something about having that contentment with what I was doing that actually helped.

Because I think if you try too hard, you often alienate as many opportunities as you attract.

FRANK BLAKE: So I think that in itself, we could spend a long time talking about that experience.

What, though, triggered your moving to Vermont? Because as we speak now, you're in Vermont.

You've been there for more than 20 years, right?

TOM BODETT: Yeah, in fact, yeah, it'd be 21 years this year.

So, pretty soon this will be the longest place I've ever lived. So, I love Vermont. It surprised me that we're here.

I never thought I would leave Alaska. I had lived there my entire adult life. I got married there, I had a child there, I got divorced there, I got married again there.

As the Neil Young song goes, all of my changes were there.

I developed a magnificent drinking problem there and I got sober there.

So, Alaska just felt like that was my place. I knew it from the moment I set foot there that this was my land.

What changed was my first wife and I had a very amicable divorce, and we were committed to never letting our difficulties affect our boy.

She met someone after a few years, which called her out of state, and she moved down to the Seattle area.

I was all upset one day and she said, "Why don't we just move down there and see Courtney through high school? We can come back."

That was so reasonable. Of course, I'd never thought of it.

So, that broke the surface tension of leaving, if you will, because we kept our house there.

We moved down and lived there for four years outside of Seattle, a little town called Gig Harbor, which was fine and wonderful.

Our boy went to school at a really nice private school that he wouldn't have had that opportunity had we stayed in Alaska.

So, there was a lot of good things.

Just about the time that he was going to be graduating his senior year and we're planning our move back to Alaska, Rita became pregnant with our now 21-year-old child.

Rita's family is as close as a family could be. So, once she became pregnant, it was like there's no way I'm raising the first grandchild in my family 5,000 miles from Nan and Papa.

So, what are we going to do? I knew Vermont. I had a good friend here.

I'd visited him over the years and I'd happened at that time too be out here on a college tour with my son.

We stopped and saw Will, and I'm looking around here and I'm thinking, "This isn't so bad." It's like Alaska.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, exactly.

TOM BODETT: But with roads.

I mean Alaska, you can drive to Fenway Park in two and a half hours. That's interesting.

So, I mentioned it to Rita. She came out and we looked around and the place is just wired for kids.

It had it all. My kids were raised on a 50 acre hay field and woods in the middle of a Vermont countryside.

They've probably been to the Natural History Museum as often as people who live in New Jersey, in New York.

We've gone to Fenway Park. I can't tell you how many opening days we've gone there.

But another big part of it was getting back to my sobriety.

When I stopped drinking 33 years ago, I took up woodworking in my home shop.

I hadn't done very much of it since I'd hung up my nail bag, but it just called to me.

I had a table saw. I had a few of the odds and end tools. I was still fixing stuff up around the house.

I still enjoyed doing that, but I'd never really spent a lot of time doing fine woodworking, furniture making, which had always interested me.

I always admired it, but I'd not spent the time to try to learn it.

I started doing that and I found myself absorbed in it. I found that I was pretty good at it and I kept getting better, kept challenging myself and learning new things.

I became entirely enchanted by my woodworking thing. It became my new drug, no doubt about it.

Just about the time we were moving to Vermont, I got my first piece in Fine Woodworking Magazine, which was the equivalent like getting a story in The New Yorker for a writer, which I've never had.

What cemented Vermont for me on the first week is I walked into our local hardware store, which is still there, Brown and Roberts, best-sold store in New England, got the creaky wooden floor and the old wooden drawers with all the screws and bolts.

You know the place.

I walked in there and I introduced myself and I said, "I'm fixing up a house. I'm building a barn out in Dummerston, and I'm also a woodworker. I'd like to have an account here if that's possible."

They said, "Sure, no problem." What's your name? Told him, Tom Bodett. He goes, "That's familiar."

I thought, "Okay, well, here it comes."

He said, "Didn't you just have a piece in Fine Woodworking?"

FRANK BLAKE: Oh, that's terrific.

TOM BODETT: Right?

FRANK BLAKE: That's great.

TOM BODETT: I'm just like, "Okay, we're moving."

FRANK BLAKE: So, Tom, you've described woodworking.

It is obviously very a profound connection to you, but you've described it as the antidote to an ugly world.

TOM BODETT: Yes.

FRANK BLAKE: Can you explain that and how it connects with you?

TOM BODETT: Yeah.

When I came to realize through my now 30-some years of being serious about my woodworking is that it's the one thing I've ever done that I totally can disappear into, where time can stop and I'll forget to eat.

That never happened to me with my writing, with music. Sometimes with storytelling, it does.

Anyone who's had to try to keep me to a timeframe on stage knows that time does not move for me.

Those two things are related to me. Storytelling and making things are the two primary human qualities.

That's what sets us apart from the beasts in the woods.

There's a social philosopher named Richard Sennett who writes extensively about craft and the place it has served in human society from time immemorial.

He used the term Homo Faber, which is man as maker that that's who we are.

We were that before we were telling stories because we developed the cranial capacity and the manual dexterity to make and use complicated tools before we developed the musculature and things in our necks and the vocal cords to make the complicated languages that we use to express our big brains.

So, what his promises is that we are makers first and foremost, and that when we are making something, we are fully human.

When I read that, which was only 5 or 10 years ago, I totally recognized it as yes, that's what it is.

That's what it is. I am a maker.

That was when I started, when people ask me, you're sitting next to somebody in an airport or something, they ask, "What do you do?"

I stopped saying, "Oh, I'm in publishing or broadcasting," to saying, "I'm a woodworker. I'm a woodworker."

It felt so good to say that, to realize that because it was hard for me to... I wanted to give up writing, but I also got a lot of my attention and my status, if you will, from my writing and radio work.

But it wasn't doing it for me. I wasn't getting that sustenance that I wanted from it.

It was a good job, but it wasn't a dream job anymore. It felt like something had changed in me.

FRANK BLAKE: So what led you to the crazy good turn of setting up your HatchSpace, which is a workshop and a school and it's much more, but what prompted you to do that?

Because you could stay within your world of woodworking and as you say, disappear into that without broadening it into the community.

TOM BODETT: Yes, yes. The reason I am doing it is when I moved out to Vermont, one of the things that I recognized I'd never done is service work in my community.

When I moved out here to Vermont, I said, "This is a chance for a fresh start."

So I ran for our local select board, it was like the town council, within a year and a half of being here. That started this habit of public service.

So, fast-forward then 10, 15 years, I read this Richard Sennett book.

I recognize what this woodworking has done for me.

I recognize that I probably owed my sobriety to it, and I owed my woodworking to my sobriety.

I met a guy, Greg Goodman, a local cabinet maker who I didn't know previously, we're talking about all this, and he had read Richard Sennett.

We started having a series of lunches where we were talking about craft and the importance of it, what the lack of it in our world means, and how our digital life has taken us away from a connection to getting our hands on things and how fortunate we were as woodworkers to have that place and recognizing arrogantly, I think, a vacuousness in society and in so many of the people we knew and a helplessness in the material world.

Can't fix a light socket, can't do these things.

So, because I was in community service mode by then, I said, "What we ought to do is we ought to just open a wood shop, just a community workshop where people can come in and learn this stuff, teach each other.

"It's like a place to do this. Just let other people experience this and let the people who are already doing it get some decent machines and a decent place to work."

So we went about that. It took us about a year and a half to find a place, figure it all out, organize it.

We opened the doors thinking we were just going to be that, a clubhouse for people who wanted to work with wood.

Almost immediately people came in, they wanted classes. Oh, do you teach woodworking?

Well, yes and no. It's just like Greg's here all the time. I'm here as often as I can.

We can show you some things, but classes, no, we're not set up to do that.

But this demand kept coming and more people kept coming in and it wasn't safe anymore, right?

Because there's a lot of people who don't know what they're doing, learning from people who barely know what they're doing.

So, we started doing classes and the first class that we set up was a woman, another retired cabinetmaker, who, she's like my age.

She had always taught women woodworking on the side as she could because she recognized being the only woman on most of the jobs she ever worked on, that she wanted to make that change.

So, we did a class called Introduction to Woodworking for Women.

It sold out immediately. It was just women in the class, so that they didn't feel intimidated because women weren't given the opportunity and the access to the shops that we generally men were as they went up through school.

That class now, Frank, has been running for the five years we've been open. Gail has moved on.

We have two more teachers teaching it, and it's one right after another.

It was like we opened a floodgate and that there was an appetite there that nobody knew about.

So, I thought we were going to certainly struggle with being a bunch of old white guys in this shop.

That has never been the case. It's always been at least an even mix between men and women.

That has been really gratifying.

What that taught us is that there's a lot of people who have been traditionally overlooked by the trades, women among them.

The building trades are predominantly, well almost entirely men, predominantly white men and increasingly old white men.

They started pulling shop classes out of middle schools like 20, 25 years ago. They pulled them out of high schools as well, and they put them over on a sidetrack career centers or trade schools.

So, it used to be that everybody got introduced to this, and now it's only kids who are being tracked.

There's a loss of dignity that comes with that.

Kids smell judgment when it's there, and if they smell that, what they're hearing is "you're really not college material.

"Why don't you go take a look at the career center?"

They know what that means, that they're being told that they're less than somebody else.

All of us who have been in the trades and worked with people in the trades know that it isn't full of dummies.

There's a lot of really talented, very smart, ambitious people who live very good middle-class lifestyles and more working in the trades.

It just isn't seen as that way. You are now because suddenly what everyone realized all at once that-

FRANK BLAKE: You need, right?

TOM BODETT: Yeah. That since COVID, if you've tried to hire a plumber or electrician or something, you realize there just isn't enough of them.

We missed an entire generation of people who might have chosen the trades as an alternative to college or other pursuits and didn't.

FRANK BLAKE: Why do you think woodworking is so effective at building a community?

Because my observation is that it is.

TOM BODETT: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on that. None of them based on very much other than observation.

One of the things that there's a body of data building on is that woodworking therapy as a form of art therapy is particularly effective at treating trauma survivors and addiction recovery.

When I read that, again, I related it to my own sobriety.

I didn't start woodworking because it was good for my sobriety, but it just was good for my sobriety.

I never connected the two until I started reading some of this.

In fact, there's a treatment center out in Colorado that I have to visit that their whole residency program is a woodworking program.

What I think it is and what some of this data shows is that all art therapy is good for us to get out of our heads and start doing something with our hands.

But woodworking in particular, it's very Euclidean. There's a lot of the simple geometry.

You look at one side of the board, but you got to be able to picture the other side.

So, it's very simple, basic shapes moving around in your head.

All of that happens in the frontal lobe where all your executive function is, and that's the part of the brain that gets impacted by trauma and addiction.

It gets damaged literally. Resources are taken from there and put in other areas of the brain that are being overstimulated by these stresses.

You have to rebuild that.

That's why sobriety is so hard to achieve because it's one of the hardest things in the world a human being can do.

They're doing it with basically half their brain tied behind their back because their executive function just isn't working right.

So, keeping appointments, showing up for your job, paying your car insurance, all of those kinds of routine executive function stuff that we take for granted just isn't working well.

Woodworking therapy, if you will, somehow accelerates the healing.

There's more and more data building on that.

So, what I think is like, okay, that's great for trauma survivors, the people in addiction, but you think of it, we're all trauma survivors.

Everybody who's grown up, we're all damaged goods.

So, when you get in a room full of people woodworking, whatever their backgrounds are, everybody is suddenly on vacation from their damaged heads.

It's easy to talk to people when you're in that place because oh wow, that's an interesting way of doing it. I wouldn't have thought of that.

There's all of these conversations that are neutral ground.

I think of HatchSpace, we now have 150 active members and we have classes going continually.

It's an issue-free zone. I've never once heard an argument, political discussion, anything like that going on.

People who I know would never meet in nature are there standing on either side of a table, one helping the other get a glue up going and chatting away.

That's why I have doubled and tripled down on this project because I see what it's done for my community.

We located it purposefully, right Downtown Brattleboro in a 38,000 square foot building that we occupy about a third of now.

The rest of it has got a print shop, a photography studio. It's like a lot of other maker organizations.

The energy that that building has brought to itself, it was essentially an empty building after COVID.

I bought it during COVID and it's now completely full with a waiting list.

It's like a jewel of Downtown Brattleboro and that everybody I see says, "Oh, man, I can't believe what you've done with HatchSpace."

Because it's like every time I go by that thing, there's something happening there.

FRANK BLAKE: So brilliant.

TOM BODETT: So when you think about it, Frank, what ails us in our politics, in our social worries is we've forgotten how to get together and do things together.

The old organizations, the Elks Club, Moose Club, and the bowling leagues, and all of these things have really diminished from the parts they played in our communities a generation ago.

We didn't replace them with anything.

I think that's a large part of why rural communities like Brattleboro and across the country have suffered so much.

Not only were they left out of the economic growth that the global economy brought, most of their jobs, including the town that I grew up in, were some of the first to go overseas.

Nothing came into replace them that gave people the dignity and the respect and the ability to take care of their families that they had before.

So, having a center like this, which can do all of that stuff, is really exciting to me.

We now have a lot of interest from other communities in what we're doing here and how they can do it in their towns.

This is what's getting me out of bed every day now when like you say, I could have just stayed in my woodshop and been enjoying myself, but now I feel like with what we've built and with the interest we have in this, that I can be a part of the solution of what happens next in our world here.

It's not going to cure everything, but it's going to cure something.

So, however you feel about the recent turn in things, nobody feels comfortable, right? I want to create more comfort in the world.

When I see it on the faces of the women and the kids and that of when they've built something and they hold it up to have their picture taken with it, I just think this is it.

This is what I was supposed to be doing all along.

FRANK BLAKE: Well, I think it is profound and important. I know I reflect on my Home Depot experience.

You want to spend a few minutes on a Saturday morning that will make you feel good about life, go into a Home Depot and see the kids' workshops with the kids lined up with the goggles on, hammering away at something.

It is a sight.

I have a last question for you, I ask all of our guests.

So, this is a crazy good turn that you've done. Who's done a crazy good turn for you in your long and varied life?

TOM BODETT: Oh gosh, there's so many. I've been a very lucky man.

This is pretty personal, but I always go back to it because I've had turning points in my life, but not very many complete left turns.

I will give it to my father, who, he was not a gifted father. He grew up without one. He had no idea what he was doing.

He had six kids, no time for any of us.

I spent more time with him than most of the kids because I worked with him on the weekends.

If you wanted to have time with my dad, he wasn't going to play with you, but he would work with you.

So, I would show up to be the other end of his tape or drag the wire into the crawl space or whatever it was he needed.

So, when I said earlier that when I first went out west, I was hurt and ended up in a hospital and I was almost killed in an electrical accident on a power pole that almost blew my right arm off my body.

I nearly lost the arm, nearly lost my life, was in a hospital for a long time.

My parents came out to visit me for a while. I refused to go home with them.

My dad and I were not even really on speaking terms at that time. He was not a pleasant guy, I'll say. I didn't look to him for anything anymore as young men will sometimes be with their fathers.

But when I was released from the hospital, I had not been totally withdrawn from my medications.

It was morphine. This is like the OxyContin story, 1970s style.

I got a little apartment that was being paid for by the county in Ashland, Oregon, which was a place where a lot of young people and hippies and drug use was prominent.

I started looking around to find if I could find some hard drugs because I was still addicted to morphine. They let me go too early.

At that time, I wasn't sure about it, just like I really felt like I was going to do it, but I hadn't got up my nerve, if you will.

But I was essentially jonesing as they say.

One day I went to the mailbox and there was a letter from my dad. He had never written me a letter.

It was in his neat engineer's script on a piece of graph paper, of course.

My dad was also a navy veteran of World War II, and that was a big part of his pride.

What he said to me, if I can keep this, it always gives me emotion when I share this, is he said, "I saw you in that hospital bed as brave as any soldier, and watching you endure what you did in the way that you did makes me very proud of you."

That was it. That letter probably saved my life.

That just him saying that one thing, it was probably the only fatherly thing he'd ever said to me in the 20 years that I'd known him at that time, changed my life in the most powerful way ever.

FRANK BLAKE: Tom, this has been such an extraordinary conversation.

I can't thank you enough just beyond, not only fascinating, but so much learning and so much wisdom and so much kindness and generosity.

So, thank you. Thank you.

TOM BODETT: Well, thank you, Frank, for what you're doing, highlighting the good works that people are doing.

It's good for the soul, isn't it?

FRANK BLAKE: Well, that's the idea. If people want to know more about you, where should they go or where do you want to point people?

TOM BODETT: Take them to hatchspace.org.

I am all about that now. There's plenty of links there if you want to learn the other stuff.

Of course, I still have books and things in print, but I'm far less interested in those.

Those aren't as good as what I'm doing at HatchSpace. Let's just put it that way.

If anybody's ever in the neighborhood, including you, Frank, I hope you come visit us.

FRANK BLAKE: All right. Well, thank you.

TOM BODETT: Thank you, Frank.

FRANK BLAKE: All right, we're good. This is brilliant.

Love every part of it. Thank you, Tom.