Roman Hrytsak, Calgary - UofM Aggie Grad 1967 - now boot carver

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From: Burke and Helena Wilson <porkiestoo@shaw.ca>Date: Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 10:01 AM
Subject: From Class of 67
To: Tom & Rose Rogers <rogerstomrose@gmail.com>, Peter Sanderson <sandersonpeterg@gmail.com>

Just as a matter of interest....

Yesterday in the Calgary Herald there a full page article on people(4) who make up the tapestry of Calgary. One of them caught my eye because it was a name from our past..... Roman Hrytsak.

I remember him specifically for his antics at an Aggie toga party in 1966. I referred to old year books......and sure enough.... He was in the class of ‘67 and there is even a picture of him in the ‘66 yearbook leading the toga parade  in a roman chariote.

In wood, Roman Hrytsak found his passion. In him, the wood found redemption.

Scrawled on the wall of Hrytsak’s backyard workshop are the words “These boots were made for talkin’!”

Rows of small, carved wooden boots line the shelves below.

Hrytsak, a husband and grandfather with a contagious sense of humour, began wood carving in 1990 when his wife, Marjorie, encouraged him to pick up a new hobby as a stress-reliever.

He attended a class in wood carving that year, bringing only a Dremel (a small, hand-held rotary power tool). “There were guys in there with equipment as if they were going to climb Mount Everest,” he recalls. “I just had this little machine. I was trembling. I sat down and I started carving.”

Hi first project was a western meadowlark songbird, which sits proudly on a shelf in his living room. Now, he carves boots — conversation pieces, as he calls them.

“I use wood that I find. I call it ‘F-wood’; free, fragile, firewood, fence posts,” he says. “Boots signify to me that they’ve been around and they’ve worked and they’re still there. They’re crinkled and that, but they carry you all the time.”

Hrytsak spends hours bathed in a cyclone of sawdust every week, listening to a French radio station (he can’t understand the words, but he says the music is beautiful) and the drone of machines.”I’m able to react with the wood. Sometimes, the wood tells me what to do, and sometimes I tell it what I’d like to do.

“It’s just so much fun, because you don’t know what’s going to happen.”