Traditions: Ohio Heritage Fellows; 102; Mark Ward interview, part 2 of 4

Restating: Well what got me interested in banjo making is that I’d been around ‘em my whole life. I started playing when I was twelve or thirteen and so I just growing up playing a lot of old time music and seeing these great banjos and I could never afford one and I was lucky enough to live down the road from Doug Unger. And so I just uh, went down and looked him up one time.

Q: So you basically knew Doug as a neighbor?

MARK: Well, I had heard of his reputat—I... I knew Doug. I’d heard of Doug’s reputation for a very long time and I had never really met him. I knew where he lived because he would live within fifteen miles of me. And actually, the very first time I met him I think I was about twenty years old and he had a booth at a folk festival and he was demonstrated his engraving. And I didn’t you know, you know what he was doing and I said, so that’s how you get those lines in those banjos, you just scratched ‘em in. And he looks at me this dead pan look and he says I’m engraving.

Q: So he takes himself a little seriously. So you... did then, did you work out through the um, Ohio Arts Council Traditional Art Apprenticeship or how did that work?

MARK: Oddly enough I ran into Doug at Fisher’s Restaurant which is right across the street here. And um, I introduced myself and he said... Restating: I first ran into Doug really accidentally um, at a restaurant and I introduced myself. I knew he was and so he invited me over. And so I walked into this shop and he started showing me around and I just developed a friendship with him. We kinda hit it off because I play banjo and fiddle and he plays banjo. And then as time went on, we just decided that, you know, I would be... want to learn how to do this through him because he was... he’s the best and he lives in town. Boy was that stupid. Restating: Yes, it is. I had been coming by to see Doug because we were friends and I was... I played fiddle and banjo and he played banjo. And I had been trying to make banjos for, you know, five or ten years but, I had never done any engraving and only some banjo neck work. And um, he offered me the Ohio Arts Council grant and, of course, I jumped at it.