Richard Calnin

Richard Calnin shapes and welds steel to create outdoor sculpture, sculptural furniture, and functional home accessories such as doorstops, chimes, and plant stands. Creative, original, unique -- all are terms which have been used to describe his work, which he enjoys as a second career, after retirement from St. Norbert’s College, where he taught Spanish and German for 24 years.

His life before St. Norbert’s was varied and, at times, adventurous. He was born in Appleton, Wis. and attended St. Francis Major Seminary in Milwaukee, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy. He was also interested in languages and studied Latin, Greek and French.

After graduation, Calnin “wanted to go and find out what the world was like.” He went to Detroit and worked in the Ford tractor plant operating a billing machine and doing office work. While there he saw a poster appealing to people interested in languages to join the Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). He was interested and signed up.

He received an intensive course in Russian, then assigned to Bamberg, Germany where he had another intensive course in German. He changed assignments often and did some of his work during the Berlin Airlift and Blockade in 1949. While in the CIC he met and later married his wife Mechtild, working at the American Consulate in Munich, Germany. Mechtild is currently involved in her second career as a watercolorist.

Calnin returned to the U.S. and was interested in learning still another language, deciding on Spanish. He then attended the National Univ. in Mexico City, Mexico. While attending the university, he worked at a Mexican factory, earning 14 pesos per day, which was less then $1/day. He also taught intermediate and beginning German to pay his way through school. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish from the Univ. of the Americas, also in Mexico City.

He then returned to Wis. and earned his Master’s degree in Spanish and a Comprehensive College teaching in German from the UW-Madison. He started teaching at St. Norbert’s College in 1957, where he subsequently established a German Center, providing students a chance to immerse themselves in the language and the culture as part of their studies.
In 1961, he went on a three month study tour to Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; in 1970, to Mexico and Germany; and 1972 a nine month study program in Peru, where he undertook weekend projects with his students to invent and install water pumps in disadvantaged areas.
His creativity and inventiveness have always been applied to his home environments, wherever he has lived, through his interest in alternative energy. His home in DePere used experimental solar heat and electricity generated by a windmill on his property.

When he moved to Southwest Wis., he converted a barn into a home above a workshop where he could concentrate on the furniture and decorative objects which he creates from steel and wood, first building them for his own home.
He has shown his work in galleries and art fairs throughout the state.

131 W. Court St. · P.O. Box 475 · Richland Center, WI 53581

608-604-2838