Spring
2003
Volume 96, Number 3
C L O S E - U P
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Making his point with a needle 
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| 37If
real men don’t eat quiche, do they do needlepoint? Ask Carl Jacobs,
a guy as real as they get who has been doing it since 1973. “It
never bothered me a bit that working in needlepoint might not be
considered masculine. Whenever anybody commented on it, I had the perfect
answer: ‘Well,
you would never say Rosey Grier wasn’t masculine,’” he
says with a laugh. Of course, he is referring to the former offensive
tackle for the New York Giants and St. Louis Rams, who does needlepoint
himself and has written a book on the subject. Jacobs’ avocation
in stitchery dates from when he moved from a large house into an
apartment where there was no room for his woodworking tools. “I
had to find something to do with my hands,” he says. That something began on a five-day cruise with a group of friends. The steel company executive saw one of the women working on a needlepoint project, and he decided to try his hand at it. “She and I thought it would be fun to make a replica of the ship’s insignia in needlepoint to leave as a memento,” he says. After scouting around, they found some red yarn, but they had to use kite string for the white. After that he was hooked. When he got home, his wife, Ann, gave him his first needlepoint canvas—a covering for a brick doorstop—and he was on his way. Jacobs has come a long way since then. In his Keene, N.H., living room is a wing-back chair entirely covered in a colorful flame-stitch bargello design that took Jacobs nine months to complete, and the walls of his home are adorned with framed needlepoint canvases of intricate design. He eschews the dainty. His taste tends toward reproductions of geometric and optical-illusional art and colorful Southwestern Indian designs. From behind a chair in his library the self-taught craftsman pulls out a replica of a Frank Stella (PA ’54) painting, then a design based on the op art of M.C. Escher; he especially likes the work of the Israeli artist Agam, whose art is featured in Jacobs’ needlepoint collection. Framed over his mantle glows a reproduction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “City of Lights,” a stained glass window installed in the Midway Gardens building in Chicago in 1913. True to the original, it is done in bright blues, reds and greens, and Jacobs has added touches of gold and silver metallic thread. He has also created many of his own designs, including a needlepoint cover on the piano bench next to a sunny window, a green and white bargello pattern that, he says, took “a lot of mathematical calculations to get right.” He seldom sells his work; if someone coveted a piece, he says, he would probably give it away. But when his church asked him to donate two pillows to sell at its bazaar, they sold for $350. Because he is drawn to textile arts, Jacobs also took up weaving a few years ago and found it fascinating. He signed up for a class at the Sharon Arts Center in Peterborough, N.H., bought a loom, and after five weeks learned the “overshot” method, where one pattern is laid over another. He did it as well or better than experienced weavers in the class, his teacher reported. A scrapbook of his completed projects, both in weaving and needlepoint, is bulging at the seams. Jacobs, a Princeton graduate and a veteran of World War II, has been a longtime volunteer at Andover. At the time of the merger of Abbot and Phillips academies in 1974, he was an alumni trustee. He has also been campaign chair for an alumni fund drive and is now president of his class. Retired for 22 years—he thinks of it rather as a 22-year-long vacation—from the Inland Steel Company of Chicago, this grandfather of four and great-grandfather of four is a busy man, but he knows how to relax. He sits down with canvas, some yarn and a needle. — Paula
Trespas
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