Wayne Knight has a fixation on Wyatt Earp, John Wayne and others–through puzzles.
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by T.L. Huffman
Wayne Knight has been fixated on Wyatt Earp, John Wayne and Hop-A-Long Cassidy lately.
Hunched over two card tables at a friend’s house, Wayne patiently fits together the interlocking cardboard cutouts in a quiet but intense challenge with himself to complete the 1,000-piece Happy Trails Cowboy jigsaw puzzle.
He’s finished 45 different puzzles so far.
“I work on them two or three hours in the evening,” says Wayne.
“When TV is dull, a puzzle kills some time.”
Wayne estimates that a 1,000-piece puzzle takes maybe two weeks. At a leisurely pace, he can finish a 500-piece cutter in a couple of nights. Puzzles come in boxes and cans, contain from 300 to 2,000 pieces, and range in difficulty from easy to not so easy to real hard.
He has a system.
“First I put the border together,” he explains. “Then I look at the picture and start at one place. If the puzzle has a scene, like a house or a ship, I put it together where it belongs, then I start away from that. I always start at one location.”
Wayne began his “night hobby” in late 1997.
“It’s the first time I ever had time,” he says.
Wayne was born and raised in Gallatin. His father, John, owned Knight Oil Company. Wayne left in 1959 and went to Kansas City where he worked for Skelly Oil for 13 years, then went to work for Chevrolet in 1989. He retired in 1990 and moved back to Gallatin.
“You go crazy when you retire unless you find something to do,” says Wayne.
To stay busy, he became a regular volunteer at Daviess County Care Center ,where he helps the residents with their bingo games and works in the garden area.
Activities Director Kathryn Lambright got him interested in jigsaw puzzles. Wayne found out he had a passion for perplexity and was hooked.
But matching his wits with the puzzle maker and watching a colorful laminated picture emerge from a jumble of pieces was only half the thrill for Wayne.
“Every time I put one together, I’d think they were too pretty to tear apart,” he says.
Wayne found a way to preserve the art form. When they’re done, he glues the puzzles to a backdrop of hardwood and then takes them to his woodworking shop where he makes and paints the frame. His shop is at the Bill Sites storage shed, where he has rigged up an electric generator that powers the saws and woodworking tools.
His wood projects include an onion and tater bin, birdhouses, and decorative centerpieces. He helped one of his sons build a deck for his home.
“Sometimes I work from a pattern,” says Wayne. “Other times I just sit down and make something.”
Woodworking is something Wayne has been doing all his life.
“Anything you want me to make in wood, I can make it,” he says. “I guess that’s my ‘day hobby.'”
Those hand-crafting skills come in handy when he sits down to do a puzzle. Wayne’s puzzles cover subjects as diverse as puppy dogs in flower pots, trains, and teddy bears.
One of his favorites, 42×36 inches, hangs in his living room. It’s a 2,000-piece rendition of the Humphrey Bogart classic Casablanca. Another puzzle enthusiast, Sherri Vance, helped Wayne put that one together.
A puzzle depicting the Peachtree Creek battle was given to Wayne by a friend who went to the Civil War reenactment of the battle in Atlanta, Ga. Wayne plans to give him the completed puzzle as a Christmas present.
His kitchen wall is decorated with a 31×25 1982 Hallmark Coke collection. The puzzle is a montage of the product’s early advertising and is highlighted by two antique trays of the same Coke slogans.
The puzzle turned out to be a brainteaser for Wayne.
“It was more trouble than any of them,” he says. “There were so many ads in it, and they all looked alike. It was laid out in really unusual, little tiny pieces. It was a mess.”
The A.T. Ray Home was nearly as hard to put together because of the many shades of gray in it.
Wayne gives many of his wall hangings away as holiday gifts. He has built up a collection large enough to display at the Daviess County Care Center.
“People really relate to them out there,” Wayne says. “Everybody likes them and wants one, and I just keep making them.”
So far Wayne has had only one upset. He had a 750-piece Norman Rockwell collage completely done, except for one missing piece.
“We looked and looked for the piece and it was not there,” says Wayne. “We haven’t found it to this day.”
A letter to the makers of the puzzle resulted in the company sending Wayne two free puzzles. But neither was the puzzle he needed.
“That is frustrating, I’m telling you,” he says.
He went ahead and put the two he’d been sent together. He thinks the missing piece was probably just an assembly fluke by the manufacturer. “When it came off the line, a piece fell on the floor and didn’t make it into the bag,” he says.
Unfortunately, the missing piece is in an obvious place in the puzzle.
“It ruined it,” Wayne says. “It was a long puzzle: 13×34, narrow and long, a beautiful puzzle.”
Despite that disappointment, Wayne has remained loyal to his hobby.
“When I go shopping, the puzzle aisle comes first,” he says.
The only problem now is finding puzzles equal to the challenge.
“After two or three of the hard ones, you don’t like to put the easy ones back together. You’re always looking for bigger puzzles with more pieces. You want more of a challenge each time. I can put a 500-piece puzzle together in probably one evening. But they’re no fun any more.”