In the early 1970s we found and commissioned Roland Chesley of Buckfield, ME to cut many puzzles for us. Chesley was in his mid-80s at the time, but had started cutting puzzles shortly after WW II and charged prices comparable to Great Depression prices (penny and a half per piece). He cut in an old barn heated by a wood stove fed with rejects from the nearby dowel mill, even in the dead of a Western Maine winter which could get as cold as 30 degrees below zero (F) with 3’ of snow! Like so many cutters in the 1930s he used pictures from old magazines and calendars, especially Currier & Ives prints, although we supplied him with most of the prints we wanted made into puzzles. His cutting was purely random when we first met but we showed him some of our old family puzzles and he began to employ some color line cutting and figure pieces shortly before his death in the late 1970s.
