60 Years Chasing Purpose: The Sugar Loaf Sign Makers

The Kitchen Table View: My First Trip to Sugar Loaf, NY

I packed my family up and drove to Sugar Loaf, New York.
Not a hotel off the highway. We stayed at The Loft, an Airbnb that sits directly above Ava's Hope Chest on Kings Highway. And the neighbor?

Clay Boone.

The man whose hand-carved signs hung over every storefront in this village for six decades. His property sits right there, next to Ava's and The Loft. And at the time of this writing, it's listed for sale.

So every morning of that trip, I sat at my own kitchen table with a cup of coffee, staring across at his.

His home. His wood shop. And scattered around the property, still visible from where I sat, hand tools and instruments I can only imagine him working with for over half a century. The actual equipment that kept signs on every storefront in Sugar Loaf and carried his work as far as Russia.

I'd shoot out from that loft to meet Keith Salberg of Sundanced Wood at his shop in Goshen. Then back to the village. Then home to that table, that view, that quiet wood shop.

You want to talk about full circle?

I was sitting down with the next generation of this craft, then coming home every night to stare at where the last generation built it. The whole lineage of Sugar Loaf sign making, visible from one kitchen window.

That's when it hit me. I hadn't found a story.

I'd walked into one that had been sixty years in the making.

The Kid in the Stroller Who Couldn't Look Away

Keith didn't know he was an artist. He just knew he couldn't look away.

As a kid, he got pushed through Sugar Loaf, New York in a stroller. The sidewalks were railroad-tied wood, bumpy and uneven, and the ride was rough. Keith wasn't paying attention to any of that. He was looking up.

Hanging from the storefronts above him were wooden signs. Hand-carved. Hand-painted. Alive with color and depth in a way a printed sign never could be. He didn't have words for what he was seeing. He just knew it mattered.

He never forgot them.

Sugar Loaf has been an artisan craft village since the 1970s. Tucked beneath Sugar Loaf Mountain in Orange County, it's the kind of place people drive an hour just to walk through. Apple orchards on the edges. Centuries-old barns turned into studios. A main street where every shopfront tells you something about what was built there by hand.

The signs were part of that identity. They always had been.

The man behind most of them was Clay Boone.

Clay came from a family of woodcarvers. Over sixty years and hundreds of commissions, his work traveled beyond the Hudson Valley, some of it reaching as far as Russia. Graphic design, wood sculpting, gold leaf inlay. He built his reputation quietly, piece by piece, the way craftsmen do when they trust what they've built.

Those were the signs Keith stared up at from his stroller.

The Torch Passes at a Kitchen Table

Years passed. Life moved. Keith worked, he struggled, he found his way through things that could have ended him.

Then in 2014, the shift happened. No art school. No mentor yet. Just boxes of crayons, white paper, and one wooden disc from a Christmas tree shop that he started drawing on, burning into, making into something.

That was the whole beginning.

The pull toward wood never left. Slowly, then completely, it became the thing. Signs. Wall art. Custom pieces. Memorial urns, starting with one for his own father's ashes, then for others when they trusted him with the most sacred thing a person can be asked to hold.

And somewhere in the process of finding his way back to Sugar Loaf through vendor events and community connections, Keith discovered something that stopped him cold.

The man who made the signs from his childhood was still there.

Clay Boone. Still in Sugar Loaf. Still in the house on Kings Highway. And he was retiring.

Keith knocked on his door.

He told Clay everything. The stroller. The signs. The thirty years those images had lived in his memory without him ever knowing why. He told him the work hanging from those storefronts had done something to him as a kid that he'd never been able to explain, and that Clay needed to know that.

Clay invited him in.

They sat at his kitchen table, ate pizza, and talked about art for hours. Clay showed him the techniques. The reverse-route method that gives Sugar Loaf's signs their shadow and depth. He talked about his father. He talked about the town. And by the end of that conversation, something had been decided without ever being formally said.

Clay Boone was passing the torch.

Today Keith carves out of his shop in Goshen, New York, ten minutes from the village that shaped his eyes before he could talk. He took on much of Clay's client list. And he does every piece entirely by hand.

No CNC machines. No lasers. No stencils. Every line is drawn by Keith before a tool ever touches the wood. Some pieces take weeks. That's what the process requires when you refuse to outsource the work to a computer.

Sitting Down With Both of Them: 60 Years of Chasing Purpose

The first trip, I stared at Clay Boone's quiet wood shop from a kitchen table.

The second trip, I sat down with the man himself.

Keith Salberg and Clay Boone, together, on camera. The torch holder and the man who handed it to him.

My final question went to Clay.

After sixty years of carving wood, what keeps you still chasing your purpose?

He didn't hesitate.

"You have to take a sharp gouge and a nice piece of wood and run that gouge through that wood and just see those shavings curl."

Sixty years, and the answer is still the physical act itself. The wood curling. The reveal.

Then he told me about the day someone tried to talk him into a CNC router. This was decades ago, when everyone was telling him he needed to modernize.

"I could just see myself in a lab coat with pencils, feeding a program. And I think, no. No. No, you don't understand."

What they didn't understand is how Clay actually works. He told me the project is finished the minute he understands what the person wants. It's done in his head before the first stroke. The carving is just the reveal.

"Every stroke of that gouge, this thing is being revealed to you. You get a little flutter going there. Another stroke, a bigger flutter. Because you are seeing your actions revealing what is already finished in your head."

Sixty years in, and he still gets the flutter.

He talked about lean times, too. The seasons when the money wasn't coming in. You know what he did when times got lean? He carved. He'd make a piece for the showroom. The craft wasn't just the income. It was the anchor.

"The bottom line is you end up feeling a sense of accomplishment that maybe you couldn't do with a CNC router. Because your hands have been in it. The dust has been up your nose and in your hair."

And then Keith jumped in, and this is the part that got me.

Keith said when he's deep in a piece, eight hours passes and it feels like one. That's how he knows he's holding onto something real. Clay nodded like he'd heard his own voice coming back at him across sixty years.

"If you're doing something you love, you're never really working."

Two generations of Sugar Loaf sign makers, sitting side by side, describing the exact same experience decades apart.

That's not an interview. That's a lineage.

What Purpose Actually Looks Like

I've interviewed a lot of people about purpose. Coaches. Founders. People rebuilding their lives from the ground up.

Here's what Sugar Loaf taught me that no framework ever has.

Purpose isn't loud. Nobody in this story announced a mission statement. Clay never called himself a legend. Keith didn't call himself an artist for years, even while he was becoming one.

Purpose showed up as a kid in a stroller who couldn't look away. As a grown man knocking on a stranger's door because a thirty-year-old memory wouldn't leave him alone. As a retiree who answered that knock with pizza and everything he knew. As a craftsman who carved more, not less, when the money got lean.

And purpose compounds. Clay's father carved before him. Clay carved for sixty years. Keith carries it now, by hand, refusing every shortcut the modern world keeps offering him. Somewhere in that village, right now, another kid in a stroller is probably looking up.

The tools on Clay's property might get sold with the house. The purpose already moved ten minutes down the road to a shop in Goshen.

That's the difference between what a person owns and what a person passes on.

Chase Yours

If this story stirred something in you, pay attention to that.

Maybe there's a craft you couldn't look away from as a kid. Maybe there's a door you've been meaning to knock on for thirty years. Maybe there's someone holding a torch right now, waiting for you to show up at their kitchen table.

Knock on the door.

Watch the full conversation with Clay Boone and Keith Salberg on Sundanced Wood YouTube channel, and subscribe, because Sugar Loaf is full of people like this and I'm not done sitting down with them.

And if you want to see what sixty years of passed-down purpose looks like carved into wood, visit Keith at sundancedwood.com. Every piece is one of a kind. Every line is drawn by hand.

The purpose is already inside you. Go run the gouge through the wood.