For 20 years Floyd Broadbent's art has graced the labels of the Latah Creek Winery

A surgeon would kill for hands as steady as Floyd Broadbent's.

An onlooker watches as the lifelong bird carver and painter signs his name to a poster commemorating his 20 years of producing label art for Spokane's Latah Creek Winery.

On it are his finely detailed, color-correct images of wild birds, trout and salmon in their natural Pacific Northwest settings.

"This is my favorite," he said, pointing to a label depicting two snow geese in flight. "I love that silly grin."

Soon to turn 89, Broadbent on a recent afternoon churned out autographs with freckled hands that repeated letters so consistent in shape from one signature to the next they appeared to have been done with a draftsman's pantograph.

"I never smoked, drink only a little, and I'm a New Englander. What does that tell you?" he says, smiling proudly.

Steady-as-you-go is a hallmark of Broadbent, who now lives in a Yakima apartment filled with finely detailed carvings and paintings of waterfowl dating back to his youth.

Steady practice served the Massachusetts native well as a teenager growing up during the Great Depression on Long Island, N.Y., where he learned to paint wildlife on a game reserve owned by a wealthy financier who employed his father.

The young Broadbent painted on oilcloth, on wood, even on the side indentations of Haig & Haig's Pinch Scotch whiskey bottles. And he'd carve, preferring to do the more detailed work of whittling likenesses of birds in flight.

Setting the course of his life

One day in 1932, his junior year of high school, Broadbent said, the game reserve's superintendent gave him a supreme compliment and a suggestion that would set a course for his life.

" 'Why don't you go see Abercrombie & Fitch — you can paint,' " Broadbent recalls the man saying. So he painted a mallard and a quail on a board fitted with three potholder hooks, packed it in a straw suitcase and rode the Long Island Railway to New York's Pennsylvania Station. He walked from there to the store at Madison Avenue and 45th Street, he said, "to save the nickel cab fare."

Steadying himself after seeing so much expensive merchandise geared for well-heeled outdoorsmen, he wondered whether his own craftsmanship would be worthy.

"Good morning," he recalls saying to the first executive-looking type he encountered. "I've got something I want to show somebody about what I do."

The man turned out to be a store purchaser who didn't much care for the potholder rack.

"But I like your birds," the man told him. So the purchaser gave him a tryout, an ashtray on which to paint a duck. Broadbent returned the next day with a finished ashtray and went home with a deal to paint 144 more for 65 cents apiece.

"That was a fortune then," he said. That led to more work, with Broadbent painting inch-long ducks that floated in finger bowls Abercrombie & Fitch sold to restaurants and other places "where the elite meet and take a seat."

In 1941 he married Virginia Whelpley, still his steady companion after 61 years. The next year he enlisted in the Army and eventually was assigned to a munitions transport unit that supplied the 3rd Armored Division as Maj. Gen. George Patton led it across Europe.

His steadiness was tested then, he recalled, not so much by combat but by Patton's tirades over infractions of military discipline and appearance.

"You didn't say a word," Broadbent said. "You just stood there and shook."

After the war, Broadbent held a steady stream of sales jobs to help feed and house his family of three children. That led him to Yakima, where Virginia's parents had moved.

Full-time artist

He said he never had a door slammed in his face as a salesman, but in 1973, weary of the travel involved with the job, he packed a suitcase one more time. In it were a number of his painted, palm-size carved ducks he wanted purchasers for Eddie Bauer in Seattle to see.

His trip over the Cascades paid off with a $25,000 contract for hundreds of birds that had to be done before the next store catalog came out in nine months. With no room at home to handle the volume, he bought an old cabin from a rancher and moved it to a site along the Naches River a few miles northwest of Yakima.

The success got his name before the public, which led to more sales of his paintings and carvings to Ducks Unlimited members and other such groups, as well as to collectors of natural art around the world. Locally he became known as "The Birdman of Naches," and he continued working out of the cabin until 1993.

One of the people he met during that phase, in 1982, was Prosser winemaker Mike Hogue, who at the time was a partner with Mike Conway in starting Latah Creek Winery in Spokane.

Conway, up from California and seeking a strong Pacific Northwest identity for the winery, said he took an immediate liking to Broadbent's work to use on Latah Creek's labels.

"This is exactly what I'm looking for," Conway recalls telling Broadbent. "He said, 'I want to do it, and I want to do a different one every year, and I won't charge you a dime.' In 20 years he hasn't accepted a dime."

Broadbent, whose father would barter outgrown children's clothes for food during the Depression, said having his art and signature on thousands of bottles of wines has been a fair trade for obtaining more recognition of his work and lasting friendship with Conway.

"You don't have to have money for everything you do," he said. "Just helping someone out is time well spent."

Thomas P. Skeen, regional wine writer: 509-525-3300 or tskeen@ubnet.com.