DERRY — Raymond Warden won't spill the beans.
With a meticulous hand and a sharp eye for detail, the Derry man keeps everything in place as he builds a city from just about every kind of bean and legume imaginable.
In his small Nutfield Heights studio apartment, the 85-year-old lives among a metropolis of garbanzos, limas, great northerns, white, pinto, black, and split peas, and creates buildings and structures from the simple things he finds in his everyday life.
"He used to work on doing puzzles," Warden's daughter, Nancy Phinney, said as she stood in her father's Derry apartment one day last week. "He had stacks of puzzles from the floor up."
Now it's the beans, Phinney, of Manchester, said, and keeping up with the details of creating entire cities from simple materials like beans, glue and other common household items helps her father keep his mind sharp and his life full.
"I'm a hobbyist from way back," the slight man said as he smiled from beneath his favorite Boston Red Sox cap. For three years, he said, he has worked on his bean town, adding a building here or there, or a favorite scene detail in beans. Now, more than 80 bean buildings make up Warden's bean village.
Originally from Lynn, Mass., Warden has lived at Nutfield Heights for several years. He said before the beans, and before the puzzles, he enjoyed model airplanes. Now it's his fondness of beans that gives him creative enjoyment.
"It takes one day to do each one," he announced as he admired his city of legumes. "I put my imagination to work."
That imagination keeps the man busy on a daily basis, but it hasn't always been the minute bean work keeping Warden's hands engaged.
For 45 years, Warden worked as a draftsman, with pencil in hand creating detailed drawings on paper and making sure the measurements were correct.
"On the drawing board you have to think," he said, adding he is now putting some of the same skills he used to master to a whole new level of creativity — making a bean town right in his own apartment.
If a visitor stops to peruse the bean community, it might seem like some of the structures are old favorites — there's the VFW and the local covered bridge, complete with a few vehicles meandering through its close quarters. Then there's the Hood dairy plant and Shaw's. There's even a Hard Rock Cafe built from beans.
Add in the other details needed in a miniature bean city, including chimneys, roadways, animals in a zoo, and even fluffy, cotton-ball smoke billowing from a rooftop, and one has a complete civilization.
Recycling other common items into city details is part of Warden's plan. Plastic bakery containers become window panes, swatches of carpet cover roofs, and special words chopped from a weekly store flier become a street sign or billboard.
Phinney said it's not surprising her father puts his materials to good use when creating his town. One day an empty tissue box quickly becomes a building of beans, while another day it's a leftover cereal box that takes on a metropolitan shape.
"When we came here the other day, it was just a tissue box," Phinney said. "Now it's a bean building." Some buildings aren't even covered with beans, she said. Her father once used oatmeal to cover a structure. And window frames are made from slender, wooden coffee stirrers.
"I call that one my monument," Warden said as he admired his oatmeal building.
But it's the beans that make the most impact on his city, Warden said. A lot of glue, cardboard, meticulous work, and a steady hand are what it takes.
"It takes a lot of beans and a lot of work, too," Warden said.
