 Ron Bushman has been weaving rugs for as long as he can remember. "My earliest memories are of standing on a box to reach the beater, the name for the handle on the loom. I was probably five or six years old."
His grandfather, Charles Christensen, was a renowned weaver who immigrated from Denmark in 1994 and ran rug-making shops near Bryce Canyon and later Marysvale. Christensen had seven children, but he taught his trade to only one of his children: his oldest child, Ester, Ron Bushman's mother. "When I was growing up, weaving rugs was simply part of the chores". I used to say "my mother learned to weave from my grandfather, and then she made me do it" "I remember how much I hated doing the rag preparation part, it took such a long time." But perhaps Ester Bushman recognized the importance of family tradition. Perhaps she figured making rug-weaving a "chore" was the best way to teach her children the skill and ensure that their grandfather's legacy continued. Whatever her motives and methods, Ester Bushman did something right. After years of working as an electrician and a Utah Highway Patrol Officer, Ron Bushman now makes his living weaving rugs, and he does it from the very shop from which his grandfather made his creations in Marysvale. The store is named "Lizzie and Charlie's Rag Rugs" after his grandparents. Charles and Elizabeth Christensen. Here is something else that would make Lizzie and Charlie - and Ester - proud: Their grandson and son was recently recognized by the Utah Arts Council for his rug-weaving, receiving a Special Citation Award for Contributions to the Arts. He was also recognized for his affiliation with the Festival of the American West and his membership on the U.S. 89 Heritage Highway Alliance. Bushman's rugs are shipped all over the world, to places as far away as Denmark Sweden and Alaska and they range in size from "place mat" style to "room-size." "We've made some rugs that are 15-feet by 45-feet," Bushman says. And each and every rug is made according to the old-fashioned, Bushman-family tradition: the long and hard way. "It is very labor intensive. It takes 12 yards of fabric to do one yard of a rag rug," Bushman says. The fabric must be cut into strips and sewn together before it is woven on the loom. "You have to be very precise to make sure you get the same color configuration throughout the rug." How Bushman came back to embrace his once-detested "chore" and make it his livelihood, and how he ended up back in his grandfather's shop, is quite a story. "My wife Glenda and I got married in 1959 and we were working in Salt Lake City making peanuts. So we bought a loom and just started weaving, sort of on the side. Then in 1968, we bought the store my mother was running in Marysvale. Around 1990, 1 decided to restore my grandfather's old shop."  It was not an easy decision.
The building - once a JC Penney store- had amazing family history. It had been abandoned by the department store in 1918 and purchased by Charles Christensen in 1928. He eventually restored the building and wove rugs out of it for nearly 20 years. But the shop had sat empty since about 1947. "It slowly became a general storage area for everyone in the family," Bushman says. "Around 1990, it became so dilapidated that our only options were fixing it up, or burning it down. I toyed more than once with the idea of burning it down. but I didn't" he says.
Once again, Charlie, Lizzie and Ester would be proud.
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