Some of the world's most valuable furniture and artistic creations will never be seen on "Antiques Road Show."

They are the first inanimate objects we would rescue from a fire, and no qualified appraiser can assign a monetary value to something like that.

These objects of family affection are the strong and sturdy, often imperfectly handcrafted items manufactured in junior high school shop classes everywhere.

Here are a few that reside in Pitt County:

Morris Elks did more farming than woodworking after graduating from Chicod High School. But woodworking was part of Ned Hawks' agriculture and shop class.

"What he wanted us to do in the shop class was to make something that nobody else had made," the 79-year-old Mills Road resident said.

Elks came up with a plan that involved a piece of shelving board and a sack of wooden thread spools his mother had collected.

"I just decided to make a table," he said.

He threaded the spools with iron rods to make the legs for his table, which has served his household in one capacity or another for 65 years.

"One thing I remember about Mr. Hawks was that he didn't believe in giving anybody a grade of 100," Elks said. "He was that kind of a teacher. He gave me a 95 on my table."

When John Meeks Sr. died unexpectedly on Feb. 13, he left a wealth of personal and career accomplishments — which he might have called works in progress.

His wife, Anne, says her husband of 45 years worked constantly on projects at home and at the company he founded, Atlantic Coastal Supply.

"Everything he did had to be just so," she said.

One of his earliest completed projects was assigned during his early 1950s high school days at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, a private engineering high school in Baltimore, Md.

It's a wooden replica of a wrench.

"He had to make it according to exact specifications," Anne said. "You can still see where he made his lines on it."

The token tool was never displayed in a place of prominence, she said, but shared time between desktops and drawers at home and work.

More than 50 years after he completed it, Meeks' wrench is a symbolic reminder that most other things in life remain works in progress.

AAl Clark of Greenville owns a reflection of America's aviation history passed to him by his father.

"In 1927," Clark explains, "Charles Lindbergh was the toast of America after his solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in his single-engine airplane, "The Spirit of St. Louis."

"It was the first time for such a flight and Lindbergh became one of the nation's great heroes — especially for young boys.

"My late father, Neill Clark, was 13 years old that year and pretty good with his hands. The result of his admiration for Lindbergh and his fascination with his flight was a small wooden model of Lindbergh's plane that he built that year.

"Time has been pretty rough on the model — its wood dark with age and some parts now missing. But still visible are the places where my father drew the door/window and carefully wrote the name of the plane on the side — just as it is on the real aircraft, now hanging in The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

"I don't know much more about his project — we never really talked about it. But it has been a part of my surroundings for the length of my memory."

J.D.Adams built several pieces in Earl Windley's shop class during two of Adams' years at Greenville High School. The 72-year-old retired banker placed one of them at the Winterville home of his daughter, Amy Ellis.

The maple end table with magazine holders is actually one of three pieces of furniture Ellis has that were made by her relatives when they were young.

An end table topped with a diamond-shaped laminate inlay was made by her great uncle, Rupert Parker, who died in 1974.

Ellis has a corner whatnot display table with thread-spool legs made in the 1930s by her late grandparents, William and Amy Congleton. The piece was a school project the couple designed together when they were high school sweethearts growing up in Stokes.

Adams says he inherited a love for carpentry and woodworking from his father.

"I had an interest in it because of the things my father did," he said. The shop-class experience, he said, "certainly intensified my interest. And it never left me after that."

Charles Ward had no idea what a serving table was when his shop teacher at Bethel High School encouraged him to build one in 1956.

"It was my senior project," he said. "Everybody had to have a senior project."

Ward's brother, Wade, had made a coffee table for his senior project and Ward planned on doing the same.

"But my teacher said 'no, let's put wheels on it and make it a serving table,'" Ward said. " My mother was excited with it and always kept it in her house."

The table still holds the food, he said, during family gatherings and holiday meals at the farmhouse in Bethel where Ward grew up.

DDuring a visit with his parents at their home in La Grange last month, Don King of Ayden went looking for the wooden tricycle he built in his seventh-grade industrial-arts class.

My wife, Michelle, and I are expecting our first child in April, " he said. "I was thinking my mom had long discarded it or it had broken or something."

Much to his surprise, however, King's mother had been storing the item in a closet for the past 28 years.

King designed the cat tricycle with mouse cage. "The idea," he said, "was that the cat catches the mice and puts them in the cage."

King made the piece in Mr. Mewborn's class at Eastern Wayne Junior High School in Goldsboro.

"I have always been creative, but I'm not sure what inspired this creation," he said. "The only thing I can think of was from watching the movie 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.' In that movie, there was a cage with children who were captured in town. I really loved that movie and could see myself taking that inspiration and creating this toy from that concept."

Mark Rutledge can be contacted at mrutledge@coxnc.com