Knife, Bayonet, Chisel

Niilo Kalervo Kallio started playing with puukoilla (Finnish for knives) while he was still in short pants. "What old men can whittle I could whittle before I was ten," he says. "I loved my puukko so much that when I went to bed I'd put it under my pillow and pray I would some day have the sharpest knife in the world."

During Finland's gallant, hopeless "winter war" of 1939-40, Kallio traded his knife for a bayonet, went after the Russian invaders as a private. His father, Kyoesti Kallio, was President of Finland.

When at the war's end the President died, the son carved a seven-ton monument to his memory. In 1949, sculptor's chisel in hand, he emigrated to freedom.

Today, at 41, Kallio is one of America's top portrait sculptors. He first gained fame in Washington with a posthumous portrait of James Forrestal, which now stands in the Mall entrance to the Pentagon. Kallio read everything he could find about Forrestal, decided he resembled "a character in the Kalevala [Finland's national epic] who worked hard all his life, was good, and finally stabbed himself."

Pink-faced and wiry, with a sculptor's heavy hands, Kallio specializes in highly dramatic likenesses. Petrified history, not self-expression, is his province, and he commands it well. Last week he had completed a bust of Herbert Hoover, was rounding out his portraits of Alben Barkley ("a very kind man"); Warren Austin ("he lives by what he says"), and John L. Lewis ("a very strong man").

After one more sitting, his scowling Lewis will be ready to cast in bronze. Big, vain John loves it. After a recent sitting he took a good, hard look; then he gripped Kallio's shoulder and rumbled: "Thank you, my boy."

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