I have fallen own miserably these past few days. I’m producing, but not documenting, so instead I present a piece of writing that explains, perhaps, my fascination with glass…
My Past in Glass
I grew up in Charleston, WV, in a neighborhood whose eastern boundary was dominated by two large glass plants. The Libby Owens Ford plant, with five towering smoke stacks, each bearing one of the letters spelling “Libby,” made plate glass. Across the street was the Owens Illinois bottle plant. My dad, a mechanical engineer, worked for the gas plant — Owens Libby Owens – that supplied the glass plants.
This caused a great deal of confusion for me as a child. What field did my dad work in? Was it gas? Was it glass? And what was his company’s name? Libby Owens Owens Libby Ford Owens Libby…
I am the youngest of six kids in a good Catholic family, and a year or two before I was born, the parish built a brand new church on a nice piece of bottom land created by filling in a ravine that was less than a mile from the glass plants. The fill material contained large amounts of waste from the plants.
The fill wasn’t the only glass waste on the church property. The far end of the unpaved church parking lot was occupied by three or four huge (or so it seemed to me at the time) piles of cullet. On the weekends, my sister and I would ride our bikes over there and scramble up and down what amounted to heaps of broken glass – shards of plate glass, lumps of bottle glass. I am not sure how we managed to avoid slicing ourselves to ribbons, but I don’t remember ever cutting myself. In the summer, the glitter was almost blinding, and, in the beating sun, the glass seemed to relive its birth in the glass furnaces, radiating powerful, nearly intolerable wave of heat.
The plate glass and bottle glass was actually a very pale green. We searched through the piles for interesting pieces of glass – angular chunks and smooth bubble-filled blobs, that, in a mass rather than a sheet, were a beautiful sea foam color. My mother liked to use the glass chunks in the bottoms of vases, to hold stems of iris and other cut flowers upright. We gave some of our finds to her; others we hoarded, like gleaming gems, for ourselves.
To the west of the church and the adjacent Catholic school was an area where the filled land and the remains of the wooded ravine blended, and a meandering creek ran through both. At recess, the creek was a boundary we dared not cross lest we risk the wrath of Sister Regina Cecilia, but we crossed it with impunity on the weekends when we’d exhausted our explorations of the glass piles. Over time and through endless cycles of freezing and thawing, the fill in that area – which included massive pieces of glass and fire brick — pushed up through the soil. The woods, where thrushes still sang, seemed like the site of some magical ruin, full of tumbled columns and shattered idols.
The glass plants eventually went the way of most U.S. glass production. To make way for a mall, the Libby smoke stacks were demolished in one of those spectacular public explosions, where some lucky person is chosen to push the button that detonates the charge. But in the days before the button was pushed, many people raided the what remained of the glass furnaces and hauled off huge chunks of that sea foam green glass. My sister was one of them, and the pieces she shared with me are now adorning my landscape.
My sister discovered Gabbert Cullet last year, and we finally went there together a few weeks ago. Gabbert Cullet receives all the glass cullet from the world-renowned Fenton Glass factory. When I pulled into the glass lot, my jaw dropped. It was the back of the St. Agnes parking lot, twenty-fold. Huge glittering piles of glass – none of it sea foam green. Cobalt, amethyst, periwinkle, lavender, ruby. Cinder block bays full of sloping piles of glass that were fifteen feet high where they met the back wall.
We spent two hours there, scavenging for the very best pieces. My sister kept spying something intriguing halfway up a glass pile, so I would charge up to examine it. Actually, “Charge up” is not really accurate. I would slowly plant one foot into the pile and test my weight to make sure I wouldn’t slide, then plant my other foot, working my way up with that long-forgotten sound and sensation of glass sliding and shifting and crunching beneath my feet.
At a dollar a pound, it’s very easy to go overboard, forgetting how heavy glass is. I restrained myself pretty well, accumulating possibilities then periodically pausing to reevaluate and cull. I ended up filling the equivalent of a shoe box for $10. Every time I pore over my haul, I know it was $10 well-spent on an enormous supply of raw material for my jewelry. But it I’d bought nothing, it would have been worth the experience to reconnect with my past in glass.
