 Hi everybody, welcome to CCTV channel 17 live at 525 the preservation Burlington show I put the cue cards in the wrong area, so that's why I'm looking all shifty preservation Burlington's a non-profit 501c3 organization whose mission is to Preserve and protect the historic architecture and livability of Burlington through our Education and advocacy Thanks for tuning in this is our monthly call-in show We'll be posting the the phone on the screen in a little bit, but I'd encourage everybody to call in with any questions this month like I often do I drag friends peers and co-workers into the show to talk about preservation trades and the different aspects of old buildings and and what we the challenges we face and what we do every day and this month I tricked my friend Larry Rebecca to come on to the show and Tell me tell us all a little bit more about 50-something years of restoring stained glass windows and creating stained glass windows and just It's it's it's a long time. Yes, it is So so you remember the old main joke about have you lived here all your life? The answer is not yet. Not yet So you've been here for a really long time, but not the full-time yet So Larry thanks for coming and doing the show. You're welcome It's been a little while since I had a Dave Ockelia doing historic masonry stuff And it's just fun people really like these kind of things I don't know if we'll get any call-ins. We usually only get callers when we have somebody from the zoning office on Mm-hmm because people are mad So when they're not mad they don't call in but so you're on Pine Street. Oh, I gotta say when I was 1998 I was thinking of moving up here and I came up to visit the town and see what it was like and and walked around a little bit I got lunch in what used to be the cheese outlet and Your shop was on next door on that side of Pine Street at the time and I wandered in with my partner at the time who's a stained glass the fesionado and I was super impressed and I gotta say that between the lunch there and your shop and the stuff that you did and the craft that was going on in Burlington convinced me that I wanted to live in Burlington Really? Yeah, so thanks. You're gonna blame me for that. I'm gonna blame you for that You have so so you're on the other side of Pine Street now But so how long have you been playing your trade in the south end of Berlin? Let me like you give you the 92nd history I started in life as an electrical engineer. I graduated with a degree in that from MIT in 1969 and I was hanging out in Boston waiting for my girlfriend to graduate from a different school and we I Took up stained glass as a hobby and I was selling a few things I would sell them at Haymarket, which was then called Haymarket It wasn't the Fanuel Hall restoration that it later became So Saturday mornings, I take I make some small things. I put them in a briefcase I'd travel to the market on the MTA and I would set up a card table and sell some stuff a couple of years later I'm in Vermont trying the same thing selling stuff at craft fairs and It was it was okay. You could sell pretty much anything I made it was you know the 70s People weren't very discriminating Which was a little bit dissatisfying the end because it didn't matter how much or how little thought I put into something I'd still sell it Yeah, so eventually a priest Catholic priest asked me to repair a buckling church window And I tried to put them off. I said I don't know how to do that and he said well, I don't know anybody else Could you try to learn? Okay, well early orientation as an engineer kicked in When you look at why did something fail? Mm-hmm it failed for a series of reasons. There's always a cascading chain of failures And rather than get all scientific about I looked at the window. I said well the wood has buckled It's got soft and rotted that's enabled the low glass to slump down And by the way all these little joints in the metal are broken And eventually I figured out the first failure was the wooden sash The second failure was probably the window getting out of plane water accumulating in the cracks in the lead Lead came so that's called. Mm-hmm. The third failure was probably corrosion caused by Galvanic corrosion. I wasn't a chemist, but my dad was mm-hmm So I understood dissimilar metals in a wet environment are gonna corrode faster right each other There's always one that's the anode and one is the cathode and lead and tin are very close together in what they call the Table of electromotive forces that's so I can't remember the name of the table But but they're very there's like 10 millivolts difference between their potential But you give something a hundred years in a wet environment and the joints would get eaten away Yeah, right very curious that the lead would become porous and break And then failures would become quick and the window would buckle get out of plane. Yeah, and so you're ready working against Yeah, to remediate all the stuff you have to the worst case you take the window apart and rebuild it There are other things you can do to make the window Survive if it's not that far gone. Mm-hmm, and there's a hole I don't want to get too deep into the but you this is what happened to you You got this deep into it because somebody asked you to what happened to Electrical engineering you just threw that away. I wasn't passionate about it. I mean I I Was a kid. I wanted to make things with my hands. I wanted to build radios I wanted to I remember the night I I picked up the voice of Moscow on my room my short home built shortwave receiver I'm going mom dad. I've got these Russians And I picked up the voice of America, and you know that didn't realize that was easy Those stations were blasting out propaganda Fantastic water just but when I got to school. I wasn't nearly so much fun. Mmm. So so you basically got tricked into the preservation trades No, I wasn't really that glass is I had been because of a I had a kind of a churchy childhood at Catholic schools all the way until college and I had been pretty well educated and in The classics and an art by a particularly terrific High school experience with the Jesuit fathers and they were really They were brilliant. They were head and shoulders above What I expect today of the most Catholic clergy and they were among them historians writers architects classicists Seismologists biologists There were the people who taught me calculus and French and all kinds of stuff and too much Latin So yeah, that comes in handy, but when you get a sweep of world Development of art I became really fascinated and one of those teachers sent his is a high school class to a different museum in New York City every Month for the several years that we had him as the art teacher and we were teenage boys We whined and we complained we had to go to the Frick and the Guggenheim and MoMA and we had to go Museums all over New York City. We had to write reports and when I saw the cloisters It was a gobsnap gobslap. It was gobsmack But so I looked at these windows and it was like these things are from the year 1100 right and they're still with us. Yeah, and they're still talking to us. Yep They're still showing Their their times in their history now 80% of their history at least was religious But I knew how to read those windows into what they're trying to say and about 20% of them were private residence windows and merchants windows merchants in the 14th century and later Got wealthy. There was a merchant class that sprung up in the north of Europe and these people had money to put fancy Stuff stuff in their houses. Yeah before then it was castles for the nobility and churches for everybody else Yeah, but when you I saw pictures from Amsterdam of ships loading barrels at the dock. That was a Dutch merchant who just wanted to look at a picture of his ship every day Yeah, it's stained glass. So I thought this is really great. This is living history somebody's eyes 500 years ago looked at this stuff and that's what hooked me. Yeah It's not like something you make with the latest engineering latest electrical engineering technology is going to be obsolete Five years from now if you're lucky, right, right? Yeah, that's funny. Somebody was just asking me the other day You know like why why do what I do and I always I tell everybody I don't know But I do know and you articulated it better than I struggled to the other day But it's like it's it's not the thing that I'm doing whether you know the woodwork or recreating a thing and matching something it's matching something that somebody else years ago did and did well and now I feel the challenge to try and like Keep to acknowledge that Keep it going and somehow honor that tradition that that they were doing, you know because it's hundreds and hundreds of years of people using Relatively simple materials to make amazing art, especially in your case You know modern houses are much much more efficient machines The houses built today. There's so much more wise in their use of energy and they're so much more equipped with wires and cables and all kinds of People build new houses with fiber optic cables for the next generation built into the walls Unfortunately a lot of people get into those houses in there. They feel like something is missing and they're looking for little nostalgic grace notes From the past so we come along and somebody wants a window that would have been appropriate in Queen Victoria's time, right? You know You probably have run into a lot of windows in Burlington houses Certainly in the Hill section, but also in St. John's Burry in St. Albans all the older towns in Vermont where there were wealthier neighborhoods and Houses were built with stained glass windows a lot of those windows were called merchants windows or or builders windows because studios in the 1900s that were Building windows for churches didn't have a commission all the time, but they had to pay the they had to make payroll Yep, so they made a lot of windows and a lot of these shops in Philadelphia Boston Baltimore, Brooklyn Where there were a lot of immigrants particularly German and English Immigrant student came with the trade. They would build windows. They put them in catalogs Some builder could look at number 73. I want that I want that and that says right here in the catalog It's gonna be 37 inches wide and you know, yeah, yeah, hi. Yep. They could build right to it in a month later It's gonna show up Probably shipped by railway express because that's how stuff moved in those days Yeah before trucks and those windows went into houses all over a builders windows So they weren't custom designed for those houses right for yeah, or the people in those houses, right? Yeah, that's so I brought some glass samples to to show you yeah, let's hold them up so people can see the Okay, so back in the middle middle ages up till about 1880 Main mostly the glass used the stained glass windows was this stuff This is so-called antique. Oh, okay, it's blown glass. Yep And you see the bubbles and the streaks and the lines that was made by somebody blowing a bottle Yep, and that was this is from Germany. So this is like Yeah, and and cylinder glass or something in cylinder glass cut it score and then let it lay flat Yeah, they're still doing that and at two or three companies in in in Europe mostly Germany in France. Yeah Look at my face look at my face through it on the screen. Oh I look better That's great. So about 1880 comes along a new process now this stuff was European It was expensive and it was made in all kinds of colors metallic salts were added to the glass You could get red and yellow blue green. That's how they get the color. Yeah cobalt and cad and selenium for the reds and yellows and gold for the pinks and and Magnesium and manganese and all every element in the in the periodic table could make a different color So along about 1880 the great age of steam Driven machinery somebody figured out you could make glass by pouring molten glass out of a furnace as a kind of a probably Called it a plastic. It's not solid yet. It's probably about 1500 degrees Fahrenheit And it can be poured out on a table. You can have a big machine with steel rollers geared together cooled by water inside them driven by chains and gears and And you can make a lot of glass very fast and it's called rolled glass So they made all these different glasses. This is an example of a rolled glass and this is one of probably two thousand Types that are in current production at Kokomo, Indiana Kokomo glass company. I'm looking for the camera. That's looking at it There we go. So Kokomo. Oh, wow. Kokomo is America's oldest glass company As is the Paul Wismaw company in Virginia. We're both America's oldest glass company Where's Kokomo? Kokomo is in Kokomo, Indiana. Okay, that's oddly enough because they named it after the place Yeah, yeah, that was very creative. So what that process did is it it produced glass of even thickness Because the rollers gonna control right that squeezes it basically Yeah, and you could make all kinds of interesting things you could put some textures on the rollers That's how they do that watch that you don't get cut on that because I kind of have sharp edges That's called a ripple. Wow. And one roller could be textured. Wait, wait, wait. There we go. Look at that. Wow That's called a ripple most one roller could be textured. This is really a heavy texture. Yeah Yeah, and the other side is pretty smooth. Yeah, and the other side had to be smooth so the artisans could cut it You couldn't cut it. Yeah, you can't run. I mean the age of diamond driven band diamond bladed band So it didn't come along till 20 years ago years ago 50 years ago for the industry, but 20 years ago for studios the size of mine and companies that did that They had trouble selling it. They couldn't figure out How to get artisans to buy it artisans thought it was inferior material because it was it was one quarter the cost of European blown glass How could it be any good? Yeah, yeah But they had a name for it. So they called it Cathedral glass Genius Cathedral Genius and that's that boost of the sales a little bit and they also discovered that with the same machinery Could make opalescent glass. This is opal glass. So and now this is smooth both sides Yep, but you can get opalescent glass that's textured as well. The difference is the chemistry Opalescent glass has a lot more aluminum Illumina salts in the sand and that's what makes it so it's an opacity. Yeah. Yeah so if you want privacy if you want to If you want a window that's for a bathroom or If you want to paint a picture of a scene And you want to make hills and trees and Birds and forests and skies and all that other opaque glass Opalescent glass is much more of a painter's material Mm-hmm. So the companies that turned out cathedral glass turned out opalescent glass at one point Somewhere around 1910 or 20. There were probably 30 companies Just east of the Mississippi making this stuff now That's kind of coordinating with the whole arts and crafts movement, right? Yeah, about to kick in. Yeah, and then comes the Great Depression Bambi meets Godzilla the great majority of those companies are not with us again anymore today. Yeah Kokomo survived and the answer they would give you When asked is our founders were German and we're stubborn So they weren't gonna give up right they weren't gonna give up because they were they were going dead broke And the Wismock company similarly and they were also Paul Wismock is a German founder of the company So there's they're still cracking out glass today now prices have risen a lot because of distribution cost and energy costs and But we can buy on today's market. We can buy probably four or five thousand kinds of cold glass Wow from distributors that stock it in warehouse or we can buy it directly from the company So this this is turning I'm gonna turn it into a little commercial for Rebekah Studios. No, you're not So well, I've seen your warehouse and I've seen the your your sample shelves in the in the shop I think I took a picture earlier when I was there, but you've got hundreds of types of glass available At any time during any day almost, right? So yeah, we have Probably between 600 and a thousand types of glass of which about 400 or pretty much Steady products that we try to stock the rest of it is shards and fragments and this person came in from East Hardwick and they gave us this stuff that was in their basement and we put it in the warehouse We have a section called the glass museum, which is just we don't know where it came from It doesn't have a stock number. You gotta get a picture up front here Peace this big and that's it and that's the one if you want it That's it. You can't get any more, but so when you've been in the trade this long I Know a lot of people who make a living with this craft you'd be surprised how many yeah, and of those people there are probably Oh, I would say 20 or so who do repair and restoration work in the state And I say my god have mercy on their soul. There's no A lot I find the same thing. There's not a lot of competition right people for some reason You know it it just there's there's not a lot of people out there like that first Catholic priest that said well, I can't find anybody else. Would you learn how to do it? Yeah, well you did I try to help people solve problems, but you know the people that are making a living get my real respect You know and so if somebody comes in and I've got something in the glass museum that was given to me for free I'll just give it to them if it can help them but if you know if it's something we buy from from a Distributor or a manufacturer, then we have a set commercial price, so She class comes in sheets that can be 10 square feet or down to about four Pretty big sheets. Yeah. Yeah, and we cut them in pieces to sell parts of them to the trade The trade is everybody from hobbyists right to cottage professionals It's a term the Vermont Department of Labor and Industry Cottage professionals industry that means you're working in your garage or your basement. Yep. Yep But they're all delightful people and some of them are discovering the craft for the first time Mm-hmm, and that puts me in touch with the delight. I felt when I can you trick them into being Restoration people. I wish I could sometimes Sometimes if I see somebody going in that direction I won't try to discourage them right now. Just explain that you can't ever match All things right never tell them how hard it really is But with a thousand different types of glass so so if you get a Church window and so you mentioned, you know some of them might be able to be repaired Often when they're really far gone or sagging and and everything's giving up the ghost then it's a complete rebuild so Tell me how you do that a little bit. So you do you take the whole thing apart Yeah, you had some pictures that I I showed you one of which you might have on your computer I don't know. It was a picture of a window at the Methodist Church in Georgia. Yep and held together by duct tape Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll pull that out duct tape is the official Vermont Repair material. There we go. There it is. See now look at that as structural duct tape I talked to Governor Dean one time. He was in my shop and I was repairing a paperweight that the National Press Club had given him his little stained glass elbowed on a pedestal and I told him if he'd stay and visit with me I would fix it while he waited and he did and his wife was there too. That was great But The end of the the repair he said what do I owe you and I said well, you don't owe me anything governor But what I really want is a proclamation from the Vermont State House declaring that duct tape shall be the official repair material of the state of Vermont henceforth and forever Blader left office without doing that. He didn't do that. He didn't do that. So so duct tape is are unofficial But you're right rest assured that it is in fact the official repair material of Vermont So we have a window window falling apart You duct tape it if if you think it's going to disintegrate on the way to your shop and that's what that picture shows Okay, so you're holding that thing together to get it back to your shop Then we have so you can take it all apart. We have a template for the opening It's supposed to go into or some measurements Round tops and gothic tops. They're the fun. They're they're harder to make templates for Rectangles if the house is an old house, it could be out of square, right? It's a rhombus. Yeah, and So um, but you have some kind of gold that you're building it to a certain size and shape You need a rubbing of the the line plan Most the window fits that far gone the lead came is all routed and corroded. Mm-hmm It gets taken off there. It gets put in buckets. We take it to a recycling center Mm-hmm don't want to put it in the landfill, right, right and We we clean the glass and we make a It's called a cartoon. That's the actual lead line drawing. Mm-hmm and they differ That's called a cut line in the UK. Mm-hmm. I don't know what it's called in in France in Canada It's called a lead line. Mm-hmm. We call it a cartoon Which is just a line plan done with heavy one heavy enough lines that you have spacing between the glass You know what the came will be so yeah, and then you you put that together on a workbench and The the traditional tools are a couple of wooden cleats to hold everything To size as you're building it. Mm-hmm. There was such a thing as a glass hammer Doesn't sound like those two things should go to in the same sentence glass hammer is we have a couple of them They're very funny. They're a little hammer with a one face of it is a hard rubber face The other one is a hard plastic face. Uh-huh designed to give a gentle tap We also have tools called latkins or fids which are tapered pieces of hardwood Mm-hmm. They can be used to push on things. Uh-huh Or you can put it against some piece of glass that you're trying to force into the game You can tap it tap the big glass hammer. Okay, and then you drive a couple of nails to hold it eventually have the whole thing together and then you solder all the joints and At that point you're ready for grouting which is we call it cementing. Yeah, which is a very messy process Right, right. I've seen you after that you've shown up for you know I the home audience doesn't know we dog walk every day together, but but you've shown up like My dog can look your dog in the day. Yeah, my dog is gonna kick your dog's butt. Okay, but yeah So you showed up after your cementing thing. So what it's powdered chalk that you're looking at on my clothing If I haven't been careful, I try to wear a respirator and gloves And the grout is a medieval Inspired grout. It was actually written down in Latin by a monk in the probably in the 1170s in Paris. Mm-hmm There's a lot about the craft that we know Because of a guy who's we don't know his real name He wrote under the name Theophilus which is Greek for the lover of God And theophilus was To borrow the expression from my Jewish friends. He was the original nudge Went around asking the artisans the stone workers the iron workers the carpenters the glass workers Hey, mister. Why are you doing that? How you doing that? Show me the tools Can you tell me how and eventually when he exhausted the mason's they kick him out and he'd go bother the glass workers Yeah, he wrote it all down in a journal Nobody else did Nobody else ever did So you come to the book called the various arts, which is translated Probably a number of times into different languages I got a hold of a copy with some translations made by a California glass worker in 1970s and they had the recipe for the grout. Mm-hmm. We all use that today. We put it up on our website So you can make the mud it gets into the grooves between the glass and the lead. Yep And then it hardens up and it's it's a wonderful Technique because it Seals the window it eventually gets hard enough in a 24 or 48 hours the window gets very stiff Mm-hmm. It polishes the glass and the powders you've got to Clean it all off right and the powdered chalk that we use to draw up the grout is just abrasive enough to give the glass a beautiful shine But not enough to scratch the glass So and it's all very labor-intensive. Yeah. Yeah, how's your elbows my elbows? But the thing is There's no conceivable way you can do this with with automated machinery. There's no CNC. There's no 3d printer There are ways of using cheap labor or using they're probably it probably there are Waterjet cutters and I know if companies doing that, right? There's an awful lot of there was up till a few years ago an awful lot of cheap Tiffany imitation stuff coming out of China And we looked at it with this may because most of the designs were They weren't really heartfelt designs. They were misunderstood interpretations of The original Tiffany idea particularly the lamps and they were poorly made with cheap materials So that but you know after building maybe a dozen fancy lampshades in my time I realized there was no better way to lose money than building Tiffany laughs. Yeah So I know of one woman in Montreal who builds $10,000 lamps. Mm-hmm. She builds about six per year. Yeah Yeah, you know, I mean you might as well build violins. You're at work Yeah, you're working at the other end of the trade than where I work, right? But my preference is windows because windows are alive with light. Yeah, yep I know people could drive by another pitch. You know as we're we're starting to wind down, but that you did those windows for You know not restoration oriented, but you do a lot of design work as well People come to you and ask you to do things and you did For the heck of it. I think that Advanced music they can they still can people still drive by advanced music and see your windows They're better to go in there. Yeah, you know, you can see you think that's much better from inside Right with the light their instrument showroom has three of my windows and Their their classroom has one. Okay, and I just I for some reason better known. I don't even know why I did it I wanted to make a picture of Duke Ellington at his piano Probably because my parents love that kind of music and I can still hum take the A train And so I put the A train. I put a subway train into that window Three foot by four foot window. Yeah. Yeah, they're huge and then I started thinking about other musicians of that era So Billie Holiday and her blue dress with the with the with the blue moon outside the window. Mm-hmm. What a tragic sad wonderful Singer and then eventually we got around to Benny Goodman. Mm-hmm. Don't ever try drawing a clarinet I am not look. I'm writing that down right now. Don't we did I did Louie Armstrong as well Yeah, because he was such a so it was a bit of telling stories if if you look at Louie Armstrong's life He began as a poor orphan Arrested for a vacancy thrown into a home. Yeah, where he blew everybody's doors off with the way he could play music So 50 60 years later I found some pictures of Louie sitting with some young boys who are African American boys and he's teaching them to play the trumpet This is a very rounded you're like this has to be in a window. It's a very rounded Life story. Yeah. Anyway, this guy from Washington, DC wanted to He wanted a window celebrating the Delta blues guitar style Mm-hmm, and I spent a lot of time looking at pictures and reading. I bought a few books looked at a lot of library material my old My old friend Peter Brown had a big library as a music professor and classical musician His as widow is a friend of mine. She shared all of his stuff with me And I just eventually figured out that the most charismatic face was Belong to Mississippi John Hurt. Yeah, the older men are hard or easy to do particularly when you're dealing with African Americans Because you can't paint them like you can't add paint to dark glasses. Right, right, right? Yeah So that's what that window is about. So people can come so we're gonna wrap it up here I want to thank you for coming on Because we can go on for another hour easily people can stop by the shop It's not an ad for Rebecca studios, but they should walk in there and you could show them that window because it hasn't shipped yet Right gonna be here for another month another month. So if anybody wants to go see some of Larry's You know design work and it's really amazing and also just the collection of glass you have in the studio Say it well, it's pretty good. One of the best absolute best things about my studio is that in 2001 August 2001 a young woman came into my shop As a candidate to be hired. That's Emily stone came and Emily was running a store running a photo stored in downtown Burlington looking for a change and She she became over the next 20 years probably the best Helper apprentice that I ever had most original The one who could figure things out on the could deal with people could deal with money fun to be around and eventually She was going to take a job she was applying for a job in England to She wanted to go to York Cathedral York Minster in York, England She wanted to become a docent and conservator and she asked me to write a recommendation. I said, yeah But I felt sad. Yeah, and then she never applied because her husband didn't want to move to England and I realized at that point. I'm gonna fall apart if I just like my daughter I'm gonna fall apart if I don't have her in my shop. So now she's a partner 21 years ago Yep, and she now owns part of the business and I have to shut up and listen That's not easy for you. I love it. I just love it Thank you for doing the show. They're gonna come in they're gonna see Emily and And tell people don't get into restoration Thanks, everybody for tuning in to CCTV live at 525 and the preservation Burlington show for more information on Burlington History or tours or events go or a marker for your house go to preservation Burlington Org and we'll see you next month with somebody else that I can trick on to being on the show Trick into being on the show. Thank you Thanks, Larry. You're welcome