Jeffrey Spencer is a lampworker who has the distinction of having been one of only three people to apprentice directly under John Burton. His relationship with John lasted nearly six years during which he learned not just John's lampworking techniques, but his philosophy of life, a philosophy that still directs his life today. Jeff also participated directly in the experiments at Pepperdine University in the early 70's that led to many of the formulas for coloring Pyrex glass that are still used today. After his years at Pepperdine, he pursued his masters degree in physiology, earned a degree in chiropractic, and began a successful practice which he still has today. He also participated in the 1972 Olympics as a bicycle racer and credits his athletic background for his aptitude and tenacity in learning to work with glass. I asked Jeff to tell me about his relationship with John and his history as a lampworker.
RM: You learned directly from John Burton, didn't you?
JS: That's correct. I first met John in 1968 and John and I worked together very closely all the way up to the time in the early 70's when he and Elsie moved to Hawaii.
RM: Right. What, about four years?
JS: Well, it was from `68 and he moved in around `73 so it was actually somewhere around five or six years. John and I worked just about every weekend together, doing a lot of different things. We spent a lot of time in his studio where he took me as a student and, to his credit, he showed me how glass behaved. He didn't really try to influence my subject matter in any way. That was really a blessing to me. We would also work on joint projects. John was at a point where we were each working at a torch. I would prepare a piece for him and pass it on to him to work on a piece that he couldn't really undertake alone.
RM: That's interesting. The team concept in glassblowing originated in Italy and has really taken off in this country.
JS: John was a pioneer in many areas. We also did work with a couple of kilns and experimented with slumping and taking some slumped work and adding it to a flameworked piece. There were many things that we started but just because of his age they felt that the move to Hawaii would be the best thing in terns of providing an environment where John could carry on his work not only in writing but in the studio as well.
RM: How did you go about becoming his apprentice? Was this just something you stumbled into or were you hand-picked?
JS: It's a very interesting story. My background is basically in athletics and I really haven't had any formal art training. One of my neighbors named John Ritterath was an editor and cinematographer and he had filmed the narrative and put together John's `Creative Person' film that he eventually won an Emmy for. One day after a football scrimmage, I was walking up the street and he was showing the film to one of his neighbors and he asked if I would like to see it and I said `yes'. So I went in and we were all kind of laying down on the living room carpet, it seems just like yesterday, watching John's `Creative Person' film. There was one point in the documentary where John was talking about techniques and he said that he had not found a person yet to whom he would like to pass on the techniques. When I heard him say that I knew that I was the person.
RM: You just knew that, huh?
JS: I knew it. It was kind of like `Field of Dreams'. So I asked my friend John Ritterath, the editor/cinematographer who knew John personally, for John's number and I called John. You know, I was eighteen years old and I called him up and I said, "hello John, this is Jeff Spencer. I'm a friend of John Ritterath and you really don't know who I am but we were just watching your `Creative Person' film and it got to the point where you said you had not yet found a person to pass on your techniques, and it was like an electric shock and that's the reason I'm calling." And he said "you're the person I have been looking for and I would like you to come up tomorrow if you could and we'll get started". So I hopped into my old T- bird and I drove up to Santa Barbara and I had my very first exposure to hot glass that day. So it was really quite an amazing experience.
RM: Did you find that you had an aptitude immediately or did this take a little time to develop?
JS: Well, I really had an aptitude for it because of my background in athletics, where balance and coordination and vision and pre-planning are important requirements for success. Well the same thing applies to glass because of its narrow technical boundaries. Because of the persistence that I had learned in athletics, which is obviously an important aspect of learning glass, it was very easy for me to be able to commit to this. I just had such an affinity for it, such a kinship for not only the strict technical boundaries but the discipline and reverence required to be able to successfully work with a piece of glass. It's a medium that you cannot get willful with. If you try to get willful, if you try to impose a strong sense of personal will on it the glass will not cooperate. You have to be really sensitive to work with the opportunities that present themselves while you're working.
I think that when you're dealing with glass you really have to be almost trained as an athlete because it requires patience, it requires dedication, it requires persistence, and you can't get too willful. Continuing to work when you get tired becomes very unproductive, you really have to learn to respect the material. And then when you are dealing with the material when it is hot, you are dealing with the physical heat, with the sound. The other thing about glass is that you don't have the luxury of starting a piece and then putting it down when you feel like it or if you don't know what to do. You're really committed to doing a piece from start to finish, which requires a certain level of stamina. Glass is not an exact science and you can't say it is going to take me ten minutes or twenty minutes or an hour to create a goblet stem or whatever it happens to be. That may be your studio experience, but then you oftentimes find out that pieces have a mind of their own and you just kind of have to go with it until it is finished.
RM: I can relate to what you said about your athletic background helping you to learn glass. I was a surfer before I was a lampworker and I always felt that the physical coordination that I got from surfing did translate to glass, maybe not directly, but in the sense that I had good control over my physical self, not to mention a level of confidence.
JS: I think you're right. There are two terms that come to mind. One is kenithsthetic feeling and the other is propryoseption. Those terms refer to the body's ability to perceive and know where it is in space and make the correct unconscious adjustments to maintain equilibrium. I think what you are saying is exactly right because there comes a point in every glassworkers career when your capacity for technical knowledge and technical execution becomes superseded by a kinesthetic touch and intuition in terms of knowing what to do. The sound of the torch gives you clues as to how hot the glass is. The color of the glass is another cue. We start to pick these things up and it becomes, in essence, somewhat like surfing a wave in that your body is making millions of unconscious corrections because of its learning capacity for doing that over long periods of subconscious control. I think that your expression of your experience in athletics parallels everybody's journey to becoming independent in the creative process.
RM: That is very interesting. Now, you were an apprentice with John for somewhere around five or six years, and then John moved to Hawaii. What happened next? When did the work at Pepperdine University occur?
JS: Well, actually Pepperdine happened prior to when John moved to Hawaii.
RM: So John was directly involved with the activities there?
JS: Yes, I was too. It was actually sort of interesting how all of that came together. I started working with John when I was eighteen years old and was in Junior High School. Suellen was around sixteen and had somehow contacted John by her particular pathway. We worked independently and even though we knew each other we never had a strong working relationship. Because of where she was living and where I was living we each shared sort of like an arm of John's work at that time. It was shortly after I met John when a gentleman named Ken Saxton who was also a lampworker became a very good friend of John's and had studied with John as a student. Ken's real talent was a capacity for understanding the methods by which grants could be secured. Basically Ken and John worked together to create grant proposals based upon John's vision of freeing the creative man.
RM: Freeing the what?
JS: Freeing the creative man. One of John's very important philosophical beliefs is that in each one of us exists a creator and our job is to free that creative man. When your hands are busy at work doing the creative process your mind is able to explore other aspects of life and create a certain level of vision and healing and prosperity that leads to an enriched future. John's chosen medium just happened to be glass but there is a much bigger message. So he and Ken had worked together to bring John's philosophy and vision and put it in a package that would be acceptable to what was then the department of health, education and welfare. It would be a means of teaching people a certain level of skill to become economically independent of public assistance. Without Ken, this would have never happened because he knew the channels, he knew how to write the grants, he knew where things needed to go. He basically understood the mechanism for making it happen. So he and John came to a point where they were awarded a formal grant from the department of health, education and welfare to set up a glassworking studio with the intention of developing skilled lampworkers that would be able to generate income and be independent and self sufficient as a result of that. It is interesting that Pepperdine would become involved because the Pepperdine studio was in the heart of South Central LA. Florence and 96th street, one of the toughest, most gang-ridden areas you could imagine at that time was part of the Pepperdine campus. They did not have the Malibu-California campus at that time, they were in South Central LA. That was in late `69 and `70 when all that was happening. It went on for several years until John moved on to Hawaii.
RM: Can you describe in a little more detail exactly what went on, what was being done at Pepperdine?
JS: Absolutely! At Pepperdine campus where they had the classes, there were a couple of different ways you could become a participant in the formal class activity. One would be coming through the department of health education and welfare and the other was to take the class as an elective for credit through the college itself. So it was a very interesting blend of people. There were not only students involved, but people from the neighborhood and from the surrounding city that could participate as well. It made for a dynamic interaction between people with very varied backgrounds. It was quite interesting because everybody acquired an excitement about the media. It didn't matter where we came from. We were all kind of exploring this medium and bringing something to the table together. The classroom had, as I recall, about eight workbenches, four on a side. It was approximately twenty feet across and probably forty feet deep. There were oxygen cylinders and torches set up at each of the benches along with the stool and it was pretty much what you would expect a lampworker's bench to look like. There was a restroom and a storage area where we kept the glass and the extra oxygen cylinders. It was pretty basic and kind of a work in progress. As the program unfolded, other elements were brought into it. A showcase was added to be able to display the student's work for visiting people because one of the programs that Pepperdine prided itself on was the glass program. When people would come from off campus whether they were prospective students or visiting dignitaries, one of the places they would always take the people was over to the glassroom. It was really a wonderful opportunity to show what student works were all about.
The other person that was actively in charge of this was Margaret Youd. She was trained and chosen by John to be the instructor at Pepperdine and I think she did a very good job of it. Because of her level of skill and her ability to teach the fundamental techniques of lampwork to people, I think she was absolutely the right choice.
RM: I have spoken to Maggie quite a number of years ago. This was after her accident.
JS: That was a tragic accident.
RM: So anyway, Maggie was running the show and you had how many people participating in this program?
JS: Well they had several different classes. They had the formal day shift where they had morning and then afternoon classes and then they would have an evening class once or twice a week as I recall and then they had the after-hours group. We all had keys, I don't know whether we were supposed to or not, but we would just show up, turn on the radio and crank up Janis Joplin and go to town.
RM: That's great!
JS: Interestingly enough, that is where the first experiments took place in creating the colored borosilicates which we will talk about in a second. That is kind of how the formal classroom worked out. Margaret would have fairly structured lessons teaching the students how to learn the characteristics of glass. As they developed a kind of skill and inquiry into vessels and goblets and things like that, they would work on independent studies. Suellen would come when she came and I would come when I came but for a little different intentions. We weren't really there so much to learn technique because we were both proficient at that time each in our own way. We were both there more to participate in what I believe was the germination of the flamework movement about thirty years ago.
RM: That was definitely a germination point. That is exactly why I am so interested in it.
JS: I get goose bumps just thinking about it.
RM: Probably back then you had no clue...
JS: No clue!
RM: ...but now you look back on it and it was just a pivotal period. I am interested in who else was involved. What are their names? Do you remember any names?
JS: There were a couple of people who were absolutely essential in this. One was Larry Ward. Larry Ward was a chemistry major at Pepperdine and he also was one of the students who took the glass class as an elective. In my view Larry Ward is solely responsible for the initial inquiry into the possibility of creating other colors. At that time the basic colors that John used were the standard cobalt oxide blue, the tin oxide white, he used chrome oxide which created a kind of olive drab, dead green, and he used copper oxide which made this kind of tomato red that is sort of unpredictable. He had two other things that were very special. I don't know if anybody else knows about this, but by some mechanism that I am not sure I understand, he had acquired some 1/2 "yellow tubing colored yellow by uranium. I still have a six-inch piece of that stuff.
RM: Yes, uranium yellow. I have seen some and played with it a little.
JS: Then he also had some 1/8" wall black tubing that was used in the thirties as a neon sign spacer between letters. It was completely compatible with Pyrex.
RM: Really! Black?
JS: Yes. I still have two rods of this about two feet long. This stuff, Robert, is absolutely pitch black. You could dilute this stuff out twenty times and it would still maintain its blackness.
RM: Opaque black!
JS: It is so opaque! It had the most incredible characteristics, as you would soften it you would have such incredible control working on it. I remember John telling me that he had access to as much as we could ever want. I said "could you get a hundred cases?", and he said "I could get a thousand cases!" There was so much of this stuff around that nobody wanted because it had been replaced by some other mechanism of blacking out the tube in neon signs. But he didn't have any place to store it so they took all of this stuff and they put it in a dump somewhere and it is now a permanent time capsule of unknown location.
RM: Maybe eventually we could find out who manufactured it and try to get some sort of specs on it because you know and I know that black is one of those things that we just wish for!
JS: I know. And this stuff is as black as is black as is black! And it maintains a high gloss whether it is on the interior or on the exterior. You know some of the stuff you buy, if you crank the torch it has a tendency to bubble and devitrify. But this was just incredible.
So basically that was all the colored glass John was working with, and if you look at all of his colored work you will see that he just mixed the tin and cobalt to make like a sky blue and that was really about all John did. He made thread and things out of the black and mixed black and blue together, but that is kind of where he left it. Green was sort of unsuccessful because it had a tendency to be sort of olive drab with kind of a dead vitality. Then Larry came along. He was a teaching assistant at Pepperdine at that time in the Chemistry department so he had the keys to all the chemistry stockpiles of oxides and whatever else there happened to be. He would show up there at eight o'clock at night and I would roll in my T-bird and we would go in there and plug in the radio and crank it up and we would stay there until one or two at night experimenting with all this stuff to see what we came out with. I remember one time he came in and said, "let's try this stuff that makes it smell like bananas!"
(laughter)
So anyhow, Larry Ward was the guy. He had the key, he was the teacher's assistant, he had a working knowledge of the oxides and the carbonates and all that stuff. Then there was one other important person, his name was Rich Stiver. Rich Stiver was a physics major and was a typical 70's guy. We all had long hair at the time and Rich had a kind of a Fu Man Chu mustache and he had a little bit of a stutter and John called him `Hound Dog'! Rich's greatest service to the pioneering effort was the fact that he was the catalyst that would make things happen. For example, if I would talk to Larry and say, "OK come down to Pepperdine. I am going to meet you back there at nine o'clock Wednesday night", Rich would make sure that the oxygen was full, he would make sure that we had all the rods we needed, that we had the tubes to put the oxide in. He would just make sure that everything would happen. We also carried on some of these experiments at my house in Pasadena California because we didn't always have access to do these sort of pioneering works of research under official auspices. It wasn't always clear where the guideline was. So when we felt it would be important to have some off-campus activities, Rich would load up some oxygen in his truck and he would drive out to my house in Pasadena which we had converted into kind of a working studio. Then Larry would drive up. Larry had this beautiful Austin Martin. It was like the James Bond Austin Martin. He would drive up in this thing and Rich would drive up in his old truck and we would go out into the garage where I had my first work area set up and we would do the same thing. We would work on this stuff endlessly. We would try different formulas and what Larry would take these little test tubes with cork stoppers and he would put the cork stopper in the top of the test tube with the mixture. Then Larry would write the basic scientific nomenclature of what proportions of what would be used to create what color. This is how we started making our first chart of creating reproducible colors. I still actually have some of those test tubes with some of the original nomenclature on it.
So several things came out of those experiences. One, was that you can get really sick by using chemicals if you don't know what you're doing. So the need for proper ventilation, for having a ventilation hood, for wearing masks became obvious.
RM: Who got sick?
JS: I remember once we tried cadmium and I got so damn sick on that stuff.
RM: Cadmium?!
JS: Cadmium.
RM: Jeez...
JS: Yeah it was a bad deal. I mean it was stupid but it was one of those things, we didn't know. My body went numb for a day afterward. That was one of the learning processes of the experience. We learned that it was important to know the colors, but we also needed to know the health implications of what we were dealing with. Things like lead and strontium and cadmium were pulled out of circulation there because they made crummy colors anyhow.
If I were to summarize the important findings of those experiments, if I were to choose a couple of different chemicals or oxides that were absolutely pivotal in the colors that we have today, one would be the use of silver. We originally started our experiments using silver nitrate and silver carbonate which were the most successful. However, silver nitrate creates a discoloration when it contacts the skin Also, when silver nitrate is heated it turns to a liquid. It is very unstable at low temperatures so it is hard to control. When it turns to a liquid it creates strong vapors so we needed to make sure that we were not exposed to the vapors. So the choice was made to stick with the silver carbonate because it stayed in pretty much powdered form and it seemed to have the capacity to mix well with some of the other chemicals. We found that the silver by itself would make a kind of nice honey-gold color but when you mixed it with blue we found that we could make a beautiful kind of gold-green color. In our early experiments, we also found that the cobalt oxide was a kind of dense material to make blue out of so we shifted to a cobalt carbonate which was pink in color and the texture of that seemed to be able mix with the glass easier. It didn't seem to have the density and it would seem to mix a lot better with other things. So our choice was to use the silver carbonate and the cobalt carbonate for making a beautiful kind of gold-green and ultramarine color. That was the first successful attempt to create some colors that I think reflected the best characteristics of glass. You know, if you look at copper red, it looks like a tomato. Well that's sort of a dead color when you think of the reflective, exuberant characteristics of glass. So, this was the first time we felt that we had a color that had the sort of vibrancy that reflects what glass as a material really is.
We also tried mixing it with copper, but not quite so successfully because they both tended to be a little difficult and unpredictable to work with. The other thing that was extremely important to this whole effort was the mixture of germanium, copper, and silver. Larry Ward was solely responsible for that. This is what makes the beautiful cranberry color you have seen Suellen use. She was the one that took that formula and put in into vessel form and used it with her dragons and things like that. The interesting thing about this color was that when you would get the chemicals dispersed and you would draw out the length of rod which would be maybe three feet or as far as your arms could spread apart, the glass would actually be clear in the center and would have a little red tip where you would pull the piece through the flame to make 12" pieces of rod. That would be the color that you would know you would get. You had to go back and reheat it on the piece to get the color you saw in the end. This was sort of an interesting phenomena.
RM: It's the germanium that causes that striking effect, isn't it?
JS: That's exactly right. Germanium was one of the key chemicals, and that is something that Larry brought to the table because copper by itself is really a dud with borosilicate. You take silver, which by itself creates kind of a gold color, you mix it with cobalt and it becomes a green, but it has the capacity for creating this whole other dynamic with germanium. To me this is pivotal because that is where all of your sort of autumn colors come from.
When we made the basic rods we would put the different metals in a little 2" piece of 3/4" diameter tubing and we would fuse the tubing on the end of a half-inch rod and then we would put the chemicals in and put another piece of rod on the open end and then we would collapse the tube. Then we would start heating the glass and start twisting the rods...
RM: I have seen Suellen do this. She is like a machine...
JS: That's exactly right. John used to call this playing glass mud pies. This came directly from John's method of producing colored glass. So that's where the method came from.
We had experimented with a couple of other colors and I don't know if anybody even knows this. This may be the first time anybody has even talked about it, but one of the most beautiful colors we ever made came from potassium chromanganate. Potassium chromanganate makes the most beautiful transparent grape color.
RM: Grape?
JS: Grape. Imagine a transparent purple that is actually a grape color. It isn't more of a blue or a red. This is the most beautiful color. I actually have an example of one of the original pieces, an amphora I made using that color and it is absolutely beautiful!. It is a little bit less stable that your cobalt blue. The co-efficient of expansion changes a little bit so it has to be used very carefully in terms of the cooling process. We also experimented with a couple of other chemicals that created an interesting kind of gritty glass. We used ferrous oxide and ferrous sulfide which makes a black, but the black has a matte finish and it almost has a reptilian type of appearance to it. You get these little bubble hemorrhages in the glass and it creates a kind of interesting texture on the surface. We also did another experiment using vanadium. Vanadium, when mixed in very high densities created a very vibrant, alternating opaque and transparent, almost like a landscape colors. You'd get yellows, you'd get silvers, you'd get some dark browns. It was a real catalyst for creating some of the kind of autumn colors that may be in use today. I don't really know what Paul's formulations are but that is one of the things that we came out with. Vanadium and silver make a very beautiful brown.
RM: That is fascinating. I am curious about a couple of things. It sounds like it was only you, Larry and Rich who were involved. Where did Suellen fit into this picture? I know that she learned all these formulas from someplace. Did she learn them directly from you or did she participate in some of the sessions or did you simply show her?
JS: She may have learned from Larry or Rich independently. You would probably have to discuss that with her, I don't know...
RM: Well I have asked her before and the impression that I got was that she was directly involved in the development of these colors.
JS: That's entirely possible. As I said before, because Sue and I had developed fairly proficient skills at that time and because of the other things that we were doing we weren't formal class members. We would show up at different occasions whenever it would work with our schedules. We all felt that we were all participating in each other's growth. That was sort of the spirit at that time. When we would make colors or Larry would make colors or Rich would make colors they would bring it to Margaret and Margaret would use it, not only in the class, but to get feedback in terms of the practical applications, what it looked like when the piece was actually done. Sue and Maggie, I don't know how close their relationship was...
RM: My understanding was that it was pretty close.
JS: Yes, so certainly there was information that was shared among all of us. The spirit was "hey, why don't you try this and let me know what you think about it."
RM: Well, that actually is not the historical spirit of flameworking as you well know. Lampworkers have traditionally been very proprietary about their techniques and materials and even today a lot of the talk about color formula is surrounded with secrecy. It doesn't sound like it started out that way.
JS: It really didn't. I think one of the wonderful things about that was the fact that we all had certain things that were our level of interest. For instance, Margaret Youd is a very skilled person in making symmetrical bottles and little goblets and things along that line, and Suellen is very skilled in the use of these very dynamic colors and the use of the hobnail technique on top of colors and she has a great sense of anatomy and vitality in doing the dragons and things like that, and my interest with my background of being an athlete and a chiropractor is really the human body. So, in a sense we weren't really competing for subject matter because we all had our temperamental differences that lent itself to certain subject matter. There was such a fascination and such a vitality surrounding the use of this medium. You know the `60s were an interesting time and we were sort of riding the coattails of that. I always felt that the encouragement was really there because we weren't competing against each other. We were working to pioneer the unexplored horizon and we all had something to bring to it and that sort of enthusiasm sort of worked as a glue. I am thrilled to death with Suellen's accomplishments. She's done an incredible thing. And Margaret Youd's participation was virtually indispensable. When you look at John's kind of overriding influence and Ken Saxton's capacity for putting the grants together and Larry's knowledge of chemistry and Rich's willingness to be able to set the stage so we had easy access and were that we were able to make all this stuff happen, it was quite an amazing thing.
RM: That's an amazing story. I'm impressed! The formulas, clearly, someone had to keep a record of them all. Do you have them? Do you have records of them all? Do you still use them today to make your own colored glass?
JS: Yes. Well we actually had a sheet, but this is going to be like the lost ark of the covenant. The question is where is it? I have been dragging boxes around with me for twenty years and it may very well be in there. But the answer is that we would do two things. One is that when we would experiment with the colors and Larry wrote on the top of the cork stopper what was in it, that was our first record. The second record is that we did do a chart where we put the formulas down and the colors that they created. Where that is, I don't know. I know that I had a copy at one time. Where the copy is I don't know. Yes I make my own colors right now. The reason I do is because I like the discipline of it and I have a tendency to like colors that are not perfectly uniform. I like things that have a tweakness to it Instead of a perfect blue I like it to have different values, maybe a little darker in one area and lighter in another.
Interestingly enough, one of my torches died about six months ago and I called Bethlehem to try to get another one and they said "sorry, we don't make them anymore. But you can call this guy in Oregon." So they gave me Paul's number. So I called him up and asked him if he had any torches for sale and he said he had a used bench burner here and if you want it it's x amount of dollars. So I said `yeah' and he sent me some literature with it. Until then, to my knowledge, I did not know that anyone was even doing production borosilicate colors.
RM: When was this?
JS: This was about six months ago. Believe it or not it was only about three weeks ago that I got my first five pound box of ends. I wanted to see what he was doing.
RM: You really didn't know that Northstar was going on until six months ago
!
JS: I had no clue.
RM: Isn't that amazing! That is so ironic because, at least indirectly, Northstar came from you. This is one of the things that I am hoping that I can establish in this conversation. Paul and Suellen are very close friends. Clearly Paul and Suellen and Northstar arose from what happened at Pepperdine. I want to know the details of how this happened.
JS: This is amazing!
RM: Have you ever seen any of Northstar's firsts, their top quality glass?
JS: No.
RM: Well I can tell you for a fact that I don't bother with the seconds or ends. The firsts are extremely clean and very consistent, extremely high quality. That is part of the reason that I don't mix my own colors is that I could never hope to duplicate the quality of Northstar firsts. The only problem with Northstar is that it is expensive as hell. But I get pretty hefty prices for my work so it is worth it. I must spend several thousand dollars a year on Northstar. But Northstar does not make all the colors. In fact, they've only got 43 colors and it sounds to me like there are hundreds of potential combinations.
JS: I can only tell you that from the experiments that we did that we probably came up with a couple of hundred because we used all the stuff and we were so tenacious! One of my greatest heartaches was that we never took pictures of any of it.
RM: Aw, no photographs?
JS: We never took pictures. I think I have one picture of me and Larry and Rich standing behind John at the workbench.
RM: Can you scan that for me?
JS: I'll have to find it first.
RM: You are right about that list being the holy grail. That is information that I don't think will ever be acquired again in quite the same way.
JS: I don't think so either. Because, like I said, we were so tenacious. We would sit there until two in the morning with the Stones cranked up to ten doing this stuff. It was unbelievable. It was like "let's try this... let's try it. C'mon, we can work for another hour. What time is your first class? 7:00. OK, well the college is just down the street. I think I'll just work straight through and go to class afterward." I got so crazed one night I said, "look, I'm gonna take this torch home with me". So I put it out on the car and I drove off with this bench burner on my hood! Twenty minutes later I was going 85 miles an hour on the freeway and I look out and here's this torch pointed back at me! At that time this was a $600 torch. So I pull over and I pulled my heart out of my Adam's apple and I put it in the car and went home. But that's the sort of tenacity that we had at that time. It was driven by the pure joy of opening up this kind of Rosetta Stone of possibilities that nobody had ever dealt with before. We were just totally hypnotized by the possibilities.
RM: I gotta ask you now, where is Larry Ward today?
JS: We're gonna have to find him. That's my next quest. It's gonna be my job to find him. And I'll also find Rich Stivers.
RM: Well that will have to be done because somewhere between the three of you, there is a copy of that list.
JS: I believe that.
RM: You must know how incredibly valuable that thing would be.
JS: I do, and I get the biggest pit in my stomach in knowing that. I can visually see it in my hands right now. I had it. I had a couple of them, and I can remember holding them and rolling them up and putting them in a tube. I can physically feel that thing in my hand and see myself looking at it. Maybe I can go back through life regression therapy and remember...
(laughter)
So let's make this our task. Track down Larry and Rich and find a copy of the chart.
RM: You will have to let me know when you do because I would be most interested in talking with them.
JS: I think you need to. They would provide a link. Suellen and I knew each other but we weren't intimately connected the way she and Maggie were. It was a different dynamic and I think that would act as a bridge to get a better insight into how the information was shared and how things were developed.
One other thing that may be important. Harry Reasoner of 60 minutes did a program on John that they were going to air on 60 Minutes and they didn't do it because some war broke out and it superseded John going on 60 Minutes.
RM: What year was this now. That had to be in the seventy's.
JS: Yes, that would have been in the early 70's. I remember John and I talking about it. I think it would be such a gem to be able to see what came out of that. John was a little uncertain about doing it because those guys usually sort of come up with their own story and John's mission was much higher than their ability to create a spin on it. But he told me that he was very pleased with what had come out and the interaction that they had. He told me that Harry Reasoner was blown away by the intimate interaction that they had that really transcended the sort of typical haggling.. they said this, he said that.. that 60 Minutes usually deals with. That may be a very important historical piece to have.
RM: It has got to be in their archives somewhere.
JS: It's gotta be. It's in the can. Those guys would not throw anything away.
RM: Well, that is something that I will take care of. I will contact 60 Minutes. Do you have any idea of the name of the show or the year it was done?
JS: I only know that it was on John Burton and it was filmed at his place in Santa Barbara up in Montecido.
RM: How about a guestimate as to the year?
JS: It's gotta be 1972 or 73... maybe 74. John left for Hawaii in 1974 - 74 and it was just before he left. It's all sort of a blur it was so long ago.
RM: Did everybody go back underground after Pepperdine? What happened after that?
JS: After Pepperdine, John moved to Hawaii. They did that because John felt that he could live a lot longer over there. They had vacationed at the Coco Palms every year for many years. Yes, we all did go our separate ways and maybe that makes sense. Rich and Larry graduated from college. For myself, I was in the Olympics in 1972 so I had just come off of the training and I had my bachelor's and master's degree to finish up at USC so I carried on with my studies there. That would have made me around 20 or 21 years old. And Margaret, when the studio was no longer operational, she kind of drifted off. I know that she went into doing some production pieces with very high technical quality. Suellen began working on her own legacy at that time. So we all virtually lost contact. I called Suellen several years ago just after she had her child and that was the first contact we had after many years. I haven't talked to Rich or Larry since the early 70's.
RM: When John moved to Hawaii did they simply disband the program?
JS: It was my understanding that it was discontinued because it was a federally funded project and there was a change of administration and the project just wasn't consistent with whoever was handling the checkbook at that time. I think that Ken Saxton would be a very important person to contact. He would know the mechanics of the situation. I will try to contact him for you. I don't know where he is but I'll find him.
RM: He's someplace. All these people are someplace!
JS: I can only tell you that I have the fondest memories of all of these people because we were all pioneering this new adventure together and we were all willing to participate in each other's successes and I never felt any sense of hostility or animosity or jealousy among anybody. That's a wonderful thing to feel when you are dealing with creative people that characteristically have some sort of inner vision and fairly volatile personalities. For me, I had my first one man show in 1972 and another in 1974. Then I graduated from college and started working in the physical medicine side of things. I continued to work in glass and maintain some loose gallery ties at that time. But then I went back to school and got my chiropractic degree and set up a very successful practice which I worked up until a couple of years ago. It was always important to me to maintain my creative touch and working with the torch. There was a point in time where I didn't work for several years. The very first time I re-lit the flame it was like I hadn't lost a beat. I had tears streaming down my eyes and I realized what an important part of my life this is and will be for the rest of my days here. That is when I committed to following through with developing my creative concepts and my ideas and investing myself fully in not only the glass movement, but in the galleries and things like that. I feel like I am just starting to get my engines running right now. In one way there is some sadness attached to that because had I worked consistently all along with the same kind of intensity that I have had with everything else I have done it is hard to say where I would be. But on the other hand, because of my experiences in athletics and health care and in writing and producing seminars and books, I feel like I can come back and contribute in another way that I would not have been able to do otherwise.
RM: This is so interesting. You know, this was not so long ago that no one has really gotten interested in its historical aspect, but I am interested. I am interested because it needs to be recorded and it needs to be set down chronologically because now, twenty years later, we have a perspective on this where we can see that each of these events all related together to create what we have today. Modern lampworking is currently a very successful medium, and so much of the reason for that comes from the way things were twenty years ago.
JS: Well I think that your intentions are very honorable and I just want you to know that I am really dedicated to participating in whatever way that I can.
RM: Well I think that you are a real asset to the industry and I am hoping that you will be able to participate more. You know there are people out there who are just hungry for knowledge and you have a lot that you can share if you are willing to do that. There is a tremendous demand for teachers. For people who want to do that there is an insatiable demand for it.
JS: If you don't mind this might be a good time to express some personal things.
RM: That's fine.
JS: I first picked up glass in 1968 and in a sense I sort of lost my virginity. This is a part of my life. It's a part of my soul. It's a part of my development as a human being. I think about glass 24 hours a day. A day without working at the bench is not a day to me. That's just part of my makeup, part of my evolution as a person and as a result it has effected my evolution as an athlete and as a chiropractor. I have written several books, I've done a lot of stuff but the bottom line is that I always come back to glass. I am at a point in my life where I know how important glass is to me and I know that I am very skilled at what I do. I want to participate in this new movement. My dilemma right now is that nobody knows who I am. This hurts me because I feel that I needed to do certain things and I didn't have thirty years of continuous work. It was interrupted here and interrupted there so my career hasn't flourished like I know that it could have. I am at a point right now where I am really dedicated to doing that. That is how important it is for me. I want to do whatever is necessary to be part of the history. I want to do whatever is necessary to create a future legacy through teaching, through written communication, through any kind of communication dissemination possible. I want to be able to share my work with people. I really think I have something to offer here.
RM: Indeed you do, and you certainly will. The opportunities will come. You just have to be patient and keep on blowing glass! Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.
JS: It's been my pleasure, Robert.
Rich Stivers, Larry Ward, and Jeff
Spencer watch John Burton lampworking. 1970 or 1971