Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project For Craft and Decorative Arts in America

Interview with Fred Fenster
Conducted by Jan Yager
At the Artist's home in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
August 9 and 10, 2004

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Fred Fenster on August 9 and 10, 2004. The interview took place in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and was conducted by Jan Yager for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America.

Fred Fenster and Jan Yager have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

JAN YAGER: This is Jan Yager interviewing Fred Fenster in his home and studio in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on August 9, 2004, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This is disc number one, session number one.

Fred, could you tell me when and where you were born?

FRED FENSTER: I was born on December 9, 1934 in New York City, in the Bronx, and to be specific, in Dr. Leff’s Maternity Home.

MS. YAGER: Very good. We like specific. And can you tell me your father’s name and where and when he was born, and the same for your mother.

MR. FENSTER: My father was named Charles Fenster and he was born in Austria, in a small town near the Czechoslovakian border, which he would never name for me, and he met my mother in this country. And she was born in Warsaw, Poland, and they had come out of Europe a few years before Hitler took power, so they were lucky to be out of there.

MS. YAGER: And what was your mother’s name?

MR. FENSTER: Sylvia [Sylvia Reisner].

MS. YAGER: And do you have any idea what year they might have been born?

MR. FENSTER: Actually I do. I think my father was born around 1900 because he died in – I think he died in 1985, and I think he was 85 when he died. And my mother was a few years younger.

MS. YAGER: And what kind of occupation or interest did your father and mother have?

MR. FENSTER: My mother was a homemaker. My father was a floor coverer. He was known as “Charley the linoleum man,” and I grew up putting down flooring because I was his helper when I was a kid. I was his helper even after I was married. I would go home – even after I was a professor at Wisconsin [University of Wisconsin, Madison], I would go home to New York and we would end up putting down flooring in peoples’ homes. He was a one-man contractor, so we worked all over Westchester County north of New York City.

MS. YAGER: And your mother, what were some of her interests?

MR. FENSTER: Well, she liked classical music, but basically she was a homemaker. She was very interested in cleaning. She was a very clean person. She cleaned. In those days that was a high priority thing.

MS. YAGER: And how about siblings?

MR. FENSTER: I had a brother, Robert, five years older. He worked for the post office after he got out of the service. He died about 10 years ago.

MS. YAGER: Can you talk about your childhood and where you grew up?

MR. FENSTER: I grew up in the Bronx, and I went to public school and basically had a really simple life. I was a conscientious student. I came home, did my homework. Went down to a local playground and practiced three hours of handball every day. I was a very, very avid – you know, I wasn’t good but I was an avid handball player. And I was – we actually had a handball team in our high school and I was on the handball team for a year.

MS. YAGER: Forgive me. What – describe handball.

MR. FENSTER: Handball is played with a small, hard, black ball and when it’s played outdoors you have one wall against which you play. If it’s played indoors, you have four walls, you know. You’re playing inside a box, basically, and everything is available for being hit – the wall, the ceiling, the floor, everything. But when you play single wall then you play against just the one front wall.

MS. YAGER: And is there a bat or anything?

MR. FENSTER: No. You just play with your hands. And the ball is very hard and very – it’s a fast game and it’s a simple game to play because you can play, you know, you can practice by yourself. So I used to just practice, as I said, for three hours a day, every day. In the rain, in the snow. I’d practice every day. But I, you know, there were people who were better at it who put in much less time, so it was a little discouraging. It’s a big city thing. You don’t find that out here. You play handball in big cities.

MS. YAGER: What was it like growing up in a big city?

MR. FENSTER: Oddly enough, I was never comfortable in New York. I didn’t like the aggressiveness of it. I was always a very quiet, studious kid and I didn’t like – I didn’t like contending with all these aggressive people all the time. I was never comfortable in New York until I moved away and I’d go back to visit. And now I have fun when I go back, but I didn’t – I didn’t – I never knew anything else, but once I moved to the Midwest I – to go to school I felt much more comfortable there. The pace of life was slower; I didn’t spend all my waking hours traveling the subways, buses. I mean, I lived in New York until I was 21. I married there, had a child there, and I was very relieved to get out. Never wanted to go back.

MS. YAGER: Tell me what – when did you get married?

MR. FENSTER: I got married in April of 1956. I married a woman from Belgium [Josette Lemaire], and about a year and a half later we had my first child, David. And he was a year old when I left New York to go to graduate school at Cranbrook [Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan]. And I didn’t even drive a car at that time. I had to learn to drive. My first trip was to drive out to Cranbrook. Really pretty funny.

MS. YAGER: Where did you get a car?

MR. FENSTER: My father helped me buy a car for, I think, $400. It was an old Dodge, and I just – I tried practicing in the city. My father would sit with me, and we’d take these short rides, and then I just got in the car and drove to Michigan and that was –

MS. YAGER: Directly into Motor City [laughs].

MR. FENSTER: It was a little scary in the beginning but it was fine. Then I found a place to live, rented a trailer, put everything in a little trailer and I moved out there. And I never came back except to visit.

MS. YAGER: Do you have – what were some of your favorite pastimes as a child?

MR. FENSTER: I used to read a lot. I loved reading. And the rest of the time, as I say, I played handball. Handball was a – I tend to be very obsessive about things and handball was something I did every day. I wasn’t a natural at it, but I loved the game and I played until I was in my 20’s, and then I have never played since.

MS. YAGER: You said you read a lot. What – do you remember a favorite book?

MR. FENSTER: All kinds of books. Adventure books. I liked history in school. I had – I was very lucky. I went to Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx and we had exceptional teachers there who really should have been college professors. And I had a history teacher who was really professorial named Mr. Isaacs. He – he just made history very interesting. European history, you know. It was really great. And I for some reason in my schooling, either because the teacher was ill or – I didn’t get much in the way of American history, especially on the Civil War so I ended up doing a lot of reading about the Civil War on my own.

MS. YAGER: What’s been your most rewarding educational experience? Do you remember something in high school or grade school that just sort of was a turning point?

MR. FENSTER: That’s a good question. High school or grade school? Well, I came to love English also in high school. I had a – several good English teachers who really made reading plays and reading literature very interesting. So I did come out with an appreciation of, you know, of English, well-spoken English, well-written English. It doesn’t sound like that because of the way I speak, but I love reading well-written things. And I also – that – I guess the other, the other habit that I acquired early in life was my mother liked to go to the movies so I picked that habit up when I was very young and I’ve been a movie nut all of my life, so it’s something I do all the time.

MS. YAGER: Were you raised with other languages as a child?

MR. FENSTER: They spoke Yiddish at home. My parents spoke Yiddish, especially when they didn’t want me to understand them. They sent me to Hebrew school, and I didn’t learn to understand Hebrew but I learned to read it to pray, and so – my household wasn’t devout or anything but they were nominally observant, so that I went to Hebrew school twice a week, you know. We got release time for religious instructions, Thursday afternoon, and then the environment was very Jewish. The neighborhood was a mixed neighborhood. All immigrants. You didn’t hear English that much spoken. I mean, in school I spoke English, but on the street it was everything – mostly Yiddish, Italian. It was basically – when I was a child, it was an Italian-Jewish neighborhood.

MS. YAGER: In 1956 you –

MR. FENSTER: Married.

MS. YAGER: Is that when you entered City College of New York, or is that –

MR. FENSTER: I was already in City College, and I was about to graduate. And I think I got married when I graduated and against my parents’ wishes because the girl wasn’t Jewish. And we had a break-up at that point. I mean, with my parents. Then we got back together again later, so it was a difficult time. And then I decided to go to graduate school, which my parents also opposed because they didn’t want to – they didn’t want me to leave the city. And I just decided I would go, and I went. And I never came back. So that was like my – getting married was like emancipating myself from my parents’ control, and – and then going away was the second part of the emancipation.

MS. YAGER: Tell me about your education at the City College. What sort of courses were you taking?

MR. FENSTER: I started off just thinking I was going to take science classes because I was very good in that in high school. Again, because I had a really fine teacher. But City College, the science instruction was really uneven and classes were crowded, the instructors were not very interested, so I was unhappy. And I had a friend there named Al [Alvin] Pine, who is also a metalsmith, and he said, “Why don’t you talk to a guidance counselor and get tested to see what your aptitudes are.” So I did, and eventually she suggested that I go into industrial arts, which I did.

So Al Pine and I and Bernie [Bernard] Bernstein, we were all in the industrial arts program. We all got degrees in industrial arts, and it’s still my feeling that for anybody going into art, that’s the best instructional base that you could possibly have. You know, it gave me such a sense of understanding about materials, concepts, and how things worked and how – how to problem-solve basically, really problem-solve on a high level. So I thought the program there was very, very good.

MS. YAGER: Was there an emphasis in metal? Because three of you were – became very, you know, prominent metal –

MR. FENSTER: Well, originally all the teachers were good. All the teachers were very conscientious. They worked really hard, and I was interested in woodworking. And I wasn’t that good at woodworking, so when I hit the metal class, all of a sudden it was like magic. So I became fascinated with it. We used to break into the studio after hours so we could do our work. And the teacher was very supportive. He was very understanding about our interest. He loved students like us because we were – we just couldn’t get enough of it.

MS. YAGER: Now what kind of projects were you working on?

MR. FENSTER: Well, the metals class was broken up into 18 weeks, and so there were six different areas. A large part of it was machine shop. We learned how to use the shaper, the milling machine. There was three weeks of forging, three weeks of casting, three weeks of lathe work – can’t remember what the other weeks were now. We – you know, every – every three weeks we would change into a different area and we rotated through the whole studio learning how to do everything.

MS. YAGER: Now what do you mean by shaping? What was that?

MR. FENSTER: The shaper is a machine that goes back and forth. It’s a – it just goes back and forth with a cutting blade on it so that if you want to create flat, parallel surfaces, you can machine – the milling machine does the same thing except it does it in a different way.

MS. YAGER: Like a surface grinder sort of?

MR. FENSTER: It’s not a surface grinder. It’s got a cutter and an arm that just goes straight back and forth. And so you set that and you just pare the metal very exactly. So the lathe takes metal off in a round – off of round things. The milling machine takes metal off in flat surfaces.

MS. YAGER: And what metals would you have been using?

MR. FENSTER: Steel mostly. We machined steel. We’d cast aluminum. And – and then – the most exciting three weeks for me were something called “Art Metal” where the teacher had somebody come in and demonstrate silver soldering and working with silver. And the person who came in wasn’t very good, and the first thing they did was they tried to solder a back on a pair of cuff links and they melted the cuff link. This guy melted the cuff link and he chased it all over the soldering board with a flame. I was really enthralled.

So at that time we had these basement gyms in the Bronx, weight-lifting gyms, and –

MS. YAGER: In your home, you mean?

MR. FENSTER: No, we had these little basement areas that we would rent. A bunch of us would get together, and so we had one of these basement gyms that were – actually Roosevelt set – a lot were – he set a lot of these things up. He was involved in subsidizing these so that the youth of America would have good wholesome things to do. So I was involved with a bunch of guys who were much older than I was who had been in these gyms for a long time, and we had separate rooms. There was a room for general weight-lifting. And it wasn’t body-building. It wasn’t to build up your body. It was just to gain strength, so it wasn’t to get pretty or anything. It was just to get strong.

MS. YAGER: Was this for men?

MR. FENSTER: For men. Only guys. And everything we built ourselves. All the equipment we basically built ourselves, so we did – we had squat racks that we built out of pipe and then we had – this was the Bronx so it was a little rough at times so we had to armor all the windows with bars so people wouldn’t break in and steal our weights. So for me it was a really good experience. I – we had a separate room where you could read and relax, and I turned that room into a studio.

I just – after I got the basic demonstrations in jewelry-making, soldering, I set the room up so I could make jewelry there and taught myself how to do it, you know. There were only a few books around. I can’t remember the basic book. I’m just trying to – one of the earliest American books on jewelry-making, I had the book. That was my bible and I just read it. I spent a lot of time experimenting. I had Fridays off at the university and I would spend the whole day just teaching myself to silver solder in every conceivable situation, and being compulsive and patient.

MS. YAGER: And were you using silver?

MR. FENSTER: Yes, I started using silver, and then I started peddling it in the City College cafeteria, earrings and pins and belt buckles, and my father thought it was a lot of nonsense. This was just before Christmas, and I – one day I made – I came home with about $200 or $300 in my pocket from selling small things. And my father said, “What are you wasting your time for Fred,” you know. And I pulled out my wallet, which was about three inches thick with small bills, and I said, “I make money, Pop,” you know. “People seem to like what I do and they buy it. They pay me for having fun.” And he said, “Come on.” And I held up this big wad of money, and for my father, his jaw dropped and he got very quiet and he didn’t say anything after that. So. But I built up a clientele among the students and people I met.

MS. YAGER: Would this have been with wire or sheet –

MR. FENSTER: No, this was sheet, sheet with 18-gauge flat stock on the edge to make things look thick. So I would always, even from my early beginnings, I was always interested in not having things look flimsy. Things always had good edges, and I’m still like that now. My things all have good rims on them.

MS. YAGER: And were they forged?

MR. FENSTER: No, they were cut out with a saw. In the beginning I remember I had trouble thinking three-dimensionally and my designs were all flat and two-dimensional. And I was coming down from the third floor of the industrial arts building and as I said, I’m very compulsive. When I’m interested in something I think about it all the time, I dream about it, I’m totally immersed in it. I got the first three-dimensional image. It just flashed in my mind as I came down – as I came across this landing, and I went, “Ah!” like that. It was just like a bolt from heaven, and from then on my work became more dimensional.

MS. YAGER: Was it something you saw in the landing?

MR. FENSTER: I saw it in my mind, you know. I saw a three dimensional image in my mind. Everything else had been flat, you know, before that. I was shocked.

MS. YAGER: And that moment remains crisp.

MR. FENSTER: Yes. It was like an epiphany for me. I was really excited. I didn’t know if I had the capability of envisioning things three dimensionally. And as time progressed I imagined things in a three dimensional setting, almost the way a computer projects things and turns them so that you can see them. That’s the way my mind went. But that first time, that was really something. I got very excited about that.

MS. YAGER: Can you – do you remember the first three dimensional piece that you made and what it looked like?

MR. FENSTER: Not really. I was making a lot of earrings, and cuff links were in vogue in those days. I was – I made cuff links constantly. A lot of them were hollow, you know, where you make the outline in 18-gauge stock and then I slapped a top and a bottom on it, and most of the time I got away without putting bleed holes in them. They just looked very thick and heavy.

MS. YAGER: That sounds pretty wonderful. Now I read somewhere that when you graduated from City College that there were over 100 shop positions in the city to teach industrial design.

MR. FENSTER: Right. I think there were 125 positions in the city. Industrial art teachers were leaving for various reasons, mostly because the discipline problems were so severe. And I had just gotten married, and I went up to the Bronx to the Herman Ridder Junior High School on the corner of 174th Street and Boston Post Road and I looked like a teenager. You know, I looked like a child. In fact, I have a picture from those days. I looked like a young kid. And in fact, when I started teaching there, older teachers would pull me out and say, “You, take a charge.” They’d pull me out of the hallway, and I said, “I’m a teacher.” They said, “Come on, you’re not a teacher, you’re a student,” because I really looked young.

In any event, I – there was an opening at that school because the previous teacher was teaching sheet metal work and he had been scared out of the school by an incident in which the next door teacher had been hit over the head in the typesetting shop and stabbed in the back. They cut a big X in his back with a knife. So I went in and I was interviewed by this very gentle, elderly principal with the wonderful name of Saul Sigelschiffer, and he looked at me, you know, very quizzically, and he said, “Do you really think that you can do this?” And I said, “Well, we won’t know until I try.”

And I had a horrible first year. I had – the kids were just – they just ran me ragged. I used to be sick, close to vomiting every day before I went to school. It was very violent all the time. There were constant confrontations, they would – you know, I mean, I was interested in learning and they weren’t interested in learning. Most of the kids were – I got the worst kids, and so I was very tenacious in organizing the studio. I – I worked, you know, I mean, the job I guess was from 8:30 to 3:00 o’clock, whatever it was. And then after that I worked in the studio organizing racks and duplicating projects. I – I got two shoulder-high piles of Popular Mechanics magazines from a friend of mine and I went through them, picked out every metal project I could pick out, and made drawings and duplicated the projects and built models of them.

And after the first year I was really well organized, and the kids were new. I wasn’t new. So the first year I was new and I got hazed terribly by the students. The second year I was very savvy. I had a very organized studio in place, and the second year was much better. By the same token it was a little boring because I didn’t have all the confrontations I had in the first year. So I decided to go to grad school after that.

The first year was terrible. I mean, it was terrible. I just – we didn’t have any control over the kids, and many of the parents were on welfare. And the only control you would have is you could threaten a kid and tell him you’d throw him out of school, and if he was thrown out of school then he was in the work market. His parents would lose welfare, and that was the only way you could say, “I’m going to kick you out of here and your parents will lose welfare.” And all of a sudden that kid would quiet down. And I felt awful to do that, just awful.

The kids were mostly Hispanic, and they – they came with a very good work ethic and a very good sense of family obligation, but they had the disadvantage of not speaking English well. And I had the advantage of having had four years of Spanish, so my relationship with them was really good.

MS. YAGER: So they were recent immigrants?

MR. FENSTER: Yes.

MS. YAGER: From where do you think?

MR. FENSTER: Most of them were Cuban, Puerto Rico. At that time we had an influx of Cubans and Puerto Ricans due to one of our congressmen, who brought people in for support. They were his people and so he had their support. I can’t remember who it was now. But I got along really well with the Hispanic kids, you know. And they taught me how to speak Spanish a lot better than I did, you know. I knew the names of the tools in Spanish, I knew the names of the materials in Spanish, and they became my allies in organizing the studio. So it was fun for me. And I got to understand the kids. I got to understand the pressures they were under. And I lived there. I lived across the street. I got an apartment across the street from the school in this very mixed, very volatile neighborhood, and so the kids would see me all the time, you know. I was not coming in from the outside. I was one of them. I was in the neighborhood.

MS. YAGER: Did – how did they respond to these projects from Popular Mechanics?

MR. FENSTER: In the beginning my projects were stupid. You know, I was doing the same kind of thing I learned at school in industrial arts, and I remember I was showing them how to make, you know, a tin can with a handle on it, a mug. And one of the kids said, “What I gotta make this for? It’s-a stupid.” And I said, “What do you want to make?” He said, “I want to make a train.” I said, “You think you can make a train?” He said, “Yeah, I can make a train. I’m going to use a beer can. I’m going to use the solder spools for wheels,” and I said, “I tell you what. You make a train, one for you, one for me.” And from then on the kids chose the projects, and they would make a model, they’d paint it really nicely, and I’d ring the room with the models the kids made. And by the end of that year, I had a model shop. The industrial art group came and visited my studio, did a whole write-up on it, and the kids taught me how to do this stuff, you know. You had to listen. And I had a really great studio and they loved it.

And I started teaching them how to make jewelry. We used nickel silver. I brought my torch in from home, and they would fight to get into the class, you know. They just loved making jewelry.

MS. YAGER: What sort of torch were you using?

MR. FENSTER: Same torch I use today. The Prestolite. Now I use a Smith tip, but I used the Prestolite. And I just would bring it in and take it home on weekends.

MS. YAGER: Which is acetylene fuel?

MR. FENSTER: Acetylene and air and – and in the studio we did mostly common soldering, soft soldering, using furnaces and soldering coppers because it was a sheet metal studio.

MS. YAGER: You mean lead solder?

MR. FENSTER: Lead solder. So we – so the original projects were done, but then through the Popular Mechanics books they had – they had things like making model boats in tin plate, in metal, and so we made submarines and model boats with wind-up propeller – rubber band propeller-driven things, and we’d flood the sink and we’d have boat fights in the sink and they loved it. And then for some crazy reason one of the projects I picked out was making a bilge pump. So who would need a bilge pump in the tenements of New York City? It was the most popular thing we made. It was made out of a piece of television antenna. The kids would get extra credit for bringing in television antenna, which littered the roofs of New York, and sometimes the kids didn’t just take used antennas. They took an antenna that was alive, and they’d drag these things in. We cut them up; we made lamps out of them with three legs coming out. We’d pour – we’d pour white metal, which was lead, tin and antimony, in to lock the legs, into this three-inch section of TV antenna. And the thing had three legs and we cast the – the lead around a threaded section that you could screw a socket into. And they made these really nice lamps.

We also made art deco lampshades that were really beautiful out of tin plate and painted them. We made – in those days it was very popular to do these fish made out of coat hanger wires, and we made – the whole shop had really nice fish all over it. They just lead soldered that together, did a nice job. And for them they would take something like that home that was very professional looking. I taught them to solder really well. They were very – they were very good. I mean, the kids were great.

MS. YAGER: Do you think any of them had metal experience in Cuba or their home country?

MR. FENSTER: Some of them did. The kids who were educated in Cuba were way ahead of the American kids. The ones who actually were taught to count and measure and – they came with some math education and some reading ability. They were fantastic. When they first came to school they were dressed in a white shirt, dressed very neatly. And then they took on the American way of becoming slobs and – and got very rude and so on. But for the most part those kids were wonderful. They were really great students. And for me it was a lot of fun teaching them because once I turned the corner on the discipline stuff by offering better problems, you know –

MS. YAGER: Yes, engaging their minds.

MR. FENSTER: Well, what I did was, I gave them a set problem for the first problem. Then the second problem they had to learn how to measure. And most of them supposedly knew how to measure but they didn’t know. And so I – I taught them to measure from a center line and they had to lay out the problem themselves. And I had duplicate sheets on each thing. So the first one I assigned, the second one they had a choice of three, the third one they had a choice of maybe 12 to 15, and then they could make anything they wanted. And they would pick out – and as I say, the – the toy boats and the bilge pump were the best problem.

MS. YAGER: I wanted to ask you, I don’t know what a bilge pump is.

MR. FENSTER: It’s for pumping water out of a confined space. Let’s say you wanted to empty your bathtub into a bucket. So this is an up-and-down pump where you just pump it like that.

MS. YAGER: And why was this so popular?

MR. FENSTER: I don’t know. It was intriguing to them and they loved it. They would just fill the sink with water and they’d pump the water out. And what it was was the TV antenna, a plunger that went inside, and leather – little piece of leather valve, so when you pull the thing up, the valve opened up, the water came in. When you pushed it down, the valve closed and the water would come out a little spigot. And it was a Popular Mechanics thing, and I – I would never have guessed that it would be popular. But they did a lot of creative stuff after that, you know. They would come and they’d say, “Could I do this? Could I do this? Could I do this?” And I’d say, “Sure. You figure it out. You show it to me.”

MS. YAGER: Now these classes, were these just for boys?

MR. FENSTER: Yes.

MS. YAGER: And what – why were these so – a common program in the schools –

MR. FENSTER: Well, they would put all the trouble-makers in shop classes. They’d dump them, you know. And many of the kids were tagged with – with being a trouble-maker and being stupid, and they were neither. They just didn’t have an outlet for their energy in the other classes. And I remember I had this one kid, and one of the other teachers found out and she said, “Oh my God, you’ve got this kid, he’s such a terror.” And I said, “He isn’t.” She said, “Oh, but he’s so stupid.” And I said, “He isn’t. He’s the leader in the shop. He reads fluently and he measures fluently. He’s good with numbers.” And she said, “No, it’s ridiculous.” And then I talked to the kid after, and he said, “Why should I work for her, you know. She thinks I’m stupid.” I mean, it’s the old story. They are what people believe they are.

And very few of them were stupid. They were uneducated, and sometimes they were educated. I don’t know if you ever read this series of books by that guy up in Boston [Jonathan Kozol]. I can’t think of his name now but he dealt with minority students and basically – well, actually in Harlem. He dealt with minority students in Harlem. He became a teacher down there and he found that the kids were actually very bright but they wouldn’t let the white teachers see that, you know, because they met the expectations of the teacher. The teacher thought they were stupid, so they were stupid, and it turned out they weren’t. They were hiding their intelligence. Just like in the slums, often the leaders, the drug dealers and the people who are heads of gangs are very, very bright.

We had a gang problem in the Bronx, and I got so friendly with the kids, they would come to me and they’d say, “You got a problem with so and so? You want us to take care of him?” And I said, “It’s tempting, but no.”

[Phone rings. Break in conversation.]

MS. YAGER: All right. Go ahead.

MR. FENSTER: Well, I taught for two and a half years in the New York Public School system in the Bronx, and it was a very interesting and difficult two and a half years, the first year especially. The second year I had things organized, and I had a system in place and the kids responded really well. And it wasn’t as interesting to me, so I decided to go to graduate school. By that time I had a small child, and my wife said she was willing to move out to the Midwest.

This came about because Al – Al Pine had preceeded me in going to Cranbrook, and every time he came back to visit, he would talk to me about how wonderful it was and how I should go. And I finally thought, why not, you know? So I did.

MS. YAGER: Now that was in what year?

MR. FENSTER: Cranbrook? I moved out there in 1958. Yes, 1958. I got married in ’56, I taught for two years, two and a half years, and then I moved out there in 1958.

MS. YAGER: So talk about the first thing you did when you got there.

MR. FENSTER: To Cranbrook?

MS. YAGER: Yes.

MR. FENSTER: I was petrified. I didn’t have an art background. I was absolutely terrified. I thought, what have I done? I gave up a job that I was pretty good at and I became – I became so upset. I became so upset. I thought, I shouldn’t be here. I don’t have the background that all these art people have. I don’t belong here. I don’t know what people are going to be talking about. And there were eight of us, I think, in that original class. And they were an odd mixed group of people. Michael Jerry was in there, fortunately for me, because he – he made it – he made it really good for me to be there. He was patient, he explained things to me, he talked to me. And I also didn’t realize how much metalwork background I had until I saw my teacher, Richard Thomas, who was writing a book on metalsmithing [Metalsmithing for the Artist-Craftsman; Philadelphia: Chilton Co., Book Division, 1960], and he was dealing with stuff that my junior high school – my junior high school kids knew because I taught it to them. He was dealing with the names of sheet metal stakes, and my kids knew that like the back of their hands. And I thought, I came out here to learn, and this man doesn’t know what my beginning metal students do. That was very discouraging to me.

But there were people in there like Michael, who had at least a year of experience at the School for American Craftsmen [Rochester Institute of Technology, New York], and Don Haskins, who had a lot of metal experience and casting experience. He later worked for Peter Voulkos doing bronze casting, and he became a very close friend of mine. A guy named Les Motz, who came out of Ft. Wayne, Indiana. So they had all kinds of different backgrounds, and they had all sorts of different experiences, and they had varied art talent. Most of them were not all that talented.

Michael was the best of us. Michael Jerry was by far the best of us. And he was really helpful to me. He was encouraging. I read like crazy. I spent a lot of time in the library, which I always do, and I spent a lot of time in the studio. I spent every waking hour, seven days a week, in the studio. There was no real teaching that went on. You basically learned by working.

MS. YAGER: What were the hours of the studio?

MR. FENSTER: Well, unfortunately it closed down around midnight or 1:00 o’clock, so I got kicked out at 1:00 o’clock. And I’m a night owl. At least I was at that time. So I had to leave. And my wife worked. I went home and took her to work, dropped her off, went to the studio, worked until she got out of work, which was like 5:30. Picked her up, we went home, had dinner, I came back to the studio. I did that every day of the week, Sundays included.

And there was no real instruction, you know. There was a minimal amount of instruction, so luckily Michael Jerry was really good at raising, which is what I was interested in, hammering metal, and I learned how to raise from him. And I loved it. I just – I couldn’t believe you could take a flat piece of metal and make anything you wanted out of it. And I’ve been fascinated doing that ever since.

MS. YAGER: Before we get into all that part about the metal, can you describe a little bit of the differences? I’m still sort of picturing up in the Bronx and all these, you know, Hispanic kids doing these things. And then you go to Bloomfield Hills, to Cranbrook. What did that seem like? I mean –

MR. FENSTER: Felt totally out of place. This little Jewish kid from the Bronx, you know, goes into a lily white area that had restrictions. There were restrictions on Jews and blacks and anybody who wasn’t like them. There were signs up. You couldn’t rent property; you couldn’t live in certain areas at that time. They had signs that said, “Restricted,” you know, and that meant me.

MS. YAGER: Now that was not a – that was not imposed in the schools?

MR. FENSTER: No, not in schools. But Bloomfield Hills was one of the wealthiest areas in the United States. And we lived in Pontiac, Michigan, which is a blue collar town, and then on the other side of Cranbrook there was Birmingham, Michigan, which was an executive town, a white collar town. And after I graduated I managed to find a little place to live in there that was being rented just to pay the taxes on this house, and you know, it was a total – total mistake, you know, on their part to rent to somebody like me. There was just a whole row of decrepit houses that went to students and people who wanted studios.

But I felt completely out of place. I was out of my depth. I didn’t know how to relate to people socially. I was very ill at ease mixing – which I never did much of. I still don’t. But it was a very strange experience, you know, being there. I’d never been out on my own before, you know. I didn’t have any family, anybody to talk to. There was – I’m trying to think of this physicist. Surely – there’s a line in there, surely you’re joking, Mr. – I can’t think of it right now. But it describes his going to Yale or Harvard or some place and he was a kid from the Bronx. And he got a scholarship because he was brilliant and he ends up being in a place where he – he went for tea, you know. Cranbrook had the same thing. I couldn’t – we went for tea. I never drank tea in my life, you know.

MS. YAGER: Really?

MR. FENSTER: My mother used to drink tea through a sugar cube, you know, from a glass because that’s a European custom. My wife, too. She put a cube of sugar between her teeth. Terrible manners for Americans, you know, but I thought, tea, I don’t want tea. I don’t want to drink tea. I didn’t drink coffee, I didn’t know how to socialize – I felt –

MS. YAGER: Did they have tea breaks?

MR. FENSTER: Just on the opening, you know, the opening day where we met the faculty, and we met the director of Cranbrook who was Zoltan Sepeshy, the Hungarian painter, the very well known painter.

MS. YAGER: How do you spell his last name?

MR. FENSTER: S-e-p-e-s-h-y. First name Zoltan. Hungarian.

MS. YAGER: I read that Cranbrook was started in the ‘20s as sort of a training grounds for the craftsmen that would be needed for the very special church there, which I’m not going to remember the name of.

MR. FENSTER: Yes. I think it was called Christ Church.

MS. YAGER: Christ Church, yes. And so was that – did you feel that sort of European –

MR. FENSTER: No, but they had their own village of craftsmen. The people who took care of Cranbrook had their own village, and they made everything. So there were plaster workers who did this exquisite plaster work, you know. Cranbrook was very unique and quirky, you know. And so you had European craftsmen who were brought over. They lived in a village of their own. The electricians, the carpenters, the plumbers, the craftsmen who took care of Cranbrook and did the improvements, built it, you know, lived on their own in a self-contained village.

So at the time I went, they were training young artists who – in metal, in ceramics, in textiles, in architecture, in design. What else. We had a – we had a general shop from which all the studios kind of radiated out where you could – anybody could go there and use the facilities. And we had a large sculpture program there at the time. So it was an exciting place to be. I – although I really stayed mostly in metal, I used to wander around the sculpture studios all the time and go to the lectures. I loved being there. It was a magical place, physically beautiful.

I rarely left, you know. I mean, once I got to school, I – I hated going outside the confines of Cranbrook. It was a world of its own in a very posh area of Bloomfield Hills. It’s still like that.

MS. YAGER: Yes. Beautiful.

MR. FENSTER: When I graduated, I didn’t want to leave, you know. I got a job as a metal worker for a local guy doing custom metal work, and I found myself driving wistfully by, gazing at the school, or turning in in the truck and just kind of driving through the grounds just to keep contact with it. It was hard breaking away.

MS. YAGER: What was the tuition there? Do you remember, or were you on scholarship?

MR. FENSTER: I was on scholarship after the first year. I got a student scholarship, so that was nice. The students voted it. I worked really hard, you know. As usual with me, I just went in and I shut everything else out of my life and I just did the metal work.

MS. YAGER: Do you remember what the tuition was?

MR. FENSTER: It wasn’t that much. What I remember is like $600 a semester.

MS. YAGER: So it wasn’t a huge hardship in that way, but it was just this big life change.

MR. FENSTER: It was a life change, and I had – amazingly enough, my wife and I saved up one year’s salary in two years, that’s with a child, and my mother-in-law living with us. So my salary at that time was $4,400 a year, teaching in the Bronx, you know, public school. Saved up $4,400. We used that to go to Cranbrook. Basically used up the whole – all our savings. My wife worked as a dressmaker in Birmingham, which was this very plushy town. She was a very good dressmaker, Josette, my first wife. And I went to school, and when I graduated we had gone through all the money. And then she said, “Okay, it’s your turn now. I supported you. It’s your turn to support us.” And I said, “Right.”

So we went through some hard times because the job I took on was not the kind of metal work I was doing. I was working making anything out of metal that anybody needed, and this was out of aluminum and stainless steel using machines.

MS. YAGER: This was at Roger Berlin?

MR. FENSTER: Roger Berlin, yeah. He was a good guy. Very fine man. He had been a SeaBee in the wartime and he was a guy – these are the can-do guys. This guy could do anything. He had a degree in architecture, and he had a degree in something else, and he was a good boss, and I was a very good worker. I mean, you know, I was – I worked seven days a week for that guy. I set my own salary. He said, “What do you want to make?” And I said, “Well, I’m not going to be worth very much because I don’t know how to do the kinds of things you want, so we’ll just set the thing at the minimum that I can get along on.” And then I said, “When I get better, we’ll change it.”

So I didn’t think I was very good. I was just a really hard worker. I mean, I was absolutely reliable, seven days a week. Saturday, Sunday. It was a two-person business, you know.

MS. YAGER: You and he?

MR. FENSTER: He bid the jobs, and then we both did them. And we hired a welder part-time to do the welding for us. So we did everything. We did tachometer boxes for General Motors, we did bank railings, we did display boards, we did display objects for the automobile show in Cobo Hall in Detroit. We built a car one time. We built a model car to show off all the chrome industry’s – how much chrome they used in a car. Built a full-sized 16-foot car out of one-inch steel and then attached chrome to it. It was like a phantom car outlined in chrome.

MS. YAGER: What kind of car was it?

MR. FENSTER: It was an everything car. It represented all kinds of makes that –

MS. YAGER: This was in 1960?

MR. FENSTER: 19 – let’s see. I got out of there in 1962, so it was around that time, 1962. That was the job I got out – when I got out of school, that’s the job I took. I had designed some railings, bronze railing mounts for the galleries at Cranbrook and Roger Berlin installed them. I designed them, I made the wooden models, I had them cast, I finished them, and then he installed them. So when I got out he said, “Would you want to work for us?” I said, “Okay.” Didn’t know what else to do.

MS. YAGER: The metal moldings, did you make the actual moldings, the chrome moldings for the car?

MR. FENSTER: No. These were moldings that came off all kinds of cars, and what we did was we made a frame out of one-inch steel, painted it black, and then attached the molding to the frame, so you had the car outlined in chrome – the tail fins, the – you know, the radiator stuff, the trim around the windshield. You wouldn’t believe how much chrome is in a car, you know. It was sponsored by the chrome something association of America, who knows what, but you know. The car weighed 400 pounds when we got done, and they sent a truck to pick it up, and it took four of us to lift it into the truck.

It didn’t roll or anything. We had chrome hubcaps that were attached it. It was a lot of fun. It was a – I did a lot of stuff for that – for that automobile show. I made a map of America outlined in three-inch or four-inch high, half inch thick aluminum, and I had a terrible time going around the Great Lakes with that aluminum. And then the welder welded the sections together. So this was a four-feet by eight-feet map mounted on plywood and it was all outlined in aluminum.

We did all kinds of stuff. I mean, we did – I think we probably worked on displays for about four months for them. Every day was something different, so whatever I learned one day, I came in dumb the next day because we were doing something else. But we had a really great studio, and I learned a lot about problem-solving from Roger. Everything was on wheels. We could reconfigure the whole studio in a matter of minutes. Everything was mounted on heavy duty casters, just push it around. The lathe and milling machines, the – we had ceiling hoists, you know, where we could just take things that weighed hundreds, thousands of pounds and shift them around. It was brilliant. The guy was brilliant, and I enjoyed working there but I –

MS. YAGER: Now would he have been considered a tool and die sort of person?

MR. FENSTER: No, it wasn’t tool and die work. It was any – we got work from designers. They would say, “Okay, we need – we need display tables,” and the display tables were going to be made out of inch and a quarter square aluminum. And we make them, you know.

MS. YAGER: Where do you think he got his training?

MR. FENSTER: Roger? As I say, he had a degree in architecture and a degree in engineering.

MS. YAGER: From?

MR. FENSTER: Colleges in the United States, but then he was in the SeaBees, and these guys were problem solvers, you know. They fly in and they have some horrendous situation in the war.

MS. YAGER: This was in the Navy?

MR. FENSTER: This was a branch – it wasn’t a branch, it was a separate unit. These – these guys were incredible. These guys were all about American ingenuity and in the best sense, and Roger must have been the best of them. He was absolutely wonderful. So he wanted to move me up in the business. Scared the hell out of me. He wanted me to start bidding on jobs that were like a quarter of a million dollars, do all the metal work on a building and we would make it, you know. And I said, “I’m not going to bid. What if I make a mistake? We’ll be out of business in one job.” And he said, “No.” He said, “I’ll check it over,” and I go, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to bid on jobs.” I like making the stuff. I don’t want to have to pore over blueprints and figure out all the measurements and everything. So I quit, you know.

MS. YAGER: How long had you worked there?

MR. FENSTER: About six to eight months. Very intense time. As I say, it was seven days a week.

MS. YAGER: Before we get too much further, I want to go back to Cranbrook. Richard Thomas, am I correct in that his training was as a painter?

MR. FENSTER: Um hmm.

MS. YAGER: So how did that come about that he was head of the metals department?

MR. FENSTER: The guy who did metals was a blacksmith who made the gates for Cranbrook [Oscar Bach], those beautiful gates. And he died, and Richard took over the program.

[Phone rings. Break in conversation.]

MS. YAGER: You were talking about Richard Thomas.

MR. FENSTER: Right. Richard Thomas was a painter and he took over the metal program after – my understanding was that the man who – who ran the metals program was the blacksmith and he died, and Richard took it over. And I think that his main contribution was in organizing the structure that the students would follow in terms of doing a thesis, in terms of research, and focusing on a theme and documenting their work. And he was very good at helping people document their work. He took good photographs so they could build a portfolio. He had a big copy camera. And that was very helpful to us. Without him I wouldn’t have documented anything because I didn’t have a camera. I was poor at that time, really poor. I didn’t have much of anything.

MS. YAGER: What kind of research did you do?

MR. FENSTER: Well, I – somewhere along the line there was this Norwegian kid named Gudmund [Gudmund Jon Elvestad], who started working in pewter. He’d never done it before, and he was an experienced goldsmith from Oslo, older than me and very skilled. And I watched him constantly, and I watched how he worked with pewter, so I started working with it, and got interested in it, and decided I would do my thesis on pewter work. And I did and it was a good thesis. When I read it over today I think, gosh, I’d forgotten so much of this stuff. I’m learning from myself.

But it was a very good experience. I had reasonably good writing skills. Even if I didn’t speak well I could write reasonably well. So I wrote this thing in five days nonstop, night and day. Just sat down and wrote the whole thesis out. And all the other kids in the class – there were I think five of us graduating – couldn’t get their writing approved. And I was sure I wouldn’t get mine approved either. And he read it over and said, “Fine.” And it was approved without having to be re-written.

MS. YAGER: Now when you talk about the thesis, would this have been historical research, or would this have been technique and process?

MR. FENSTER: Part of it was historical. It begins with a history of pewter, a brief history of pewter, and then it was all about process after that, and the experiments I did with casting and forming. And then I did a whole succession of pieces in pewter. That’s how I got started working with it.

MS. YAGER: What is some of the history of pewter? Colonial?

MR. FENSTER: Well, it goes back. I think the oldest piece in existence that’s documented goes back to about 1,500 B.C. and it’s found in Asia. It’s – it’s a small bottle about that big. I can’t think what the name of it is now. It was found in this particular place in Egypt, and of course Asian pewter is also – goes way, way back in time. I mean, tin is mentioned in the Bible, so they knew the properties of the metal. And oddly enough, this unguent container from Egypt, Abydos – it’s called the Abydos Flask –

MS. YAGER: How do you spell that?

MR. FENSTER: A-b-y-d-o-s. Abydos. I’ll give you – I’ll give you a handout. It’s in there. There are some pictures of it, too. And it’s very much like a modern alloy. It’s got over 90 percent tin in it, and that’s what – what we use today is 92 percent tin. It’s got some copper in it, and I don’t know what the rest of it, but it’s very similar in content. And that’s like 1,400, 1,500 B.C., something like that. Goes way back there.

And then, you know, in Medieval times, London alone had over 400 pewter shops, individual pewter businesses, and the last one closed about two years ago. Crown and Rose was the last one in London that closed. I mean, there are still some in England, but you know, obviously it doesn’t have the kind of audience it once had.

I belong to the Pewter Collectors Club of America, basically for the kind of historical knowledge I wanted to learn. And we – at the meetings they call it the “Tupperware of the Middle Ages.” Everybody used pewter, and it was cheap, renewable, easily formed, easily used material that didn’t have much intrinsic value, but it was useful. It was a good – it was a good tool for the home.

MS. YAGER: How was it – was it usually cast?

MR. FENSTER: Usually cast, yes.

MS. YAGER: So it could be re-melted and – because it’s very –

MR. FENSTER: That’s the way it was used in this country. We were captive of the English. We were not allowed to manufacture our own pewter. We were not allowed to use raw materials, so Americans started melting down pewter that came in from England and re-shaping it the way they wanted it. But you know, we were – like I say, a captive audience for English pewter production. And we had a joint meeting with the English Pewter Guild people, and it was amazing. They were so superior and so condescending to us. We met in Williamsburg –

MS. YAGER: It’s only been 300 years, you know.

MR. FENSTER: What’s that?

MS. YAGER: It’s only been 300 years.

MR. FENSTER: It was a riot. They were very nice individually, but as a group, whenever the head of the guild had something to say, he was very pompous when he had something to say officially. He was wearing his medal as the head, the president of the guild, and he’d stand up and harrumph, and then give his little spiel and sit down, rearrange his medal.

MS. YAGER: Was this in England or –

MR. FENSTER: No, in Williamsburg down in Virginia.

MS. YAGER: Oh, okay, Colonial Williamsburg, yes.

MR. FENSTER: Yeah, and they opened up – this is a very good group of people. They opened up all the museums to us. When I can get to the meetings, they let us handle 14th century pewter work, they let us handle ancient English stuff. And the English component, the group came over, so we had this joint meeting, and it was amazing. And nobody knows how to work with pewter. They’re all collectors. They’re antique dealers, they’re historians. Most of the pewter books that I have on my shelves were written by these people. I met them, and I was too shy to talk to them. But I met them, you know. It was – they were very nice individually, but as a group, God, what a – they were arrogant about their knowledge. They would – you know, at the meeting they would refer to us as their younger cousins. So rude.

Anyway, as I say I joined this group because it’s very active and I get to learn a lot about the historical side of pewter. And I – they collect stuff that’s unbelievable. Everything was made out of pewter, from nursing bottles, you know, baby nursing bottles. In fact, I had a student make one last semester out of pewter, a nursing bottle. To wine-making equipment, you know, special funnels. There is a – the group is absolutely obsessed with pewter, so if you go to breakfast at one of their meetings, you start eating breakfast, somebody stands up and says, “I have some pewter here I want to talk about.” He drags out his pewter. You go to lunch, the same thing happens. You go to dinner, the same thing happens. Part of every meal is a learning session about pewter, where they bring in very unusual items. And they’re not interested in contemporary pewter at all. I tried. So I just kept my mouth shut and I learned a lot.

Three of us. Three of us out of maybe 50 or 60 people knew how to work with the material.

MS. YAGER: The – I belong to the American Society of Jewelry Historians, and it’s not quite so extreme, but it’s a wonderful – it’s wonderful to learn all the historical background of our field, and many of them are not aware of contemporary makers. They don’t even know that they exist.

MR. FENSTER: Yeah. I mean, you learn all kinds of esoteric, strange facts that you would never get out of a book, but these people are – they’re like detectives. And part of that is interesting to me, you know, because of the obsessive quality of gathering information. And part of it is so over the top that you have to enjoy the fact that somebody would go to the lengths that they go to in tracing down work. I mean, you know, they’re dredging the shores of the Thames to dredge up Roman artifacts, you know, which are many, many pewter artifacts.

And I have a friend who is like this, Jerry Jackson, and he’s in State College, Pennsylvania, you know, the home of Penn State. So he started collecting these little miniature amphora pieces – amphora pieces. And today, like when you go to the Olympics you come back with these Olympic medals, you know, or these Olympic keepsakes, you know, in enamel, in expensive enamel to show that you were there. Years ago people would go to religious sites and they would come back with pewter castings that were slush-cast into a stone mold, pour the pewter in, dump it out. They’d have a thing that was like tissue paper and then they’d pour in some sand from the site, fold the neck of the amphora over, and then they would wear this. And my friend Jerry collects those things.

MS. YAGER: What time period are these from?

MR. FENSTER: The Middle Ages, you know. I don’t know, the 1400’s. I don’t know. But you know, they were – this was proof that they had journeyed to this site and it gave them prestige in the eyes of God, presumably.

MS. YAGER: Well, it’s a connectedness with that place.

MR. FENSTER: Absolutely. So they would come back with either sand or soil or something like that. And the neck of this amphora shape, which was only about that big, like two inches long, and he has some. He has some of those. And I didn’t get excited because in the beginning he was showing me little torn fragments that he had bought from antique dealers in England. And I said, “What’s this thing? It doesn’t look like anything. It’s so little, it looks like something that fell on the floor when you were trying to cast, you know. This is a splash.” And he said, “Wait.” And he kept unwrapping these cellophane envelopes, and then he took out a whole amphora, you know, and there it was. So that got me. I was dead tired after the workshop. My eyes snapped open and I thought, this is really interesting.

MS. YAGER: I’m always struck that something 500 years old that, you know, that people continue to talk about it. That’s the potential we have as makers.

MR. FENSTER: It’s quite wonderful when you think about it. Somebody spends years traveling to a pilgrimage site. I mean, there’s no question of taking a plane or anything like that. You trudge. You trudge for a couple of years to get there. And then you get there, there’s this, you know, hole in the ground or something, where some religious transformation occurred, and there are souvenir sellers, just the way there are today, and you come back with a keepsake, and it gives you prestige among your friends and the experience of a lifetime, presumably. You know, because the experience is not the result. It’s the trip itself. Like we always talk about process and end result. The process for me is what’s important in metal work. Like I – the experience of the process is the key thing for me.

The end result I try to make as good as possible, but what stays in my head is what I learned when I was doing it. So I love this stuff, you know. Really interesting for me.

So anyway, you were talking about Richard Thomas. He set up a good structure, and he had a collection of metal work that was part of Cranbrook’s that was in the studio that we could examine, and I became familiar with several really wonderful hollowware people, one of whom was named Stone [Arthur J. Stone], who was a fabulous craftsman. Did very sort of neoclassical, beautiful hollowware in very thin metal. And I – I came to realize that the way we were being taught was wrong. Richard Thomas had us use like 16-gauge silver to raise things, and that was a lot of work, a lot of money, and it wasn’t the way our predecessors did it very often. Like this guy Stone used 20-gauge metal. He did it fast, he did it well, and he did it much more easily. So I changed my thinking about all of that.

When I got out, somebody actually from – Birmingham, Michigan was a very ritzy town – somebody actually had dropped a piece of Mr. Stone’s work, including the tray, and they brought five pieces to me to get them bumped out and straightened out, so I had a chance to keep the pieces for a week and examine them very carefully. So I saw how they were made. They were magnificent pieces.

MS. YAGER: He had gone to Cranbrook?

MR. FENSTER: No, he hadn’t gone to Cranbrook. I believe he was English originally, but he lived in America a long time. I have a biography of him somewhere.

MS. YAGER: How about Harry Bertoia, with –

MR. FENSTER: Harry Bertoia did go to Cranbrook.

MS. YAGER: Were there pieces there of his?

MR. FENSTER: No. The only thing was one of those big dandelions, you know, where the tines kind of move in the wind and vibrate and make noise. But that was a real plus for us, you know, knowing that [Charles] Eames and [Harry] Bertoia and a lot of these people had been there. It gave Cranbrook, you know, a kind of prestige that we all had enormous respect for.

When I went there we actually made models for – I just forgot his name – Saarinen, the younger [Eero] Saarinen, the architect who had his offices right next to Cranbrook, and the first year I was there we made 430 two-inch high, 400 chairs and 30 other pieces, including banquet tables, that were models for a presentation that he was going to make. We made them out of a 14-gauge square wire, copper wire that we got from the dump. And each chair had 13 solder joints in it and Don Haskins and I did the whole thing in something like two weeks.

MS. YAGER: These were the little model wire chairs?

MR. FENSTER: Yes. This big. Thirteen solder joints in each chair because it had the stringers, you know. So there were four leg joints and then the two, the cross pieces, that was six, and then there were the rest of the joints. So we pulled the wire down – I’d never done anything like this before. This guy Don Haskins was a real wild man. And I was good at soldering. I was very good at silver soldering, so I did almost all the soldering. We put the thing together, spray painted it, delivered it on time.

And then I did another one on my own where I made captain’s chairs out of wood. Same thing, a couple of inches high. There were only about 30 of them, I think, and delivered it to Saarinen. So we had that contact where we could see the models, you know. He was right behind Cranbrook. And then after I got out they moved and he died en route. When everybody was in transit, Saarinen died, and they were moving to Massachusetts or something. It was a question of whether the business would continue, which it did. It did continue.

Those were really wonderful experiences.

MS. YAGER: Now would those have been jobs that you were paid for?

MR. FENSTER: Yes. Yes. We got paid for those. They were – what would happen – well, it was interesting. That was a source of conflict in the studio, which is one of the bad things about what happened with Thomas. He doled out the jobs, and so somebody would come in the studio, they would go to him and he would say, “Fred or Don, would you like to do this?” I always said yes, because I needed the money and because I wanted the experience. So I did all these jobs, and I prepared things all the time. I made it – I made insulators for this beautiful 17th century French – like a drinking cup or a mug out of silver, and it had ivory insulators in it that had dried up and cracked with age. I replaced those. So I did two pieces like that. And I – it was like – it was like working on museum – they were museum pieces and they were done actually for the librarian, Mrs. Barnes. I loved working for her.

So a lot of this stuff came in. One of the Saarinen’s was an interior decorator, and so she would come in all the time with commissions to have somebody in the studio make something for one of her interiors. I did some – Aline Saarinen. I did some of those things at the time.

MS. YAGER: Well, what was the contention?

MR. FENSTER: Well, yes, I didn’t explain that. The first time Dick doled out the job to fix this 17th century French mug. The second time Mrs. Barnes called and she said, “Oh, Fred, I have another one of those, could you fix it for me?” And I said, “Sure,” without thinking. Well, anyway, Dick Thomas flipped because I bypassed him. And I didn’t mean to do that, you know. I just thought it was reasonable that she talked to me, and she asked me to do it and I said yes. He got really angry at me, and he accused me of hovering near the phone, picking off the commissions. I said, “I’m not hovering, and I’m the only one here who’s willing to take those on. None of the other students want to do that stuff. They don’t know how to do it.”

Michael Jerry got this really nice commission, a church commission to do a – I don’t know, two chalices, or a chalice and the intinction cup, and a whole bunch of stuff for a church. And Dick said to Michael, he said, “Well, you have to give it to the other students.” And Michael said, “They don’t know how to do work of that caliber.” And he said, “You have to give it out.” And so Michael said, “Well, what if I don’t give it up?” And he said, “Then you can’t do it in the studio.”

So Michael, we rented a little real estate building, just a little bungalow, and he did it in that bungalow. And I was able to watch him do the pieces, and I learned a lot. And the quality, Michael is a superb craftsman. The quality was beautiful.

MS. YAGER: So in some ways the students lost out by not even witnessing that process.

MR. FENSTER: Well, that was Dick’s thing. He wanted to control everything, and I thought that his attitude was unreasonable. If we were a skilled group of people, that was one thing. Then Michael would have been willing. But he wasn’t willing to compromise his designs by people who were beginners, you know, which is what we were.

MS. YAGER: You mean, Michael would have designed it, and someone else would have executed one of the pieces?

MR. FENSTER: That’s the way Dick worked. Dick didn’t do his own work. Dick designed things. Like I used to do his work. The big Cranbrook punch bowl, I made that. It’s not my design, you know, and it’s a nice bowl, but basically he had it spun commercially. It’s big. It’s like this.

MS. YAGER: About two, two-and-a-half feet across.

MR. FENSTER: And I planished it and I stoned it and I did all the grunt work on it, nothing creative there. Took me a week to clean the thing up and take the spinning rings out of it and planish it and get it all set up. Then he assembled it.

But you know, I benefited from doing that work, although I hated doing this particular one because it was really hard and it was hot as hell there. But I did chalices for him. There was a Lutheran seminary attached to Cranbrook and we would get commissions off – from that seminary. And I did I don’t know how many chalices for them, where I would make the cups. He had the cups spun, and I would planish the cups and then build the rest of the piece. So it was good experience for me. It’s one of the ways I started making cups, which I still make to this day. So there were, you know, that was a good thing.

But there was tension in the studio about the commissions and who got them and why they got them and so on. And I felt like throwing up my hands and saying, “I don’t want to do this any more, you know. Give them to somebody else. I don’t give a damn.”

MS. YAGER: How many – you were there for two years?

MR. FENSTER: Yes.

MS. YAGER: And name some of your other fellow students.

MR. FENSTER: Well, Gudmund Jon Elvestad was a Norwegian that did the pewter.

MS. YAGER: How do you spell his last name?

MR. FENSTER: Elvestad, e-l-v-e-s-t-a-d. Gudmund, Jon, J-o-n Elvestad.

MS. YAGER: And who else?

MR. FENSTER: Don Haskins. Les Motz. Michael Jerry. Myself. Brent Kington was there the second year. Leilani Kam, k-a-m, was a Chinese girl from Hawaii. Richard Mazur, M-a-z-u-r, who became – he got the job here. Richard got the job. We all – five of us applied for the job. Richard got the job because the –

MS. YAGER: Here at University of Wisconsin?

MR. FENSTER: Yes. He got the job. Because characteristically the art department couldn’t get off its behind to make a decision so they let the thing slide, and Richard showed up. Richard was very aggressive. He showed – he moved. He lived in a trailer camp in Stoughton. He showed up and they said, “Oh, we need somebody. Okay, you’re hired.” So they never even contacted me or any of the others. So then after three years he got – he was let go because he was not – he ran – he got into a head-to-head conflict with [Arthur] Vierthaler, the senior teacher, so he wasn’t re-hired.

And then Harvey Littleton came to see me in Birmingham and asked me to come up for an interview, and that’s when I came.

MS. YAGER: The woman, the Chinese student, was she the only female in the class?

MR. FENSTER: No. Betty Helen Longhi was there also. Stanley Lechtzin was there the second year. Stanley and I became really good friends. He was wonderful. He was just great. People have negative things to say about Stanley, but I think the world of him. He’s a wonderful – I learned more about jewelry in a short time from Stanley because he had been working. He had a full studio set up at home. He was – he shared everything, you know. We became good friends.

MS. YAGER: Now why did he have so much training?

MR. FENSTER: He worked in the trade for a year. He went to, what was it, Cass Tech [Lewis Cass Technical High School] in Detroit, and then he worked in the trade for a year before he decided to go to grad school. So he knew how to buff. None of us knew how to polish, you know.

MS. YAGER: I think I read somewhere that Cass Technical High School, I’m pretty sure if I remember right they had five metals teachers at one point. This was a high school, but –

MR. FENSTER: Well, that’s where Gene Pijanowski went also, and his background was really good.

MS. YAGER: I didn’t realize that.

MR. FENSTER: He’s in Hawaii now. Yes, he had a really good background because of that. Very technical, very good problem solving. And he – Stanley and Gene share some common traits, you know, about –

[Audio break. Tape change.]

MS. YAGER: This is Jan Yager interviewing Fred Fenster in the artist’s home and studio in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on August 9, 2004 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This is disk number two, session number one.

Fred, we were talking about Cranbrook and fellow students. Can you talk about the second year, some of the people that were there?

MR. FENSTER: Yes. Well, I think, you know, the best thing that happened at Cranbrook was the mix of students, both in the metal studio and outside. The second year Brent Kington came in and Stanley Lechtzin came in, which Stanley’s presence was a real boon for me because I got to ask a million questions about jewelry and he answered them. I could ask anything I wanted, and he would give me a really good, comprehensive answer.

That year Stanley made Betty Longhi’s engagement ring, and that was really fun to see that develop. Had a marquis diamond in it – or not a marquis diamond. It had a – yes, a marquis. A marquis diamond. Really a nice ring.

MS. YAGER: Now you mentioned Gene Pijanowski. Did they study together at [Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan]–

MR. FENSTER: They studied together, but they came – I don’t know if they – I think they met at Cranbrook, from what I remember. But I didn’t know Gene at that time. I didn’t know Gene until well afterward.

MS. YAGER: They were both students of Phillip Fike, I believe.

MR. FENSTER: Were they? I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. I know that they really, you know, spent time together at Cranbrook. I didn’t realize they were students of Fike’s. Fike was a very influential teacher.

MS. YAGER: I know that Fike really emphasized research, and I think Vierthaler emphasized –

MR. FENSTER: Emphasized research as well, and that was one of the really good things that he did. The other thing that he emphasized was drawing. He had everybody do a lot of drawing, and he was quite good at drawing himself. So that was a – there were several people who came out of the program in Madison who were really wonderful. Fike was one, and Von Neumann was another.

MS. YAGER: Robert Von Neumann.

MR. FENSTER: Robert Von Neumann, who was Eleanor Moty’s teacher, and of course she was my colleague for 25 years here. So you know, it’s interesting how that turns on itself.

MS. YAGER: Phillip Fike talked about, in studying at University of Wisconsin at Madison, that there was a historical jewelry, or historical practices course. Do you remember this?

MR. FENSTER: I think that course was in the art history department, and it was probably taught by James Watrous, who – who basically taught about painting and he had the students experience these things by mixing up tempera paints and going through the processes that were used.

MS. YAGER: The actual minerals and – yeah.

MR. FENSTER: Doing the actual mixing and preparation of canvases.

MS. YAGER: So the hands-on appeal of learning –

MR. FENSTER: Right. And Watrous also did murals around campus that are ceramic tile murals, you know, with small tesserae. So as you go around campus, you can see these things. They’re placed in various areas. That was a course, everybody loved that class. They talk about it all the time still, about how valuable it was for them in terms of understanding how a painter made his preparations. I don’t know if that included print-making or not, but the paintings, the tempera painting is what I remember them talking about.

MS. YAGER: What were some of the things that Stanley was working on, and that Brent Kington was working on?

MR. FENSTER: Brent was working on a series of masks, copper masks that were basically formed on a stump and then he put the details in. And he also did very detailed castings. That’s when he started those gold castings that were just sort of small figures, caricature figures. And he continued that as he got older. He made them for his son, I remember. They were cast in gold. And Stanley was doing really spectacular jewelry pieces. Did some hollowware in school and did the jewelry at home because he had much more control there. He had a really beautiful shop at home, very well organized studio.

We became – both our wives were French-speaking. My wife was from Belgium and she spoke French as a main language, and Stanley’s wife of those years was also French, and so the women became friends. Stanley and I would see each other once or twice a week and share a lot of enthusiasm and information. Mostly I learned from him. I don’t think he was learning that much from me, but I got a lot out of it. And he seemed to enjoy the contact. And then when he went to Tyler [Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania], you know, that kind of broke up the – didn’t break the relationship up, it just meant we didn’t see each other as often. But he was really helpful for me. He just – he was so open about sharing things and he was also very committed, hard worker, and so was I. And I was doing hollowware.

When I had my graduate show, I think I probably had the biggest show of hollowware that they ever had there. I had 22 pieces of hollowware and 40 pieces of jewelry, almost all of which had stone settings. So it was a lot of work. Some of the hollowware was pretty good.

MS. YAGER: Tell me what the – this was with pewter?

MR. FENSTER: It was everything. I wanted as much experience as I could get. The first major piece that I did was a Kiddush cup, which I thought I was making for my father, but the St. Paul Art Center bought the thing, so that was the end of that. And then I made a sugar and creamer in silver, which I actually saw at an antique store in New York City, one of these Russian antique places on 26th Street. But it was closed. I would have bought them – I would have bought them back but I couldn’t get to them. When I went back, they were not there any more.

MS. YAGER: When was that? How long ago?

MR. FENSTER: Probably about 10 years ago. I think those pieces were sold to somebody local. There was a woman, Mrs. Harmon, and her husband was a big electrical contractor near Cranbrook, and she bought a lot of the production that came out of the school metal shop. A very wonderful woman. And she bought a lot of my stuff. She bought the jewelry; she bought some of the hollowware. So I guess when she died they probably – the pieces probably went into the general population.

Yes, I worked in silver; I worked in brass, copper, bronze, pewter. I had some stuff plated. I tried to make my best piece in silver and I over-annealed it and it broke while I was trying to close it in. And I turned around and I made it in bronze. It’s a really nice piece of work. But it was – I cut the silver up and I made jewelry out of it that was in the grad show, so everything got used, but it cost me about two weeks of time and the piece broke.

MS. YAGER: What was the central piece? You said your best –

MR. FENSTER: It was a teapot on a stand. It was a very Scandinavian-type teapot. It was on a swivel stand with an alabaster base. Handle was forged, had a really nice spout line. You could take it off the stand to pour or it could sit on the stand, you know, as a kind of permanent – what I was trying to do, I was trying to mimic what the program was at RIT. Michael had described – Mike Jerry had described the program very carefully, and that there was a hierarchy of pieces that were progressively more difficult. So I was trying – Cranbrook didn’t have that kind of a structure. I was trying to make a piece that would fall into the masters range of pieces, you know, and at RIT it would have been a piece with a burner on the bottom to heat the liquid. It would have been a teapot with a heater on the bottom, either Sterno or alcohol or something like that. I didn’t have a heater on mine, but the piece had an inside hinge where the hinge was inside the teapot so it was invisible. It had all kinds of complications that I put into it to learn a lot.

When I was there, I was very frustrated in not knowing how to structure my time, being there was no one telling me, or asking me to do a series of pieces. I thought, well, if I’m going to get something out of this, I have to figure out my own structures. So I wrote it out. I said, you’re gonna do a bowl on a stand, then you’re going to do this, then you’re going do this, then you’re going to do this. And I set up seven teapots, one in silver, one in copper, one in bronze. There were several in bronze. And I just – all of them had different problems involved. One had hinges involved and a very elegant spout, so I had to learn how to make a spout, which I didn’t know how to do, and Michael helped me with that.

So they were all graded. Each was a step up from the previous one. And that’s what I did. I had a notebook, I wrote it out, I did my design. I spent a lot of time late at night designing and re-designing and re-designing and re-designing, and then I just sat down and made the pieces, all in pursuit of learning to control the process because if I was in Scandinavia I would have to submit a drawing, and then the piece would have to be made exactly to the dimensions of the drawing. They would check that. The guild would check it. They would stamp a piece of silver, they would give it to me, I would do the work in front of them, and at the end they would check to see that it was just like the drawings. So that’s what I tried to do. And I pretty much did it except there was no guild checking, and so it was easier for me.

MS. YAGER: Self-guild.

MR. FENSTER: Right.

MS. YAGER: Tell me what Betty Helen Longhi, what kind of work she was doing.

MR. FENSTER: I don’t remember too well. I mean, I don’t remember what she was working on. I think that she was working on jewelry but the nature of it escapes me. We didn’t have too much contact. She was a very nice presence in the studio. We all liked her, and we’re still friends to this day, and I just talked to her last week, as a matter of fact.

MS. YAGER: How about Leila –

MR. FENSTER: Leilani?

MS. YAGER: Leilani.

MR. FENSTER: Leilani Kam.

MS. YAGER: Kan?

MR. FENSTER: K-a-m. Leilani was – [laughs] – a study in uncertainty, I guess. She had won a design competition in I guess it was Hawaii, a silversmith’s competition. I guess it wasn’t in Hawaii. She won a – won a silversmith’s competition. She got an award and none of us really knew anything about it. She just showed up one semester and she was really insecure. So we’d be sitting there working. There were eight of us in the room. We all had these really bad work benches and big square like woodworking tables that didn’t have anything to do with a jewelry bench. And all of a sudden Leilani burst out, “You all think I don’t deserve to be here, don’t you?” None of us had thought about her because she was quiet up until that time.

And then somehow she got on the wrong side of several members of the class, like Richard Mazur, and they started really making fun of her in an ugly way. Like Richard called her a “Dragon Lady.” Really awful. And the atmosphere in the studio went downhill. I actually came to the point where I did not like working there when the other people were around, which was one of the reasons I worked late at night.

But Leilani was not very confident, and she assumed that we were all against her, which we weren’t. Until she opened her mouth, I don’t think anybody was paying any attention to her at all. And I never knew what happened to her. I always wondered about what happened to her.

MS. YAGER: And how about Michael Jerry? What was he working on?

MR. FENSTER: Michael Jerry did jewelry. He did – when he came in he did the first casting I ever saw anybody do. I had never seen a lost wax casting before. And I watched him build a pin, and I still have slides of that pin with a citrine stone and it was very nicely designed. And the thing about Michael Jerry was that he had notebooks full of the most wonderful designs. Michael Jerry is one of those people, he draws like a savant. He can – I’ve never seen anybody like this before or since. He could start anywhere on the object and draw it, starting at any point and draw it in perspective. And he doesn’t sketch. He draws the line as if it was on the page already, you know. To me that’s miraculous.

He could start at the back of the object, you know, the front of the object, the top, the sides, and there’s no – they’re not tool lines anywhere. He draws it just as it is, and my mouth would hang open, you know. I was so envious of that kind of design ability. And he’s got great hands. He had worked for Toza Radakovich for a year, Svetozar Radakovich, who was a, you know, really good jeweler.

MS. YAGER: Where were theylocated?

MR. FENSTER: They were at that time, he and his wife Ruth were located in Rochester, New York, and then they moved down to California.

MS. YAGER: Because he had spent a year at RIT with Hans Christensen.

MR. FENSTER: And he worked also for Ron Pearson, and so he had Radakovich with the casting, Ron with the forging. He came with such a wealth of background, and then a year at school with Hans Christensen, so he had more than all of us put together. And he’s a very quiet, you know, self-effacing person, Michael. After a while we all realized how much he knew so we would go to him with questions, which caused Richard Thomas to get very upset because he was the teacher and we were going to Michael with questions.

The other thing was that the studio was not well equipped. We didn’t have stakes. We didn’t have a variety of stakes. We had – when I first went there, I saw a whole wall full of stakes, and I thought in my naiveté that this is incredible. There are seven rows and seven down, there are 49 stakes on that wall. Turned out there were seven stakes, seven copies of each stake, so there were seven stakes in the shop, not 49 stakes.

Michael had the benefit at RIT of what they did at RIT was that they cast – they made copies of the stakes in the studio and you bought what you wanted. So everybody turned to Michael because he had his stake set with him, and they’re borrowing stakes and borrowing stakes and borrowing stakes. And somebody made the mistake of bringing that up at one of our weekly meetings and because Michael had been – got fed up with this thing over the church stuff, you know, and he was leaving, going back to RIT. And somebody said, “What are we going to do without Michael? We won’t have any stakes.” And Dick hit the ceiling and he gave us all a problem of designing stakes and having them cast. And so today you can buy raising stakes at Cranbrook, you know. I still have mine. And then we also, I don’t know if you know about the C.F. Struck Corporation. They make stakes outside of Milwaukee in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and in those days a whole stake set, nine mushroom stakes, eight – nine hammers, I guess, eight mushroom stakes and eight T stakes, it was $42. So I still have my original set.

MS. YAGER: Are those the ones you had to finish yourself?

MR. FENSTER: Yes, you had to finish them yourself. The guy’s not doing it any more. For years I bought them for school, you know. They were great. They were cheap, ten bucks for a hammer. In the early days it was $12 for like a mushroom stake. Now at the end they were like $24, which is still cheap. I still have the entire set downstairs, my original set. Never broke any of them.

So yeah, after a while we had plenty of stakes in the studio, but it took a while to get there.

MS. YAGER: Tell me about – oh, I wanted to know about the jewelry in your graduate show. Can you describe some of the pieces?

MR. FENSTER: Yes. People said it looked – they look like fishing lures. They all had movable parts. They all featured tumbled stones, so I was making the settings out of wax, out of that 20-gauge green wax and –

MS. YAGER: This is sheet or wire wax?

MR. FENSTER: Sheet wax, yeah. And somewhere I have the slides here. I use the slides now to show my students how bad my work was in those days, and I tell them, “You can do better. This is what I was doing way back. You can do way better than that.” And at the time I obviously thought they were interesting, and I think at the time they were. But yeah, there were all kinds of stuff. They were combinations of casting and forging. I had learned a little bit of forging by watching Michael work. He – he worked for Ron Pearson who was, you know, did these wonderful forged chokers.

Interesting enough, I have a student working for Ron’s wife now. A great kid who really understands how to forge.

MS. YAGER: Describe the show. Was it a solo show or a group show?

MR. FENSTER: No, no, no. It was a group show. The whole graduating class was in that show and we had this wonderful gallery, the Cranbrook gallery. When you see automobiles photographed, they had these big columns in the back. That’s the Cranbrook gallery. They do the photography right there. They whip the coverings off the cars, they take their shots fast and they cover them up again and spirit them away.

Yes, this was a group show and the whole class was graduating and it was chaos. And it was one of the few times in my life where I got so angry. Everybody tried to grab off the best spots in the gallery, and so what they were doing was they were selfishly staking out their own space, and I couldn’t believe that people who had been friends all year long were cutting each other to pieces and insulting each other, screaming at each other. And I watched this and finally I said, I raised my voice because I was very quiet, and I said, “You know what? You people are destroying any chance you have to make this a good cohesive show by being selfish. So I tell you what – I’m going to walk out. You pick all your spaces and you fight it out and I’ll take whatever’s left.” And I walked out.

When I came back, they had calmed down, they gave me a really nice space, and they had apportioned the spaces in a way to make a really nice show. I came back late in the afternoon. I came back around 2:30, 3:00 o’clock. We put together a nice show, where everybody had a fair amount of space. I mean, people were doing things like channeling. When you came in, you had to walk down this aisle and then right at the end of the aisle there was Richard Mazur or somebody like that. So you could not – he would be the first person whose work you looked at. I thought it was ridiculous.

MS. YAGER: And now would this have been a public opening? Can you describe that?

MR. FENSTER: Yes. A movie star opening. Cranbrook was poor at that time. Now it’s plush, but at that time it was poor. And that one night they turned on the fountains in the, you know, the sculpture, the middle of the sculpture gardens there and the fish were spouting water and the underwater lights were on and it was magical. One guy in the design department had built a car, the whole car, and that was his graduate show, was that sports car, red, wonderful looking sports car with a beautiful fire engine red fiberglass body and he built the thing from zip, you know. Everything. He did it all. That was actually outside. They didn’t put that in the gallery. They had it at the entrance in the –

MS. YAGER: Where they photographed the cars?

MR. FENSTER: Right outside the door to the gallery. Anyway, that was a magical night. We’d never seen the place lit up like that before because they didn’t do it, you know, and they only did it for special occasions and that night was our graduation.

MS. YAGER: And did the public come?

MR. FENSTER: Yes. It was open to the public, and I remember getting this inquiry from the people at Cranbrook saying, “Would you like us to notify your hometown newspaper?” And I said, “Yeah, write to the Times, tell them I’m graduating.” [Laughs.] “Yeah, notify the New York Times, tell them I’m getting out. Sure to be headline news to them.”

It was a lot of fun. It was a wonderful opening.

MS. YAGER: And how long would the work have been up for?

MR. FENSTER: Well, you know, I’m not sure, but I remember when I came to Cranbrook the summer show was up, and I think it was the work of the people who had previously graduated. So I got a chance to go through the show at length and look at people’s work. And one of the interesting and memorable things that happened that summer when I arrived, because I came early – I came in the summertime, not in the fall – there was a ceramic guy named Donald Wright, W-r-i-g-h-t, who did pewter. Not a ceramic guy, I’m sorry. There was a pewter guy named Donald Wright who did pewter that looked like ceramics, and that was the first time I’d ever seen pewter used using the kind of ceramic sense or sensitivity or sensibility that I saw in the clay being made. I never saw anybody work pewter like that.

He textured it, he had offbeat forms, he didn’t have – his forms looked more like clay than metal but they were made of pewter and I thought, this is really interesting, you know. I had no idea how he worked with the metal until Gudmund started playing with the pewter. Gudmund played with it like it was silver. He treated it like silver but I didn’t. I treated it like it was clay when I began. I cut it, I slashed it, I slashed it with acid, you know, nitric acid. I was brush painting like, you know, a Japanese brush painter. I was very excited by it. I remember my hands were all yellow from acid burns, but it was so – everything was so immediate with this stuff. You didn’t have to wait for it to etch, you know. You just, “Pow!” and it etched right there. It smoked while it was etching. It was like God. You felt like you were writing the Ten Commandments on it. It would smoke. It would spiral smoke. No wonder I got – I was so burnt up. I was so excited I didn’t pay attention to it. And I wasn’t hurt or anything. My skin just turned yellow.

MS. YAGER: What sort of acid?

MR. FENSTER: Nitric. I was trying it in different concentrations and I was using like 50 percent nitric, 50 percent water. That’s really strong. Now when I do the pewter today –

MS. YAGER: Not recommended.

MR. FENSTER: No. It’s not good. You’re inhaling that stuff also. When I do the pewter today I use 14 parts of water to which I add one part of nitric, just to color it, you know, so it’s much – it’s really watered down.

MS. YAGER: Now the show, were people encouraged to buy things? Was that considered?

MR. FENSTER: They could, yeah.

MS. YAGER: Did people?

MR. FENSTER: I don’t remember, actually. I don’t know that I sold anything myself, but I do know that, you know, this woman I mentioned, Mrs. Harmon, she bought a lot of the jewelry that I made. She encouraged me to do that jewelry.

MS. YAGER: So that was not at the show –

MR. FENSTER: It wasn’t at the show, but the work was promised to her, so the work was in the show but she was getting it. I assume people sold.

MS. YAGER: And what happened to people – well –

MR. FENSTER: Gudmund went back to Norway and it’s interesting what happened, you know. Brent went down to found the iron program at Southern Illinois [Southern Illinois University-Carbondale].

MS. YAGER: Did this happen right away, like within –

MR. FENSTER: No. Within a couple of – well, he was still, you know, it was his first year and it was my last so he had another year to go. And then he got the job at Carbondale and he built – I mean, the strongest iron program in a university in the country.

MS. YAGER: Had there been a program there before?

MR. FENSTER: I don’t believe so. The other thing that Brent – Brent was a very, very – he knew how to talk to people. He was very, very good at, you know, he talked slowly, logically, very convincing, very nice personality, and he was really a slick guy. Was very, very slick when he was in Cranbrook, but after he got out he changed, you know, and he really got interested in teaching and he built a program that was extremely beneficial to the students. He got them scholarships. Every student – every grad student has a scholarship, you know. They were all two years. No other program that I know of has that. So he really worked with the students.

He just turned 70 a few weeks ago when I came back, I think the day I got back from Penland [Penland School of Crafts, Penland, North Carolina], Jan Craft called me up, and she said, “You know, Fred, Brent turned 70 today.” And I said, “I didn’t know that.” She said, “You might want to call him up.” And I said, “Nah, I don’t want to call him up.” But yeah, I have to admire what he accomplished, you know. He was really great.

And Stanley went on to – to do the Tyler program, you know. And it’s a program that, you know, set many standards on electroforming and computer generated jewelry, all the things that I’m not personally interested in, but I love the fact that Stanley was doing all of that, you know. Photography. He’s great. He’s just born to do research and incorporate the results. And I came here and, you know, did the pewter thing here and that’s worked out well for me.

Les Motz went down to Fort Wayne, Indiana [Indiana University-Perdue University, Fort Wayne] and taught down there for years. Betty Helen, I guess, you know, worked on her own. She still does that. She does workshops and she’s working a lot on pewter now. She took a pewter session with me in Penland and was good from the beginning and she does a lot of pewter work now that I run into occasionally.

Let’s see, who else was in that group. Michael went on to run a really successful program at Syracuse University, he ran a very good program there. John Marshall had originally set the studio up at Syracuse. He did a great job. Michael enhanced it. They had blacksmithing, they had a room – a separate room for everything, you know, for patinas, for raising, for – for hammering, for – a big jewelry room. I’ve done several workshops there. And yeah, that was a very successful class.

MS. YAGER: Let’s see. One of the things I wanted to ask you about, I read reference to in 1961 you were an Army crafts instructor.

MR. FENSTER: Oh, yeah. Right after I got out of Cranbrook. I – I applied for I think it was 240 and – you get this big book with all the art departments listed, you know. So I just looked at the book and I sent away letters to every art department. And I got about 40 letters back that showed an interest, and I did – Dick said, “Hey, there’s a job open in Louisville, Kentucky.” So I went down and I – I found that I was finishing everybody’s sentences because they spoke so slowly. I’m a New Yorker, you know. I can’t do that. And I thought, I can’t come down here. My wife would hate it, and I’m going to get really edgy here so I didn’t take the job.

But then this Army job came up where I was the assistant craft director of the 28th Missile Battalion that protects the Detroit area. Which meant that I was sort of a jack of all trades. I taught a little jewelry making, I taught – it was a great shop and I had a great boss, this guy Bruce Smyser. He’s an absolutely fabulous guy. He’s a graduate of Indiana University with Alma Eickerman. Not a metal guy. Sculpture guy. And Bruce was a wonderful boss and we hit it off well and I worked there for, I don’t know, must have been, I don’t know, the better part of a year, and it was an interesting job. I worked as a civilian for the Army, supervising the craft shops in these Nike bases. There were like 28 different Nike bases ringing Detroit.

MS. YAGER: I was interested in that because I read that they had these crafts shops in every single base.

MR. FENSTER: In every base. The more successful the crafts shop was, the less trouble you had with drinking and bad behavior on the base. So that the people who ran the best crafts shops were instrumental in terms of high Army morale. And it really – there was a very strong correlation.

MS. YAGER: So it was not about developing skills among the people. It was about keeping them busy and keeping them satisfied?

MR. FENSTER: Well, a lot of the people who attended the crafts shops were the dependents of the soldiers.

MS. YAGER: Children and –

MR. FENSTER: Not the children. The wives mostly. We had a lot of women doing the ceramics, slip cast – slip cast ceramics. And they loved decorating them and we had lots of molds. The guys came in mostly to do model airplanes that were motor driven, you know, with these little “nneeeehhh,” you know, motors in them, and there were several very dedicated guys working on those. But the biggest – there were a lot of woodworking guys, too. A lot of guys came in to do woodworking. So basically it was a supervisory thing with Bruce on the home base and then I would go out and visit the shops one by one all week. I just drove an Army car around from base to base.

MS. YAGER: It interests me because, you know, the National Endowment for the Arts, they’re now doing this link-up with the military, a writing program, Shakespeare on military bases.

MR. FENSTER: I think that’s great. I mean, these – I never was in the service and I had a misconception. I – I came to respect the people I met a great deal. I thought that the discipline and the seriousness and the caliber of the people I met was extremely high. Most of the civilian personnel that I met was extremely dedicated to serving the GI personnel. There was a woman – I was – it was in Detroit on the – on the river between Canada and that was the base, Ft. Wayne. Yeah, I think that was the name of the base. Between Winnipeg and Detroit.

MS. YAGER: Windsor, between Windsor –

MR. FENSTER: I mean Windsor and Detroit. Anyway, the woman who was in charge of the, you know, recreation facilities, she had lost a boyfriend or her husband in the war and this woman had dedicated her life to serving soldiers, and I never met anybody who was a finer example of giving your life up to make other people happy. And my boss Bruce was like that also. He just did everything he could to build that program. And it would have been a steppingstone for me to go to Europe, you know. If I worked there for a couple of years I could have gone to Europe in that program and had a nice, you know, posting in Europe. But the University of Wisconsin thing came up, and I took it when it came up.

MS. YAGER: That was in 1962?

MR. FENSTER: Yes. I came here in 1962.

MS. YAGER: And how did – how did that come about?

MR. FENSTER: A fluke, you know. The way most things in life are. Harvey Littleton was looking to replace himself in ceramics and he got Donald Reitz to do that, and then he was looking for a metal guy because the guy before me, Dick Mazur, they let him go for conduct inappropriate to somebody working there. So I had applied. My application was still there from before. They had never contacted me in any meaningful way, so when they did contact me, it was way too late and I just didn’t even bother answering.

So Harvey came to Birmingham, Michigan, pulled up early in the morning, like 7:00 o’clock or something, and he said, “Are you still interested in a job?” I said, yeah. He said, “Can I come over? I’m here in town.” I said, “Sure.” So I put my pants on and the doorbell rang. He was right outside. So he – I don’t think he was too impressed with me, but Harvey’s one of these people who is over-awed by Europeans, and my wife was from Belgium and he started trying to speak French to her. Didn’t pay any attention to me. They rattled on together and really enjoyed each other. The next thing I know he says, “Would you come up for an interview?” Just because of Josette, you know. And I said, “Yeah, okay.” Not thinking I’d get the job because Michael Jerry had applied for the job and I thought – I was still naïve enough to think that the best person got the job.

So I came up and Michael, actually he had stopped off to see me on his way up, I figured I didn’t have a chance in hell because I didn’t stand up against him. So I had a very difficult interview. They were rude. Two of the people were absolutely rude. I had this old guy, Leo Steppat, who was from Austria. He came out of the concentration camps in Europe. He taught sculpture here, and his voice box was damaged in the concentration camp, and he said to me, “Mr. Fenster, did anyone ever tell you your work looks like shit?” And I said, “Not until today.” He said, “What do you think of that?” I said, “You know, all of these pieces – all of these pieces were done as a learning experience,” and actually – I told the truth. Actually I don’t know how I feel about them myself. So I said, “I did them to learn a series – they were like a series of exercises. So I have mixed feelings about them which are not settled yet. And if you think they look terrible then that’s what you think.”

So it didn’t rattle me. I mean, I figured I, you know, I wasn’t investing a lot in this. And then he took me around and he asked me a lot of dumb questions about the stuff he did in sculpture, and I knew all the answers because I had spent a lot of time at Cranbrook looking at the sculpture studio and all the stuff they did there. And then it turned out at the meeting he was a big supporter of mine, you know because I didn’t blow up, I didn’t call him names.

What I learned in the end is that it had nothing to do with merit. What they wanted was somebody who could get along with Vierthaler, somebody who was quiet, who wouldn’t rock the boat, which is what Mazur did, who wouldn’t – and Michael Jerry never had a chance. Michael Jerry’s father was the curator of the Wustum Museum [Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, Wisconsin] in Racine. And members of the art department had had run-in’s with Sylvester Jerry and he was off the map as far as anything positive happening. Because I tried to – I tried to get Michael a job there teaching design after, and they wouldn’t even consider it. I said, “Why don’t you bring him in for an interview and form your own opinion instead of saying no?” “No, we’re not going to do that.” He didn’t even have a chance. I didn’t know that.

So when I got the job offer, I was so embarrassed, you know. I felt that somehow I had taken a job away from Michael and I was – I felt so badly about it. I actually went to Syracuse to tell him personally, you know. I actually made a trip there, stopped off. I was making a trip with one of my students then. I told him face to face because I didn’t think this was something you do on the phone. And I said, “I don’t know how it happened, you know. I don’t stack up against you. We both know that.” He was angry. I didn’t – I figured he should be angry.

So anyway, he took a job up at Stout and I took the job here.

MS. YAGER: Stout?

MR. FENSTER: Stout Institute, which is in Menominee, Wisconsin. It’s about two hours, two and a half hours from here. So he taught there and I taught here, and it should have been the other way around.

MS. YAGER: Tell me about your first year of teaching here.

MR. FENSTER: First year of teaching was – I told you I looked very young. I was 25. Many of the students were older. Nobody believed I was the teacher. And I taught two metal classes and a class in what they call crafts, which was woodworking, metalworking, and I actually had a textile component, though I didn’t know much about textiles. And I had – in that class I had mostly occupational therapy students who were wonderful. They were fabulous. And then I also taught a design class. I had four sections. And it was very hectic and I worked really hard.

And Vierthaler took me under his wing. I was over at his house every weekend. He treated my like his own son. Better, actually. Wouldn’t act nice to his own sons. Treated me better. And as long as I didn’t do anything to change things – he told me, he said, “Don’t change anything. This is my shop. I don’t want to see you do anything to change what’s here. It’s my – it runs the way I want it to run.” So of course I tried to change things, you know. I built racks for the stakes; I tried to organize the place. Vierthaler had a – he had a big shop coat with a lot of pockets and everything was in the pockets, which meant that the dapping block was in the pockets, the draw plates were in the pockets. So when I needed something, I couldn’t get stuff.

So I started ordering things for myself. And which he allowed, and I set up a tool cabinet that we both could use, with racks, the way an industrial art guy would do it. Everything had a name and a place and the students were required to clean up and put everything back, and he said, “I don’t want that in here,” you know. I said, “This way we both get to use everything. The other way I have nothing. It’s all in your pockets and you lock your coat up and I’m dead.” And he said, “You can’t do that.” And I said, “You have a key and I have a key. We both have.” He wouldn’t do it. I don’t know why. He just wouldn’t do it because it meant sharing and he was the senior guy and he didn’t have to do it.

So anyway, things deteriorated. We got along well for two years and then we had another two years that weren’t very good, and then we moved from the old education building to this new building where we are now, and it was very chaotic. And when we moved, Vierthaler took the whole year off. Never showed up. He was in town. Never showed up to check on anything. So I thought, you know what? He’s not here. I’m going to do the thing the way I want it. Because he wouldn’t let me change anything, so I couldn’t change his designs that he fought with the architects over. It was a really stupid design. You had to go out in the hall to get from one room to another. You had to physically go out in the hall, go around. So what I did when nobody was looking on a weekend was I cut through the walls and I framed in doorways. I put two doorways and three windows in.

And when he came back after that year – he hadn’t shown up one single time – he hit the roof. He said, “You change my” – he was a tough guy.

MS. YAGER: I heard he had a booming voice.

MR. FENSTER: Yes. He was a phys ed instructor. He wasn’t big but he was very – he had fighting medals from the Army, boxing medals. Scary guy. Little shorter than me but physically very rugged. And he said, “You had no right to do that.” I said, “You weren’t here. I had to make decisions.” He said, “You had no right. You should never have done that.” I said, “It’s done, and it’s better. It’s better. If you look at it, you have to admit that it’s better.”

He didn’t plan for a buffing room, for instance. He gave himself two offices, one in that room and then one in the grad room. Two separate big offices. So I took one of the offices, the one that was supposed to be for me, and I made it into a buffing room, a really good buffing room. And I made it so we shared the other office, and he said, “I’m not sharing an office with you, Freddy.” And I said, “That’s the choice that you make, you know. I’m happy to share an office with you.”

And he said, “I’m not teaching with you.” He said, “I don’t want you in the end room. Don’t – don’t put your nose in there. That’s my room. I’m not coming into these rooms any more because you changed them.” And then he stopped talking to me, except to yell. So for seven crappy years, or probably more like four crappy years, there were two years that were okay, the first two, and then a medium year, and then the rest of it was bad. And then he moved out of metal and hired Eleanor [Moty]. Without telling me. Didn’t say a word to me. Didn’t put me on the committee to work with Eleanor. Nothing. He just – he and Harvey hired her. And he didn’t know that I knew Eleanor, we were friends from Tyler because I went to do workshops there and visit Stanley. So I was very happy about it.

And then he left metal entirely and taught only drawing. And then Eleanor and I had a chance to build a good program. But he basically sat on the program before that and he didn’t work in metal for many, many years. He wasn’t that interested. He didn’t pay any attention.

MS. YAGER: Was he an enamellist?

MR. FENSTER: No, he did – what he was was – when I came he was a really good teacher because he had a very strong personality and he – the drawing thing I thought was great and his style of teaching was really good. He was emphatic. He would do things like – he would get a lot of GI’s from the war who had the GI Bill so they had money to buy materials so they worked in silver. He’d have a fistful of change, you know, and he had this big rough voice and this big personality and he’d take the change and he’s fling it all over the room, this big room that we had in the old building. And he’d say, “You see that? If you cut your piece out of the middle of that silver, you’re throwing your money away. Cut it at the edge.” You would think you wouldn’t have to tell people, but all beginners do the same thing, you know. They cut the piece out of the middle. Stuff like that that nobody ever forgot. He had a fantastic personality. He was a sailor.

His thing was always to test people, get the better of people. So when we were still on reasonable terms he said, “When are you going to go sailing with me?” And I said, “Well, one of these days, Art.” He said, “Do you get seasick?” I said, “Yes, probably,” because it was in like mid – Lake Michigan. I knew it was a test, you know, and so I said, you know – so finally after being badgered for two years I said, “I’ll go sailing with you.” And I went for five days of being browbeaten, and attempted humiliations. Except that I never knuckled under, you know. In my quiet way, you know, I stood up to Art and he was the one who actually ended up getting rattled.

So we went out, me and him and his wife, five days together on the boat without getting off the boat. And it turned out he wasn’t a very good sailor because Lake Michigan is really treacherous, and I didn’t – I had been sailing a couple of times in my life and I said, you know, we were going around the tip of Wisconsin is Green Bay – or it’s not Green Bay, it’s – there’s a channel there. It’s called the Door of – the Porte das Mortes, Death’s Door, and the winds get really wild and there are reefs all over the place and there’s lots of wrecks up there.

So the boat had heeled over at an angle where the side-rail was buried in the water, and I wasn’t even standing on the bottom. I was standing on these cabinets at the side of the boat. And it was cold and it was wet and very dangerous and I said – and the wind was screaming. I said, “What happens if one of us falls overboard?” And he said, “You won’t last four minutes in the water. You’ve got about four minutes and you’ll die.” So I said, “Okay,” you know. I looked at the nearest island and I thought, that’s what I’d have to go for, you know.

Well, the more time I spent with him the more I realized he didn’t know how to sail properly, you know. So we’d get around, we came around the island, and then he’s – he’s a drinker. Vierthaler was a drinker, which is one of the difficult things with him, and he needed to get boozed up. And we tried to get into Fish Creek, which was an area that I had taught at previously. We tried to get in and we tried to get in and we tried to get in. There was this crazy wind coming off the headlands and couldn’t get in. And he’s getting really frustrated, and I’m thinking, the sailboat has a motor in it. Why doesn’t he start the motor? And I thought, must be a macho thing. You don’t do it if you’re a sailor. You don’t start the motor.

So it was getting dark. It was getting too dark to see, and I said, “Art, I don’t want to be impertinent or anything, but why don’t you just start the motor?” And he goes, “The motor!” Started the motor and we motor in. We have a nice dinner and Art gets drunk as a skunk and he’s – luckily he’s a pleasant drunk, but he’s a terribly sexist guy, starts insulting all the women in the place and I’m turning red as a beet, you know.

But in the meantime, you know, he’s yelling at me all the time about this and about that and I’m handling the tiller and he’s got to change the sails, go fast, go slow, and he’s getting very frustrated. I said, “You know, what? You did a stupid thing. You took two people out, neither one of us – not your wife Ruth nor I know a thing about sailing. Then you’re screaming at us for being ignorant. So who’s the ignorant one here?” So he didn’t like that kind of thing. I said, “You put yourself in a position and you get angry at us? We should be angry at you.”

The other thing that happened was, I got seasick and he seemed really happy when I got seasick because he doesn’t get seasick. He’s like a rock. This guy is so tough. And then after about – you know, you start shaking with chills and everything, nauseous. So it was about 4:00 in the morning when I got seasick, and they covered me up with all these sails. I had a pile of sails on top of me. And all of a sudden the sun came out and the water – there’s a very sharp chop that a lot of people who don’t get seasick get seasick. And then all of a sudden I felt better. My strength came back, I stopped, you know, feeling nauseous and shaking. Pushed the sails aside, stood up, and said, “I can take the tiller now. I’