Oral history interview with Michael John Jerry, 2004 Nov. 15-16

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Michael John Jerry, 2004 Nov. 15-16, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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

Interview with Michael John Jerry
Conducted by Jan Yager
At the Artist's home and studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico
November 15 and 16, 2004

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Michael John Jerry on November 15 and 16, 2004. The interview took place at the artist's home and studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, 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.

Michael John Jerry 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 Michael John Jerry in the artist's home and studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Monday, November 15, 2004, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This is disc number one, session number one.

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

MICHAEL JOHN JERRY: I was born August 18, 1937, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Even though my parents did not live in Grand Rapids, that was my mother's home, and she went home to have the baby. At that point, the family was living in Detroit, Michigan. That's where my father's offices were.

MS. YAGER: Tell me your father's name and when and where you think he was born.

MR. JERRY: Where and when? He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as far as I know, and his birth date, I'm not sure about. He would be 87 or so now-somewhere around 1900-1908, 1909.

MS. YAGER: Actually, I do have that. He was born 1904.

MR. JERRY: Nineteen oh-four, okay. All right.

MS. YAGER: Woodville, Wisconsin.

MR. JERRY: Woodville? Okay-[laughs]-Woodville is a little tiny village in northwestern Wisconsin, I believe.

MS. YAGER: And tell me your mother's name and where and-

MR. JERRY: Cherry Barr-maiden name-and my mother, I'm not sure about her birthplace. I'm not exactly sure about date either, but her childhood was spent out here in Denver, Colorado. Her parents were involved in ranching, outside Denver, and that, until Depression time-until probably 1929, 1930. The family businesses, many of them went bust, and her parents and her brother and sister and she moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan.

MS. YAGER: How did they choose Grand Rapids?

MR. JERRY: I'm not certain. I think there was another family business in Grand Rapids that was still healthy, and I think the men who were involved in the ranching side of the family came to Grand Rapids to work for one of the relatives, who was in the brick business. And that was a very, very large-there were many streets in Grand Rapids that are paved with Barr Bricks. There are-probably half the public schools that are still standing in Grand Rapids are constructed with Barr Bricks. And they were able to ride through the Depression on the strength of that particular business. They lived well, even during Depression times. They lived pretty well. So somehow they got through it all.

MS. YAGER: How did the Depression affect your father's family?

MR. JERRY: Oh! Big time. I would say, it probably has a lot-it ricocheted down into my generation, and maybe even further. I hope not. Well, my father-his father was a machinist and his mother was an elementary school teacher-in those days, being a school teacher meant two years of state normal college, and she could-and I don't know how long she taught, but he died before I was aware of him at all. So I don't know-my father's father died-well, he was a teen I think-of pneumonia. But the Depression-because of his father's foresight, his father kept all his money under the bed through the Depression and was able to buy homes, and bought, at one point, probably two city blocks of one neighborhood in Milwaukee during the Depression-buying homes for $500, $600 apiece. So when he died, he left a great deal of property. Unfortunately his wife didn't manage it very well, and it all ended up in pretty poor condition. And by the time she died, there wasn't much left of it.

Yeah, I think my-I'm trying to think-my father's attitude about money was a result of Depression times, and it's not an unusual story. If he were living now, he'd be mortified-[laughs]-at the idea of credit cards. Credit was not something-you either paid cash or you didn't do it. He was always-in his career, always extremely careful about money. He would call it a good year if he gave the state back money. Instead of running a deficit like we all do so we get more next year, he'd run it-he'd go with X thousand back to the city or wherever he was working, and of course, that-he was a workaholic, too, so he worked very, very hard. And that's-all of that ricochets into my-positively and negatively, and I have some of those traits-[laughs].

MS. YAGER: Tell me-both of your parents were artists. Can you tell me a little bit about your father's-he was a painter-

MR. JERRY: Okay, the best I can. My father-his parents lived in a section of Milwaukee where English was not spoken-very, very little, even in the public school. German, and something called Pla Deutsch [sp], was the language spoken. So when he emerged from school-public school-he was pretty much unable to deal with the outside world.

MS. YAGER: Did he speak German and this Pla Deutsch as well?

MR. JERRY: Yes, oh, yes, for sure. And one of his hardest times was restructuring his whole language, which he did as a young man. So as he headed towards arts school, he realized pretty quickly that he wasn't going to go anywhere unless he redid his whole language structure. So I don't know exactly how he did that-whether he went to-he must have gone to school, because-of some sort-because he would recite-when I was a kid, he would recite grammar stuff to me. He had all of that drilled into him, and he spoke the German version of English, which is what Pla Deutsch was. It was the worst of German slang and American slang. And it was just awful. There was no sign of it left. He worked very hard, and he wrote well. He-and I don't know how long that took-probably several years for him to eradicate that part of his background.

He went to an art school that was part of the Milwaukee Art Institute [Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design], and it was a typical museum school, from what I can imagine, like Chicago Art Institute, like Boston Museum School [School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]. All-much of art was being taught in museum schools at that time.

MS. YAGER: What was the name? Was it-

MR. JERRY: I think it was called the Milwaukee Art Institute, which became eventually-that educational arm of the Institute became the Layton Art School [Layton School of Art; closed in 1974], which now is no longer. And then, in those days, there were certificates that you had attended, and that was it. All this degree stuff came after World War II. And then at some point-I don't know about dates, but he did go to New York and spent time at Art Students League [New York, NY] and was a student of Thomas Hart Benton-

MS. YAGER: I also have-

MR. JERRY: -who he, you know, later in his life, went to see on occasion, before Benton died.

My mother went to art school inWashington, and I don't recall the name of the school. Now, it might have been-might have been, like, the Corcoran [Corcoran College of Art & Design, Washington, DC]. I'm not certain about that.

MS. YAGER: There's the Maryland Institute [Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore] down there.

MR. JERRY: Maryland Institute, okay, well, that's true. I'm not really certain; I'm very fuzzy on that. But she, from what I could tell, was involved mostly in the commercial side of the art world, and her early jobs had to do with advertising of the day, whatever that meant-fixing up photographs, you know, whatever they used people for. But that was very short-lived.

When she went home after art school, went back to Michigan, where she of course, eventually met my father-because he was involved in the WPA project at the time-she had also gotten very involved in-let's see, how can I say this-theater, via marionettes, puppets, and she was a major player. I think she was maybe even president of the Puppeteers of America at some point. I'm not certain about that, but certainly in the region she was very involved with that. So we had a lot of friends when I was a kid who were really puppeteers-serious puppets, serious plays, as well as children's plays. And then of course, film came along and pretty much knocked that out.

And then, from there, as I was growing up, both of my parents became teachers.

MS. YAGER: Before we get to that-

MR. JERRY: Before we get there-all right-

MS. YAGER:-I wanted to ask you a little bit-now, your mother was the Western Michigan supervisor for the Index of American Design.

MR. JERRY: Oh! Well, that's-that's helpful. [Laughs.] Well, that's probably where she met my father then.

MS. YAGER: Right, and your father was the director of the Works Progress Administration for the state of Michigan.

MR. JERRY: Right-that's right.

MS. YAGER: And it says here, "Unemployed people of all abilities were paid to use their skills to benefit society. President Roosevelt-this was the first relief art program in the United States, and it became a vital part of the democratic process."

MR. JERRY: Right.

MS. YAGER: And I had read that your father was very interested in social causes, and-

[Telephone rings, audio break.]

This is disc one, track number two.

Michael, we were talking about your father, Sylvester Jerry, and his attitudes-he was involved with the WPA and had a strong interest in social causes.

MR. JERRY: Yeah. Yeah, so it fit him well. [Laughs.] Part of my father's work life as a young man had to do with-he worked for the auto industry for a while. Milwaukee was a major blue collar town that produced-they didn't produce a single automobile, but they produced tons of parts for various automotive-particularly the Nash plant down in Kenosha, Wisconsin. So he was involved with that, but he also was a strike breaker, and I'm not just sure where, but he talked about going into plants with armed guards and things like that.

MS. YAGER: What sort of work did he do? I mean, his training was as an artist, so what did he do?

MR. JERRY: Yeah, yeah, he just sold his skills-well, manual skills. I think he put lead on seams of cars as they went by on the assembly line. Yeah.

But I know, later-later on when-I'm talking about the socialist thing-when he took the job as director for the museum in Racine [Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts], there was some opposition to his appointment, and it got quite nasty. There was another individual who thought that he should have the job, and they did some detective work and found that my father had been in the Soviet Union for a period of time as a cultural-in a cultural exchange program before the war broke out. They put what they thought were the dots together and declared, actually in the Milwaukee Journal, in an article saying that he was-you know, he was a communist and he should not be allowed to dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. Well, that all blew over, and of course, he went on to have a career in Wisconsin without any problem. But he was a socialist-[laughs]-no doubt about it. So the WPA was right on.

MS. YAGER: And your mother's role with the Index of American Design?

MR. JERRY: I have no idea about that. She never spoke of it-not a whisper, as far as I know.

MS. YAGER: This would have been before you were born really.

MR. JERRY: Yeah. And that-that Index of American Design might have very well been a WPA project in itself.

MS. YAGER: Yes, it was.

MR. JERRY: They were doing renderings, and they were recording and doing all kinds of stuff. That's interesting; I learned something. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: Now, he was-I also read that he was head of the Kalamazoo Art Institute.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, for a very short period of time. That must have been when the project-when WPA shut down, and it didn't shut down at the same moment in every state, but at the time it was over in Michigan, the time between his work for the government and his time that he took-the time that he took the job in Racine-there was this period of time when he did that, and he got started in the museum business, but he also traveled. He was part of the exchange program I mentioned before, and so he had been well traveled. In fact, he was in Berlin when they burned the Reichstag down. They just got out-that group. They headed for the train in the middle of the night and got out of that country. So he talked-he didn't talk very much about any of that, but that was-that was part of his connection with history there. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: Now, then he was invited to be the first director of the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts in Racine, Wisconsin. That was-I have down 1941.

MR. JERRY: Nineteen forty-one?

MS. YAGER: Does that make sense?

MR. JERRY: Well, I would have said it would have been a little earlier, but I'm not absolutely certain, and that's close enough, and that-of course, that museum didn't exist. It was on paper as part of a will that the last remnants of the Wustum family willed this physical plant to-which was a home-willed it to the city as a fine arts museum. And lo and behold, I don't think they had what happened in mind. They had traveled-they were farmers, and they had traveled a little bit, and they collected all this weird stuff like armadillo baskets and Indian beaded this and that and-

MS. YAGER: This was the Wustum you said?

MR. JERRY: This was at the Wustum, and a lot of it was still there. And I think they had it in mind that it was going to be that kind of a museum, you know-a natural history museum, but the way it was stated in the will-legally, it didn't direct that. It said fine arts, and fortunately there were people in Racine at the time who helped define what fine arts meant.

It took, I'm sure, a turn that wasn't intended, but it served the city well, and they have their own historical museum downtown, and they didn't really-and the collection that the family had was not worth showing, so you know-but the building-it was a house. It was filled with furniture. It's like people had just walked out, and the whole building of the museum, the gutting of the interior was all-a lot of it was done with Wisconsin WPA labor. All the furniture, the carpeting, any kind of furnishings were done by WPA project people for the state of Wisconsin. And he hired some former WPA people that he had met in Michigan to come in and do the design work for the interior and for signage and all the rest of it that happened to that building. It was a major do, and I don't know when it opened. Do you have anything there? Does it say?

MS. YAGER: Well, I think 1941, but I can check on that.

MR. JERRY: Oh, it opened in '41. Okay, so what I'm just talking about probably started in 1938, 1939, because there were-there must have been at least a year or two of dealing with this-this structure which wasn't designed as a museum.

MS. YAGER: This is sort of a big, Victorian farmhouse with large rooms.

MR. JERRY: Yes, yes, that's right, with a cupola on the top and the whole thing.

MS. YAGER: -and very commodious rooms and, you know, wonderful front porches, and then it's on 13 acres of land.

MR. JERRY: Yes, yes. That's right. And the land-in the will the land said "park." The word "park" was part of the will, and so my father hired a park designer and made a master plan. And as money was available, they created that-all those gardens on the one side of the building, which now has been diminished some from the time my father was there, so-because of finances, politics, whatever-it covers the same amount of land, but there's less of it, so it's a little lower in maintenance than it was.

MS. YAGER: So it was open seven days a week, free of charge-nurturing and creative atmosphere, and you and your siblings lived upstairs.

MR. JERRY: Well, we lived-

MS. YAGER: Or toward the back?

MR. JERRY: We lived in-I don't know what the structure was originally, but we lived in a small house that was attached to that building, which must have been-just thinking, must have been help for the house, where those people lived. Yeah, it was pretty small! [Laughs.] There were three of us, my brother and I and my sister, and of course, my mother and father, so there were five of us living in-boy, I don't think there was a thousand square feet there. It was a tiny place, and it was Bruce [Pepich]'s office for a while. The living room was his office, last time I was there. I'm sure that's all changed by now. My bedroom is a library. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: He has a beautiful office in the new museum [Racine Art Museum] now.

MR. JERRY: [Laughs] Oh, I'll bet he does. I bet he does.

MS. YAGER: Yeah, with wonderful windows and views.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, probably one of the curators has the office that he had out on the site-out on the older site.

So it was years of planning, and my father was, sort of, you know, a major cultural guru in Racine. They did concerts, they did film programs, they did all sorts of stuff.

MS. YAGER: And so it expressed the ideals of the WPA.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, I would say. A lot of classes, a lot of-you know, he developed an art school there, and mostly for people in the community, both young people and older people; employed a lot of the local artists, many of them who were illustrators-that's how they made their living-and who were really serious painters. There were probably a dozen of them that taught painting and drawing and printmaking. And then, of course, he taught-he and my mother both taught for the University of Wisconsin extension service in Racine, too, off and on. My father taught painting. My mother got involved in enameling and metalwork-hence, my direction. There was a studio there for-in the lower levels of the older museum structure, there was a ceramic studio, and next to that was another studio that was used for enameling and for some very light metal work.

MS. YAGER: So what was it like to have two parents as artists and live in an art center? It obviously rubbed off.

MR. JERRY: Well, it was pretty hectic and there-the things that I remember as a kid were-there was no privacy in our lives because we were in the public face all the time. And my father being a money manager, there was only one phone. The phone for the museum was the phone for the house. So when the phone rang, it could be anything: somebody asking for, you know, restoration of some crazy thing or-so we were in the business all of the time. My father, because he was open seven days of the week, most of that-all of that time got covered by him. There was no front desk person during all of those years. He was the person in the gallery greeting people as they came and left, and closed up in the afternoon. Then he would do office work at night, and we didn't see a whole lot of him, though he physically was there somewhere. Plus this huge piece of park land that had to be maintained. There was a crew for that, but he did-you know, he did get involved with it. At one time, Jackson Perkins [Jackson & Perkins] had major experimental rose beds in that park, and he maintained it.

MS. YAGER: Jackson Perkins.

MR. JERRY: Jackson Perkins was a major rose grower-big, big time.

MS. YAGER: There were lots of rose bushes in the flower gardens when I was there.

MR. JERRY: Oh, yeah, but there were like twice or three times that much when my father was there, and they were a major pain in the butt. Roses are not easy. Oh, my Lord, they are like kids.

MS. YAGER: High maintenance, yes. Yeah, a lot of diseases and such.

MR. JERRY: Oh. Oh, God, endless. So that, plus running an art school, which he did pretty much single-handedly, except that he did have his staff. So I as a kid got to know all the local artists. They were there all the time, and if they weren't there teaching, they were at the dinner table. A lot of them, especially the younger ones like, Jim Hoffman here-these people were not making very much money at the time, so they were around a lot-Frank Ruzicka, who later became head of Parsons School of Design [New York, NY]. Frank was on his knees weeding next to me because we both worked for the city, and in the summertime particularly, that was my summer job: working for the city, maintaining that park-along with whoever else was around it and needed some money. My father would hire them. All of them were artists of one sort or another. So that, I guess, goes back to his WPA thing.

In fact, rarely, when I think back on the crew that was there during my growing up-with maybe only one exception-they were all either painters or potters or school-you know, public art teachers or whatever. So I got to know that whole community of artists, and on Sunday, we would go-my father and I-my mother must have said, "Take Michael and get out of here for a while"-so his idea of fun was going to visit another artist. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: Now tell me the names of your siblings.

MR. JERRY: My brother, Christopher, and my sister, Sylvia. My brother still lives in Racine and has a family-a grandfather now-worked for the city for almost all of his work life; completely non-involved in the art world. Same thing with my sister. My sister, although, probably had a little bit more creative bent to her than my brother did, got involved in social services and was-I don't know what her title is now, but probably Director of Resettlement for people in Indianapolis and Indiana.

MS. YAGER: And where were you in the ranking? Like, which of you was first?

MR. JERRY: Oh, I'm the oldest.

MS. YAGER: You're the oldest?

MR. JERRY: I'm the oldest and I'm-

MS. YAGER: And you were born when?

MR. JERRY: I was born August 18, 1937. My sister-my brother came along four years later-four and a half years later, and then my sister, 11 and a half years later. So by the time I was headed towards college, my sister was still a young person. As a consequence, we're not very close. On the other hand, my brother and I are pretty close.

MS. YAGER: Now tell me a little-like, can you remember the very first experience you had with metal or anything like that?

MR. JERRY: Well, let me-you were asking about the benefits a minute ago, about being in that kind of environment, which was extremely unusual.

MS. YAGER: Pretty industrial strength.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, right. It was hard not to notice what was going on. Which included the lifestyle of all these people, too. These are not people that made a great deal of money, even those of them that were illustrators. It was-you know, I grew up knowing that being an artist, was-[laughs]-certainly not going to be financially rewarding. That was pretty well ingrained in me early on, you know. I could see it all around me. But people seemed to be happy with what they were doing, and that was enough for me. But I knew pretty well what I was getting into, at least at that point in history.

My first art experiences were not really in the public schools. Of course, as a young teen, I was-I went to life drawing classes once a week, because it was being taught right-30 feet from my bedroom. [Laughs.] So, I-for some reason, I got involved in the drawing thing.

MS. YAGER: Thirty feet might be an exaggeration. [Laughs.]

MR. JERRY: Actually you're probably about right. So I did that as a teen, and then, at the same time, I was involved in music pretty heavily as a teenager. I was a saxophone player and played in orchestra, dance band of the era. I thought for a while that I would head that way, and then I was also heavily involved with mechanical drawing, as it was taught in industrial arts programs and public schools at the time.

I thought for a while that I would head towards architecture, because I had a tremendous amount of drawing experience at that point and was hirable. I actually hired myself out as a draftsman for the Case Tractor Works in Racine.

Racine was a major producer of farm equipment, and Case was one of the biggest ones that survived. So I did that-I did that for a couple of summers, and so I had a lot of that kind of drawing experience, which of course now has all been replaced by computer.

So the life drawing was the beginning of it-you know, formal classes, and then my mother's involvement with enamel and enameling led to metal, of course, and very minor, very, very minimal-she was not a metalworking person. She was a two-dimensional person-lots of enameling, lots of tile. There's a big sculptural piece outside the building of a Saint Francis there that she did. And a lot of fiber-she did a lot of fiber, and the Johnson Wax Home at Wingspread [Racine, WI] had some major fiber pieces of hers.

The metalwork, probably, came about mostly in the high school program. There was a high school teacher whose name was Bill Francis, and he had had, I think, a course or two at the University of Wisconsin in his preparation for teaching. There was some encouragement there to do some metalwork, and I guess I had an interest in it. So between the school and the studio at the museum, I started to make some pieces, some simple pieces. That eventually led to a portfolio that I submitted to the scholastic art awards system.

MS. YAGER: Before we get to that part-I want to get back to that-go back a little earlier in your childhood, and name a favorite toy or a favorite game.

MR. JERRY: Didn't like games; still don't. I'm not a game person; I wouldn't know one card from another-didn't care for games at all. My-to entertain myself, I did a lot of writing, which is very strange because I don't handle the language very well, never did. I was a borderline dyslexic. I had a lot of trouble with reading and writing as a kid, but I used to write stories, just for myself, not to show anybody. I could while away hours writing stories, and none of it is reserved or saved.

MS. YAGER: Do you remember any of the themes?

MR. JERRY: Not at all. [Laughs.] Not at all. And I suppose I made things, too. Young boys at that time-there were a lot of models, a lot of activity making models, and I probably-

MS. YAGER: Models of-

MR. JERRY: -of airplanes, cars, trucks, whatever. And then I got into the model railroading thing. And I would do-oh, gosh, what would you call them-train layouts and all of that stuff having to do with model railroading with the-

MS. YAGER: With the landscaping and-

MR. JERRY: -landscapes and buildings and some of the electronics of it, and it got pretty big. And then I discovered girls, and then I sold all of that stuff and got into cars. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: What kind of cars?

MR. JERRY: What kind? Oh, Lord. Between my brother and I-we, yeah-I'm still involved with it. I've got two cars just sitting down-the one you saw, which just came from New York, and then I've got another one in storage. I'm still playing.

MS. YAGER: What was your first car?

MR. JERRY: Oh, Jesus-a 1937 Desoto, I think, which never even got on the road it was in such bad condition. So by the time-I had that before I had a license, and it was unrepairable [sic], as it turned out, so that went to the junkyard.

The first thing I had on the road was probably a 1941 Ford. My father, because of his upbringing, didn't believe young people needed a car and wouldn't let me drive the family car, ever. He had all kinds of reasons.

MS. YAGER: What was the family car?

MR. JERRY: Family car was always a wood station wagon. Well, it started out with a 1939 Ford Sedan, which he used to travel the state of Michigan in with his job with WPA, but after that it was always-we always had station wagons-until later in his life, of course, and they didn't need that kind of space. But for hauling paintings and all of that, that was the vehicle. There were no SUVs, like there are now.

So I spent many happy times sitting in the back of a station wagon on trips. And my father would, of course, sand and refinish the wood-[laughs]-and all the maintenance-those things were high maintenance. So, I was, in terms of transportation as a teen, like a lot of teens. I wanted my own vehicle, and I-there was no way I was going to drive the family car, so I would get summer jobs. And I went through 10, 15 cars before I went away to college. My brother, too. Between the two of us, it was amazing.

MS. YAGER: How could you go through so many? What would have happened to them?

MR. JERRY: Well, you know, it's like anything else-if you buy one old car and you fix it up, and then there's always a better one, and then the peer pressure to own something better, more powerful, more this and that.

MS. YAGER: So it wasn't that you were crashing them.

MR. JERRY: Oh, no, no, no. Not at all. You know, sometimes it was easier to buy something new than to fix up the old, because it was in such bad condition.

MS. YAGER: So what are the two cars that you have right now?

MR. JERRY: I have a 1971 MG GT car, and then I have a 1961 TR3 Triumph-both British. I got caught up in British cars when I was a young teacher. I had-my day-to-day car was a Jaguar, and I just fell into that. It wasn't anything that I-and I did Jaguar cars all the way through my teaching. I had one, two, three, four-yeah, I think I had four of them all together. In Syracuse, I had-yeah, I had three different ones in Syracuse. So that's sort of-and my interest in cars had to do with-more with the visual side of it. Mechanics I pretty much left to others, although I got more involved with it later, but mostly in the metal.

MS. YAGER: The restoration of the skin of the car?

MR. JERRY: The restoration of the skin of the car, and that's what I have right now-that pile of stuff you went by coming in here. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: Are there any pewter parts? [Laughs.]

MR. JERRY: Yeah. Gosh, I wish. It'd be a whole lot easier than working with steel, but no.

MS. YAGER: Tell me-oh, another question. Were you a Boy Scout?

MR. JERRY: Ahh! Where did that come from? Yes, I was involved in scouting for a while, which was a very, very good experience due to the scout leader that I happened to come across when I was a kid. That's my first trip to New Mexico-was to come out here to the Philmont Ranch [Cimarron, NM], which is in north-in the northwestern part of the state, a huge ranch on the bottom part of the Rocky Mountains, and it's called Philmont. It still exists today, and kids and their leaders come from all over the country, where they spend anywhere from a week to a month traveling, hiking in the lower part of the Rockies with-not mules, but we had burros. So we traveled with burros.

But I had had an operation on my foot prior to that, so I wasn't able to walk the whole thing, so I got kind of transported around in trucks of one sort or another, until I was able to do some of the hiking.

MS. YAGER: What an amazing experience.

MR. JERRY: Oh, it was incredible. Yeah, it was absolutely-yeah, I mean, we carried everything on our backs and on the burros. So that was my scouting experience.

MS. YAGER: Now, the scouting-the reason I ask that is that it seems to come up in so many discussions where people had their first exposure to craft-

MR. JERRY: Oh, through scouting.

MS. YAGER: Through Boy scouting or Girl scouting-Camp Fire Girls and that-

MR. JERRY: By that time, I had so much other exposure, those crafty things that they used to do in scouting didn't interest me too much, at least at the level they had it. It was beading and making a bow and some arrows, a wallet-all pretty much kit stuff. Now the better camps have shops in them and so forth. That was not my experience with scouting. It was more outdoors and canoe trips and things like that than it was the craft side of it. My craft experience started with the museum, at the Wustum.

MS. YAGER: At the Wustum, yeah. And tell me the name of your elementary school.

MR. JERRY: [Laughs] Elementary school-Lincoln Elementary School, which is now housing for elderly people. It's still there, and it's one of those projects where they went in and divided it all up for people who live in low-fairly low-income living, I would guess.

MS. YAGER: Do you remember a favorite class or a favorite teacher?

MR. JERRY: In elementary school? Well, school in general was-except for a little bit of junior high school-school was very difficult for me. School was not a wonderful experience. I always sat in the back of the room because I was unusually big for my age. So the only way they could work out those desks where the seat and the next desk were a unit was to put me in back, so that I could have a large seat. And that was my experience all the way through elementary school, which put me in the back, which was probably pretty good because I didn't get called on so much. Reading-I'm a very slow reader. I had lots of problems with reading, had outside tutoring when I was a kid to get me up to some kind of speed so I could carry on with the reading that I needed to do. When I got to junior high school, things changed a little bit because there was an industrial arts program.

MS. YAGER: What was the name of the junior high school?

MR. JERRY: Washington Junior High School.

MS. YAGER: And so tell me about the industrial arts program.

MR. JERRY: So the industrial arts thing came in, and in Wisconsin-unlike New York where all the craft areas were taught as part of industrial education, in Wisconsin it was more restrictive than that, so it was woodworking, some printing-weird, but-

MS. YAGER: Printing, like woodcuts-

MR. JERRY: Commercial printing, letterpress stuff. And I suppose Wisconsin has a history of papermaking, and so maybe that's why that was there. Then they had this drafting program, and that-I must have taken the first two or three courses there, and that has paid off big time for me all through my career. Being able to see dimensionally all the way around and-God, that paid off big. So I continued doing that in high school, but I did some woodworking, made these stupid little projects that I didn't even know what they were for, but it was the discipline of working with those materials that was-yeah, I had a good time.

MS. YAGER: So the junior high, it was-

MR. JERRY: Junior high was then-I'm trying to think-three grades, I think-seven, eight, nine, yeah, and-

[Audio break, tape change.]

-then high school. I went to high school, and it was Horlich High School, because Horlich Malted Milk was made in Racine. [Laughs.] It's now a Canadian company and not longer-I don't think Horlich is even-they made the milkshakes-all the Horlich mixers and all that stuff, so hence Horlich High School-one of several high schools in Racine, but that was on my side of the town.

MS. YAGER: Now, did you have shop classes in either or industrial-

MR. JERRY: Yeah, industrial education classes, yeah. I'm trying to think. I continued the drafting thing-took all the courses they had to offer and more, and I don't know how I got more, but somehow they worked it out so I could do more-kind of an independent study thing.

The other offerings were headed towards the trades. I think the industrial education, particularly at the high school level, had-they had the hope that they were preparing some young people for various trades. So in wood it got be, like, building construction, printing, electrical work, things like that, and that did not particularly interest me. Now, I don't know why. It may be that my parents wanted to see me on an academic track to get ready for entry into college, and so I don't know what interference there was there. And then I was involved in a music program in high school, too. So and that-I was involved in a marching band outside of the high school for a number of years, a dance band, which took up some weekends, plus music lessons, and you know, that was pretty absorbing.

I was not a sports person, so I wasn't involved in football or basketball or any of that. And, of course, the marching bands had a lot to do-the high school marching band-so I was always at the football things doing that. There was another street band performance kind of thing that I was involved with, and that was outside the high school. So I met a lot of the young people who were headed towards serious music during that time, and then I don't know what happened. I guess I felt I just wasn't motivated enough to head towards music as a serious pursuit.

MS. YAGER: Do you remember any particular teachers that stood out?

MR. JERRY: Well, in high school, this person that I mentioned a minute ago, Bill Francis, probably was the most influential person at that moment, and I think Bill did some teaching for my father, too, because anybody involved in the arts was connected to the museum. It was a straight line, whether you were a high school teacher or an illustrator or whatever. They all found their way and were friends with my parents. And Bill was certainly one of those, but he was also a high school art teacher at the time.

Bill went on-I think he got a-finally got himself a Ph.D. in Education and ended up at University of Texas in Lubbock. And he's probably retired at this point. I had no connection with him after I left high school. But he did-he was very helpful in getting a portfolio together for these Gold Key Awards, and I only entered it once, and I got nine or 12 gold keys, and my portfolio went on to a national thing, and my first year of college was paid for by Scholastic Art Awards.

MS. YAGER: Yeah, I thought that was very exciting-

MR. JERRY: And then, of course, later on I became a judge for it, too-[laughs]-which was really nice. That was a real treat. That happened in Syracuse.

MS. YAGER: The Scholastic Art Awards, they're still going on right now, aren't they? I believe they are.

MR. JERRY: I've sort of lost touch with them. Each state has-had a program, and-I think each state did. And there was a sponsor. Usually it was one of the big stores or something that had space to manage all that, and, of course, the high school art teachers were involved in it heavily.

MS. YAGER: Do you remember what you entered in the competition?

MR. JERRY: Probably, best guess, maybe half a dozen pieces of jewelry, a piece of hollowware-

MS. YAGER: This is high school, so you were doing jewelry at this point?

MR. JERRY: Oh, yeah, mm-hmm, oh, yeah. And, let's see, some drawing, some figure drawing, some block printing on fabric. That's about as much as I can remember.

MS. YAGER: What would the jewelry have looked like?

MR. JERRY: Hmm. I know there was a fish. [Laughs.] Everybody did fish, abstract fish of one sort or another, and, in fact, I may still have it here.

MS. YAGER: Would this have been wire or sheet?

MR. JERRY: Wire, sheet, and wood.

MS. YAGER: And wood? What kind of wood?

MR. JERRY: Yeah, whatever was around-probably some walnut, a pair of cufflinks with some silver wire embedded in it. It sat like a stone on a silver background with some prongs that came up alongside it. The fish had a piece of-I had access to lapidary stuff, so it had a piece of tiger's eye running down through the middle of it. The hollowware piece was very basic-was a conical form, like a chalice almost, with a simple cup shape on the top of it.

MS. YAGER: So you were doing hollowware in high school, too?

MR. JERRY: Yeah, well, again because this art teacher, Bill Francis, had had a little bit of-he had worked with, probably, Arthur Vierthaler at the University of Wisconsin, because Fred [Fenster] wasn't there yet. And Arthur had-I don't know what his whole background was, but had some hollowware experience and passed it on to his students, and it got passed on to me.

MS. YAGER: I had read somewhere that Wisconsin required metal experience in the public schools.

MR. JERRY: Oh, in the public schools? Might have.

MS. YAGER: And I think it's unusual.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, I would say. I don't know where that would have-

MS. YAGER: I've always been kind of interested in how many metalsmiths have come out of the Midwest.

MR. JERRY: Right. Well, there's another thing going on in Milwaukee, and I never quite-I was never part of it because I was long gone by then, but there were several silversmiths with long careers in Milwaukee, mostly liturgical stuff-and I'll come up with a name in a minute, but there were a number of people there. In fact, there's a book out there by one of them, now who's probably deceased, but they came out of industrial ed programs. So I don't-there was no sign of it in any industrial ed program that I was connected with as a kid. But maybe-maybe it was seen as part of-there were schools of industrial education that-

MS. YAGER: There's one in Milwaukee at least-yeah.

MR. JERRY: There's a name for that.

MS. YAGER: I can look it up.

MR. JERRY: But anyhow, the idea was they were training people for trades, and I think metal and ceramics might have been part of that-

MS. YAGER: But there was the Milwaukee Handcrafts Project on the WPA sort of thing. There was an awful lot of-in fact, I think that Wisconsin was the model for the WPA program nationwide-

MR. JERRY: Oh, is that right? Something was always going on there.

MS. YAGER: And there were some strong leaders: Elsa Ulrich [sp] and-

MR. JERRY: Yeah, that sounds familiar. She was a good friend of my father's.

MS. YAGER: Oh, really?

MR. JERRY: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, and there was-well, we'll get into that later, but there was a woman at University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, which didn't exist then; it was the Layton School of Art, and then they've had this extension thing going on, and, of course, now the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee is huge. It's almost bigger than the main campus now-really big. And Layton dissolved. There was never any metal program at Layton that I know of. That dissolved-the faculty member created the new Milwaukee School of Design or whatever. I don't even know if it even exists anymore.

Yeah. I'm trying to think of some names. I got invited to show some work in a-I think it was an anniversary of the Milwaukee Metalworking Silversmiths or something or other, probably 15 years ago or so, and I went to the opening because my folks were alive then and my brother of course lives there, so it was a good opportunity to go. And I'm trying to think of some names. I don't-no, all my notes have to do with later, but there were some active silversmiths there, and I suspect they were part of this craft program.

MS. YAGER: I was interested-I wanted to talk a little bit about awards, too. The very earliest award you ever had, do you remember that?

MR. JERRY: Oh, my Lord. Well, the earliest recognition that I got was the Gold Key Awards when I went off to school. Nothing that I remember prior to that-

MS. YAGER: Did you get a literal gold key or was it a paper or-

MR. JERRY: Yeah, I've got nine of them somewhere.

MS. YAGER: An actual key?

MR. JERRY: Yeah, it's a little tiny thing about like that, and of course-

MS. YAGER: Really? About a half-inch?

MR. JERRY: Yeah, about a half-inch long and it's a key. And I'm sure embedded in it somewhere it says Scholastic Art Awards. And those were given out for individual pieces that were submitted to the program. That happened in Milwaukee every year, and it was sponsored by one of the big department stores, I think.

MS. YAGER: I thought this was-it said that it paid for your first year of college.

MR. JERRY: Yes, it did.

MS. YAGER: That's a pretty astounding and sizeable award if you were to put it into-

MR. JERRY: Oh, in today's context, absolutely-absolutely.

MS. YAGER: I mean, that was a very major thing. MR. JERRY: But that was a national-that did not happen locally. You were able to submit individual pieces, which the majority of the students did. But then if you felt bold enough, you could submit a portfolio for regional judging, and then in Philadelphia, I think, there was a national gathering of these portfolios that had made it through the regional thing. And at that time, in a group of other people at a national level, that's when I got this thing.

MS. YAGER: Now was there-did it specify that you had to study art in college?

MR. JERRY: I don't think so, but I think the assumption was certainly-

MS. YAGER: Yeah, that you were so talented-

MR. JERRY: -that you were going to use this to further your art education. The certificate probably said something like that. And I'm not even sure that I had picked out a school at that point.

MS. YAGER: Your parents must have been quite proud of that.

MR. JERRY: I would have guessed so, because I certainly, on an academic basis, was not college material. I can tell you that now.

MS. YAGER: Well, you were a visual thinker.

MR. JERRY: Oh, yeah. No, I was definitely left on SAT scores. [Laughs.] I wouldn't have gone very far, I'll tell you that.

MS. YAGER: I worry about those SAT scores things now, how many people it will keep out.

MR. JERRY: That's right. And it sorted itself out, and, of course, as time went by I learned to compensate for my inabilities to deal with the language, and that, of course, has changed over the years, and I was able to deal with it as much as I needed to.

MS. YAGER: Before we move on, there was also-I noticed-in the '60s, Wisconsin State Fair Arts and Crafts Division-

MR. JERRY: Well, you're right. That would be the next-when you talked about awards a minute ago, probably the next-nope, nope, earlier than that. While a student at the School for American Craftsmen in Rochester, New York, there was a regional-I'm trying to think-there was a regional art exhibition sponsored by the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. And my first sojourn out into the exhibition world was in one of those exhibitions. I don't think-I didn't win a prize, but I certainly got included in the show as a student, which was pretty risky then, because as a student we were not allowed to show any work that we made in the school. They felt that the faculty had too much input and it wasn't fair to other people on the outside. So whatever I did in terms of exhibitions as a student, I did with work I made away from the school. And that's how I got away with it. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: Now, how did you make a decision to go to Rochester?

MR. JERRY: Oh, go to Rochester?

MS. YAGER: This is Rochester Institute of Technology?

MR. JERRY: Institute of Technology, yeah. Well, at the time-we're talking about 1956-57-metal programs were far and few in between. They were mostly in museum schools like the Boston Museum School. There was a little bit going on off and on at the Chicago Art Institute. There were Rhode Island School of Design, maybe. There had been, in a major magazine at the time-I'm trying to think-Collier's probably-

MS. YAGER: Saturday Evening Post?

MR. JERRY: -or Saturday Evening Post-an article about the School for American Craftsmen. And my folks saw it and they said, "Gee, this looks like just the thing for Michael." And on the basis of that, I chose that school.

MS. YAGER: So did you drive out to go and see it, or just went?

MR. JERRY: No, no, no, no. I just went-got on a plane and went. Just got on a plane and went on the basis of that. I was thinking about the Chicago Art Institute, because, of course, it's regional, was a great school. I knew all these artists like Jim that had gone there. They had really good experience there, but there was no metal in the program. It was a big ceramics program. I met a lot of potters and ceramics people in the Midwest that had gone there, but the metal thing, I suspect, came and went, because a sculptor had had some experience with metal and did a little work, but there was no major-

MS. YAGER: So you had already narrowed down to metal, and this was just from high school experience with Mr. Francis-

MR. JERRY: Oh, yeah, high school and that experience I had in my folks' place of business. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: For the enamel and-yeah.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, that's funny because I never touched enamel. I never got involved with enamel. It was so-handled at such an amateurish level I just couldn't ever deal with it. I never introduced it into the school. It was out of-it was just-which is silly because, you know, a lot of people went on and did beautiful and great things with enamel, but it just wasn't for me. So color got left out of my experience until now.

MS. YAGER: Now, did you know the metals people other than Mr. Francis when you were in high school through your parents?

MR. JERRY: The exposure that I got, which was very influential-my father had a small exhibition of John Paul Miller, and I remember it to this-

MS. YAGER: Where was this exhibition?

MR. JERRY: At the Wustum.

MS. YAGER: At the Wustum, of John Paul Miller-

MR. JERRY: Yeah, doing the granulation thing, and they were exquisite. I mean, there were the bugs and all the animals and crabs and stuff that he was doing, and I thought, wow, incredible! And roughly, probably somewhere around the same time, I would go in and out of Chicago with my folks a lot. There would be an exhibition and everybody wanted to see, so we just got on a train and went down to Chicago for the day.

And the exhibition that really knocked me out was a major exhibition of Danish silversmithing sponsored by, I think, the Danish government or embassy or something or other. Major, major, major-hundreds of pieces from that period of 1945, maybe even earlier-maybe the Jensen pieces before the war, maybe. But all of that stuff that happened at Georg Jensen's and the smaller shops after that-and then, as it turned out, I ended up working with the person who made those things. I didn't design them but made them. That just-all that contemporary Jensen stuff just-

MS. YAGER: Was this at the Chicago Art Institute?

MR. JERRY: This was Chicago Art Institute.

MS. YAGER: And the John Paul Miller Show was at the Wustum.

MR. JERRY: At the Wustum. It was a little traveling show, and, of course, museum people love things that are already put together, you know, because financially it's a lot easier. And this was probably something that was traveling around and my father picked up on it.

MS. YAGER: He did have a show in Chicago. I remember him saying it was a very significant show that may have traveled.

MR. JERRY: Well, of course, when they're installing these shows, I played in the crates and, you know, I was there and the pieces were up there, not behind. So, yeah, sure, I got to see all that stuff firsthand. The Danish show just knocked me out. I remember it to this day, seeing that big fish platter-the big version, about like this, which Hans Christensen-

MS. YAGER: Which you're saying is like four feet long.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, they made different versions of it, you know, of the big one sitting in a case in the middle of the gallery. I can picture it still to this day. Then it turns out that Hans was the model maker at the time and had made the piece.

MS. YAGER: Wow. This is Hans Christensen, who you then studied with at Rochester.

MR. JERRY: Right, that I ended up-and probably a part of the decision to go to the School for American Craftsmen was that there were-all the faculty were either Danes or Norwegians or Germans, or whatever, and in fact, at that moment Hans was not a faculty member. I think it was Jack Prip.

MS. YAGER: Okay, yeah. John-

MR. JERRY: Jack, as he was known then, was teaching for two or three or four years there, and I missed him. I came in when Hans came to the school. It wasn't his first year; I think maybe it was his second year, because he couldn't speak English.

MR. YAGER: That's amazing they hired him.

MR. JERRY: And that led to a whole bunch of other stories. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: Wow. So this-tell me about-this is great. Now, the Scandinavian show that just planted all those seeds-then you went to Rochester Institute of Technology, the School of American Craftsmen. So tell me about some-

MR. JERRY: Nineteen-that would be 1957, 1958. And the school at that time was in the downtown area of Rochester. The whole school of technology was down there, but it was in an old Victorian house, very much like the one I grew up in, almost exactly, with the cupola on the top and the whole nine yards. It had already been remodeled. There was a little gallery space and a lecture space downstairs, and then the studios-wood, ceramics, metal, and fiber-were in the other major rooms of what was an old house.

And at that time, the faculty-Hans was the steady member of the metal faculty. In other words, he was there when I came, and he was there when I left. The other half of the metal studio, that job changed many times. And as I learned out later, after I had left, a lot of that had to do with Hans's personality, which I had never had an inkling as a student. And now I can guess why that job changed.

But at any rate, in the metal studio at the time was Larry Copeland. And Larry's background I don't know too much about. He was a graduate of Cranbrook [Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI] and probably at a time when the Cranbrook metal shop was just being reopened after the war, because they closed it during the war. So he came from a Cranbrook experience, which meant then a minimal technical background, but he was a very creative guy-more multimedia. I think he liked to work in wood; he drew a lot. But he was not the metal person that Hans was, not by a jillion years. They were completely different, which, of course, led to problems.

But Hobart Coles and Frans Wildenhaim were in the ceramic studio at that time. Tage Frid-

MS. YAGER: Oh, yes.

MR. JERRY: -the woodworker, was in the woodshop, and the same thing sort of happened there: the other half of the job rotated.

MS. YAGER: Strong personality men.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, very strong personalities. There's only one way to do things, you know. And we would tease them all, because Swedish was the language of the studio pretty much. Hans had no English. Tage-very little. They bought houses close to each other, so there must have been a neighborhood thing going on in one of the suburbs, where they didn't speak English at all.

And as it turned out, Larry Copeland had been a prisoner of war and ended up in Europe teaching English to Swedes or something. He could speak Swedish. So now in the metal shop you got that language going. Tage would come up from down below and they would speak Swedish, and then, of course, they all had some multilanguage skills, so German was not too difficult. Frans was-

MS. YAGER: Now Jack was Danish.

MR. JERRY: Jack was Danish. [Laughs.] And I'm sure they knew they could work-I mean, most Europeans are multilingual people anyhow. Somehow they got it-between the Danish and the Swedish, they got it, amongst them. It used to drive us bloody nuts and led to some speech patterns that I still use occasionally, which is kind of annoying, but putting words in people's mouths. He'd be reaching for a word-

MS. YAGER: And you'd try to help him. [Laughs.]

MR. JERRY: -and I'd punch it in, and he would go, "Yeah." [Laughs.] I still do that occasionally, which is not very nice. So, Larry Copeland was there for the first two years that I was there and encouraged-just by his approach to design and his creative energy, I started thinking about Cranbrook, and I decided to leave. So I got a scholarship to go to Cranbrook. I got an Associate and Applied Science degree, which was part of the institute-you know, Associate and Applied Science degrees are far and few between right now. Mostly technical schools gave them out in the east.

MS. YAGER: Before we get to that, Hans-I have marked here, that-your experience when you were at Rochester, that you had to experiment in secret-

MR. JERRY: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah.

MS. YAGER: -and that may have motivated the switch to a different school. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MR. JERRY: Yeah. The way the program was run then was one faculty member came in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and the other one came in Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So we had this overlapping day. And that's where we'd get into trouble, during that day, especially when you had somebody that had technical skills that were like magic and the other person was still struggling. And it was obvious very fast, as a student, what the differences were. But I liked the spirit of Copeland, and he was very easy to get along with and easygoing, and Hans was very rigid and there was only one way to do things. And as long as you were in his group, that was great. If you moved outside of that, then you were in big trouble.

MS. YAGER: I remember when I visited RIT one time, considering it for school, and Hans said, "If the tool's got a plug on it, it's no good."

MR. JERRY: If it's got a what on it?

MS. YAGER: If it had an electrical plug. [They laugh.]

MR. JERRY: That's funny. Well, Hans was-he had some rules, and, of course, surface embellishments of any kind, textures, chasing / repoussé, forget all that. That wasn't in his vocabulary and he never spoke of it. It only came up amongst the students, because, of course, periodicals and books started to come out, and we were becoming more aware of what was happening-historically had happened with metal, at least in the Western world, and we would start to ask questions. And, of course, Lawrence Copeland-what did I say his first name was?

MS. YAGER: Larry.

MR. JERRY: Larry, okay-he was open to any idea. If you wanted to stand on your head and work and, you know, make a big puddle, he was up for all of that. That came from his Cranbrook side. And Hans would have rules: no casting. [Laughs.] You just didn't do that to metal. Even though we would try to explain to him that the sheet and wire we had came via an ingot, nope, he didn't want to talk about it. No casting. Zero. Casting machine had been removed from the shop-gone-kiln, everything, gone, gone.

MS. YAGER: Who had taught there before?

MR. JERRY: Well, Jack had been there before. I don't know how much work he did with those techniques, but I can't imagine-well, of course, I could, because he probably came from a very similar background.

MS. YAGER: He did, but he was also very open-minded.

MR. JERRY: Oh, oh, oh, yeah-way different than Hans. They are not alike at all.

MS. YAGER: Because I studied with Jack for one year.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, I kind of thought maybe. Oh, yeah. I would have-when I look back on it, God, I wish I had had my experiences with Jack rather than Hans. He and I were good buddies. We got along really well. I had no problems with Hans at all, but I-now when I look back on it, whoa-[laughs].

So anyhow, no casting, no chasing, no repoussé, no engraving. You didn't-you just didn't do that. So that created a lot of problems, so any exhibitions that I was in-I found the old casting machine. I would get it out on Saturdays. We were allowed to use the shop on Saturdays only. It's not like today when we have open studios and stuff like that. We went to school eight hours a day, and so every hour that we weren't in an academic situation, we were in the studio. So there was no night use of the studios. There were night classes for the community taught in the studios at night, but that was the way it was.

Occasionally they'd have the studios open on Saturday, and that's when I would come in and do the other things. Because at that time I was already aware of a whole bunch of other stuff, because Ron Pearson's Shop One [Rochester, NY] was two blocks away. And we were all aware of him and what he was doing there, plus, of course, Frans and Tage Frid were part of Shop One.

So we were sort of seeing faculty work almost continuously.

[Audio break.]

MS. YAGER: This is Jan Yager interviewing Michael Jerry in the artist's home and studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on November 15, 2004, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, disc number two, session number one.

Michael, we were-just before break you were talking about your time at the Rochester Institute of Technology School of American Craftsmen.

MR. JERRY: Well, as I said earlier, it was the right kind of experience for me, and it was very interesting because of the faculty that were there: one, in that many of them didn't speak English very clearly. But during my second year-I was a sophomore student-through-I think through Olaf Skoogfors, who had been at the school before I arrived and continued during some of the time that I was there-Olaf introduced me to Ron Pearson.

And Ron had a studio in Shop One, which was a carriage house behind a large home that was only about three, four blocks from the school-a place I was already familiar with, but I didn't know Ron that well. Ron needed some help. He needed some bench help, and so I started working for Ron Pearson after school and on the weekends and working with others. I wasn't the only person. There were several people who were working part-time for him, doing production work that he was doing at the time.

MS. YAGER: Now this was 1959 to 1960, I have?

MR. JERRY: That's about it. And Shop One at that point was still close into town. Shop One eventually moved to another site later, but I wasn't around when that happened. I think Jack Prip had just left and had gone to Rhode Island.

MS. YAGER: Who started Shop One?

MR. JERRY: Shop One is Ron Pearson, Tage Frid, Frans Wildenhaim, and another woodworker whose name I've forgotten. I think that's it. There were the four or five of them, and then that partnership changed. Jack Prip may even have been part of that in the beginning, but, of course, he moved away. Tage moved away-went to Rhode Island. And so they took on some new partners as time rolled on. Ron was probably the consistent partner there. The rest of the partnerships sort of evolved. In fact, at one time Tom Markusen was a partner.

MS. YAGER: Was Tom a student at Rochester?

MR. JERRY: Tom Markusen? No, Tom was one of Fred's students from the University of Wisconsin very early on. And Tom taught at State University of New York at Brockport.

MS. YAGER: So can you talk a little bit about-you had, was it an apprenticeship or an actual job with-

MR. JERRY: That was a job. I got-in terms of influences on my work and how I work and so forth, a lot of those impressions happened during that time. I mean, it was the first, full-time serious metal person that I knew well, other than the teaching faculty. And Ron was making his living from his work and had been for quite a while. And I sat right across from him; we had a common bench. We sat across from each other-actually where Jack had shared. He and Jack had been partners for a while. So when Jack left, that was about the time I came in-or several of us did.

MS. YAGER: And were all of the things that you made sold at Shop One or-

MR. JERRY: No, Ron had, oh, I'd say 30 to 50 places distributing his work-a lot of museum shops-but there was a whole, you know, a whole craft sales things going on at that time. There were more and more of them coming on. And he would make the work and then he would travel. He'd peddle it.

And he had not only the jewelry line that he was doing, but he was doing these big hollowware pieces, too. And he was spinning them. So in the wintertime he would spin these shapes, and then he'd hire somebody to buff them, you know, a professional buffer, and then he'd load up his car and he'd take those things out and sell them. Bronze bowls-there was a whole line of them. He got very well-known for doing them, and eventually turned the whole line over to a stamping company in Rochester. They produced them for, oh, I don't know, three, four years or so.

MS. YAGER: Now, what was your role there?

MR. JERRY: My role was to do multiples. So what Ron would do is he would make the first piece, the prototype piece, we would call it, and then he would do six to a dozen of them and sell them.

MS. YAGER: Now this was jewelry or-

MR. JERRY: Jewelry.

MS. YAGER: Okay.

MR. JERRY: Jewelry-I think all of it jewelry.

MS. YAGER: And made in what material?

MR. JERRY: Silver, some gold, but mostly in silver. And he would do the first batch, and he would keep very careful records on how much time it took. And he had three-by-five cards in a file, and every piece had a drawing, the weight and the material, all the information that would go into pricing. And then he'd have an hourly-or a minute actually. A lot of things were made in minutes. So he had the time on there that it took him to make it, and then he established an hourly rate for that time. So it didn't matter if it took me two days to do it or five minutes, except it didn't quite work out that way. So I got paid by the piece. That's fair enough, but I had to get it to a point where he was doing it, which, because of techniques are fairly simple, it didn't take me too long to exceed his limit, and then he'd rethink the price. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: Were these forging with a hammer?

MR. JERRY: Some of them were forged. Yeah, I used to make a tie clip in seven minutes with his name stamped in it, in a package, polished, but I'd do a hundred of them at a time-and a lot of casting.

Ron was basically a self-taught person. He had one year at the School of American Craftsmen when it was down at Alfred [Alfred University, Alfred, NY] and couldn't afford to go to school any longer, so he opened a little shop at-because it's a ski area-he opened a little shop. And he was cutting things out of thick plate and then filing them to shape. He didn't know anything about casting, and then finally got introduced to that. And then, of course, rubber molding and all the rest that goes along with castings. But he had a whole line of forged things. So we did a little bit of both.

And every year he would add to the line, pull things out that weren't doing well and maybe add 15, 20 new pieces. And the rest of his time in the studio was spent, one-he was the quality control person, of course; he would look at everything before it was packaged. But he would do the one-of-a-kind stuff, so he had a big commission business going, and that ranged from jewelry to hollowware to enamel pieces-you know, quite a range that he was capable of doing, but it's pretty amazing because he was a self-taught person.

But his father was an art educator, and in fact, he ran his father's business for a while after he died. He had a by-mail art program going, and I don't remember the name of it now, but I remember the file cabinets with all of the material in it. And I think it had to do mostly with art appreciation and art history, and it was by mail. And Ron was finishing up all those contracts, so he had all-this huge wall with slots in it with all his paperwork in it.

MS. YAGER: I always remember those, you-want-to-learn-to-draw-this course-

MR. JERRY: Yeah, this was up from that-quite a bit up from that.

MS. YAGER: But it was by mail?

MR. JERRY: Mm-hmm [affirmative], all by mail. Yeah, very interesting. So I suppose that, you know, Ron's beginnings-Ron was pretty politically active, and he, I think, originally went to school at the University of Wisconsin and studied political science. That's where he was headed, but then-I don't know if that was after the war, but he was a merchant marine, was a merchant sailor.

MS. YAGER: I didn't realize he was from Wisconsin.

MR. JERRY: No, he's not from Wisconsin. He just went there to school.

MS. YAGER: His training in metal-

MR. JERRY: His training in metal was at Alfred. I'll show you some-sorry. Have you seen that? That'll tell you.

[Audio break.]

MS. YAGER: We're starting back on track two. Michael, you were in the middle of-

MR. JERRY: Yeah, we were talking about my experience with Ron Pearson in his studio, which, of course, was also part of Shop One. And people who came to Shop One had to walk by the studio door, so it was a very kind of busy place, but it was a great experience because I think that I had discovered then that I didn't want to make multiples, after sitting in front of piles of a hundred cufflinks or a hundred brooches. It got-the money was great, but it was not a life that I thought I wanted to pursue. And at one point, as I was finishing school, it was suggested maybe I would like to be part of his operation, and it was a time to make a decision about all that, and it didn't take me long to figure out that I really didn't want to do this if I didn't have to.

MS. YAGER: Now, you also, at that very same time were working with-

MR. JERRY: Toza and Ruth, yeah. Well, Toza-

MS. YAGER: -this is Radakovich?

MR. JERRY: Radakovich, yeah. Toza and Ruth had just moved to Rochester, and Toza was a painter and had been an art director for a major magazine in Yugoslavia. And he more or less escaped from the country, and I think they worked their way through Canada. She's an American, but immigration was a problem, and they finally got all that cleared out and found themselves in Rochester.

And Toza taught at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, an evening class in painting, I think-

[Audio break, tape change.]

-and then attended the School for American Craftsmen as a student for a few minutes because he wanted to touch down with Hans. And Ruth had been a student at the School for American Craftsmen when it was at Alfred. In fact, she probably knew Ron Pearson; they probably were classmates. I'm not absolutely certain about it, but the timing fits.

So she was the metalworking person, and his metalwork came through her experience, plus workshops and things that he could attend. But they were, I think still are-I mean, their jewelry is fabulous. Toza had-has, because he's still alive-Ruth died at least 15 years ago, but Toza is still in California, where they eventually moved. And he was involved in all sorts of design activities. He was working with a boat builder to do fiberglass doors for houses; he did playground equipment, all sorts of things. He was a very, very creative guy-is a very creative guy. I don't think he's making jewelry right now, but when the two of them were at their peak, which probably was that time while they were in Rochester, they made some fabulous things.

And they did some-and that's where I came into the picture. They did do some multiples, and that wasn't their primary thrust, but they saw that that would be helpful economically. So they didn't do things by the hundreds; they did things maybe six to a dozen pieces at a time: silver and gold and-let's see; what else was I going to say about that? I was pretty heavily influenced visually by those folks. I still love the work; what can I say? [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: What did you do? What was your job?

MR. JERRY: My job was forging parts for pieces and also doing pretty much what I was doing for Ron Pearson, and that's dealing with casting-not physically casting but dealing with castings afterwards.

MS. YAGER: This would be filing and polishing?

MR. JERRY: Yeah, filing, polishing, stamping, some simple soldering. It was at a time when those-when neither Ron or Toza knew about other things-other industrial techniques that would have made it have even gone faster, like stripping fire scale chemically-all of that. I used to file the fire scale off. I mean, that's why I was filing, not so much to make the shape better or to make the surface better; I was filing to get rid of the fire scale. Well, you know, it's very deep on casting, and now there's an alloy where you don't have any fire scale to begin with, plus bonding, plus all those other things. And the techniques were finishing; they weren't-they didn't have any knowledge of tumbling and vibra-tumbling [ph], all of that, which would have made their life a lot easier.

So I was that person, so I got to know them pretty well. And then eventually I took over Toza's job as teacher at the museum. My first teaching experience was at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery. And there was a small metal studio there, and they also had children's classes. So I taught ceramics to young children on Saturdays, and I taught one or two classes a week at night in this metal shop. And that's what Toza and Ruth had been sort of playing with since they had arrived.

MS. YAGER: Now, they had gotten their metal training in another country?

MR. JERRY: Yeah, I think Ruth-the School for American Craftsmen at Alfred, and I think Toza, through Ruth-they did have-I remember they had some really nice Scandinavian stuff in the house, and I think they had been in Denmark, but whether either one of them had gone to school there for any short period of time, I don't know. I really don't know that part.

MS. YAGER: Now, let's see, you were at Rochester for two years; then you decided you needed a change.

MR. JERRY: I needed a change, so I applied to Cranbrook, and I got a scholarship to go there for my first year, and off I went. And Dick Thomas, of course, was the faculty member at the time, and that's where I met all of my peers my age. Fred Fenster was there at the time; [L.] Brent Kington was there at the same time I was. Let's see, who else was there? A sculptor-his last name was Haskin-Don Haskin.

MS. YAGER: I have Al Pine.

MR. JERRY: Al Pine was either-Al Pine was before me.

MS. YAGER: And Barry Merritt?

MR. JERRY: Not at Cranbrook. Barry Merritt is part of the Rochester scene. Barry I didn't know the first two years I was there.

I went away to Cranbrook, and during that time Barry enters the School for American Craftsmen and eventually becomes a benchworker for Ron Pearson and then goes off on his own. In the meantime, his brother becomes-takes over Barry's job with Ron, with no training, I don't think, and becomes his lifelong foreman. So Barry Merritt's brother and his family moved to Maine with Ron.

MS. YAGER: And what was his name?

MR. JERRY: I don't know his first name. I haven't a clue. I never met-I don't think I ever met him. I just-I heard these things through Ron and Barry. But he turned out to be a super-he ran the whole shop, as far as I know, and he was the only person, I think, that Ron took with him to Maine when he moved there.

And then Barry stays, does his own thing, opens a gallery or two in Rochester, and then sort of disappeared. Nobody knows where he is now-very strange-very strange event. Well, he would leave galleries behind in deep debt and disappear. That was his-he just-he was not a very good businessman. He was a great guy, did some very creative stuff, ran what appeared to be a really nice gallery in Rochester, and then all of a sudden in the middle of the night he was gone.

MS. YAGER: What was the name of the gallery?

MR. JERRY: I don't remember.

MS. YAGER: I wanted to ask you about the people that you studied with, but before that, the scholarship that you had at Cranbrook-was that a full scholarship for room and board and tuition?

MR. JERRY: No. I was married at the time, so living on the campus was not an option, so I lived in Pontiac. No, it was tuition.

MS. YAGER: And did you have to teach as well?

MR. JERRY: No. No, that was not part of the scene at all, except what happened, all unknown to me, during the time that I sort of signed up for Cranbrook, Dick Thomas gets a contract for a book, and what he was doing was trying to gather some people that would function by themselves. That's putting it kindly. They did hire a person to come in and fill in, but he was basically a model maker, so he was a technician-kind of a low-grade technician. In the meantime, Dick's writing this book.

So the shop was sort of left to run itself, and so I came-I was the only person of the group that had any extensive metalworking experience. Everybody else had had one course or two courses, but they had two years of college education, so they had most of their academics out of the way. They were intensely interested in doing some metalwork.

Now, at that time, Cranbrook also was undergraduate and graduate. Cranbrook had a problem after all the GIs left, where they had enrollment problems. So they opened an undergraduate program. So people like Fred Fenster were graduate students. I was an undergraduate student because I had just two years of school. Fred had already graduated from City College, and Brent from Illinois and so on and so on.

So anyhow, because of the background I had-and then Dick Thomas brought in another man. What was his name? Gudmund Jon Elvestad. And Gudmund was already a journeyman goldsmith from Norway, and as far as I could tell, he was there just for a place to base himself so he could travel around the country. And I'll get that name for you if we remember. I think it's in Dick's book, if I still have it. The book was-

MS. YAGER: What was the name of the book, and what was the topic?

MR. JERRY: The topic was-it was a general metalsmithing book, covered some jewelry techniques, mostly larger pieces, which was Dick's personal interest [Metalsmithing for the Artist-Craftsman. Philadelphia: Chilton Co., Book Division, 1960]. A technical book, a show-and-tell-lots of pictures of tools. Dick was-he was a pretty good researcher, so he would research his stuff-you know, what's the stick called, what's the hammer called-completely pointless activities-and didn't know how to use half of it.

Dick was self-taught-pretty well self-taught. He was a painter and an art educator that taught in a high school, I think, for a year or two after the war, and then they opened a metal shop, and he sort of brought the metal shop back to life after having been closed. He might have been a student of Fleming's [Baron Erik von Fleming], the English silversmith that they brought-Cranbrook brought in before the war, or maybe even attended one of the Handy and Harmon conferences. I'm not sure about that, but his experience with metal was extremely limited.

MS. YAGER: I'm trying to-was von Fleming-I'll get his full name-

MR. JERRY: Von Fleming, I think-Erik-

MS. YAGER: Erik von Fleming.

Well, anyhow, so Dick opens this shop and gathers-the one talent he seemed to have was sorting people out, and the atmosphere in the shop was great. Now, a problem with me, and the reason I left-I didn't stay there for a full two years-the reason I left is that I was doing a lot of teaching, and it's very flattering in the beginning, but it got to be a drag after a while. Every time I'd do something: how do you do that? And these were friends of mine, and they were very intent on finding out, and a lot of them had been working trial by error, and, you know, wow, wow, wow, and after a while I just-

So Dick had also another talent. He was giving lectures on liturgical craft. And I don't know just how that came about, but out of those lectures-not to the students, but we're talking to greater audiences away from the school-he would get commissions, and he would bring them into the school and he'd say, "Listen. This is what's needed; I think you have the skills for that and you have the skills for"-and then he would spread them around as an educational device, which was the justification. And that worked, really. Well, as those commissions got more complicated, then it narrowed down real fast. It was either me or this Swedish guy who had no hollowware experience.

So Fred and I got together, and we did a number of these commissions-big ones: whole church, all the metalwork in the church, two or three of them.

MS. YAGER: Goodness.

MR. JERRY: Oh, yeah, we made a ton of money.

MS. YAGER: Oh, you got paid for these as well.

MR. JERRY: Oh, yeah. We did all our own contracts; we did the whole thing top to bottom, dealt with the client. In fact, Fred and I rented a house at one point-a whole little house; turned the whole thing into a studio to do these things. And after that was over, I decided that I wasn't getting anything out of this experience. It was all very interesting-I made some money and so forth-but I wasn't going to get anything out of Dick. And the more I saw of the book and his preparation for it, the more I realized that he just didn't know what the hell he was doing. He had no clue. And I knew that as a second-year student. I knew that he was way out of his league.

And, I don't know; Fred stuck it out by force of will. He and Brent stuck it out. Mostly, I would say, by trial and error, although Stanley comes to Cranbrook after I've left. So Stanley-

MS. YAGER: This is Stanley Lechtzin.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, Stanley was living in Detroit at the time. He had graduated from Wayne State [University]. And he was running a business-was doing custom jewelry things out of his studio in Detroit, and he decides, enough of that, and he wants to teach. So he needs an M.F.A., and that was an easy way for him to get it; just drive up from home.

And so he comes in-so he and Fred got together, and they enjoyed each other's company for years. And Brent finishes out, goes to Illinois [Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL], Fred finishes out and goes to the army, and he worked for-he probably told you, he worked for the military as a civilian in Detroit for a number of years. And then at that moment, I'm coming out of school, and he and I are applying for the same jobs-[laughs]-both of them in Wisconsin, and I got one; he got the other. So it worked out.

Yeah, but the Cranbrook thing was-well, it always is the camaraderie of other students, I suppose, but in terms of Dick Thomas, I can't say much positive about it. In fact, it could even-he was a little sour also, and he just wasn't a terribly pleasant guy to deal with, not for me, and everybody-I think that all of these folks had a hard time with him, never went back. I went back once years later. I happened to be, actually, visiting my wife's brother down the street and, well, let's go up to Cranbook; it's a beautiful place to walk around and so forth. And Dick was there, and he was busy filing away the theses of the last 30 years or so, and I just-I don't know what motivated him at all. He did horrible things with metal. He tortured metal just terribly. I just had to walk away and keep my mouth shut because it was so bad. [Laughs.]

So I go back to the school-and then also, I was out of school for one semester, living in Pontiac. My wife had a job at the phone company at the time, and so we hung out there. And then, what was the major crisis? Some major crises in the Middle East came up, and the draft was still functioning. And not being in school and the draft active again, I was right in line, and my father, being a city official, was able to find out where I stood in line, and I was coming up fast, and so I had to get back into school real quick. So I marshaled my resources and got back into school in the summer. So I went to school in-

MS. YAGER: Back at Cranbrook?

MR. JERRY: No, back at the School for American Craftsmen.

MS. YAGER: Okay.

MR. JERRY: I went back to Rochester.

MS. YAGER: Okay.

MR. JERRY: And that summer I finished off my undergraduate degree and stayed for a master's degree.

MS. YAGER: Well-

MR. JERRY: So all my graduations are from the same institution, which looks weird, but I did spend three semesters at Cranbrook.

MS. YAGER: Now, when you were at Cranbrook, do you remember some of the work that Brent Kington was doing, for instance? What was he working on at that time?

MR. JERRY: No, I don't. The toys that Brent got to be known for early on in his career, they emerged after I left. Before that time, I think it was a lot of experimental stuff, one thing or another. He was trying out a lot of stuff. He had come from a good program. I'm trying to think where he came from-Kansas [University of Kansas]? I think so. And I don't remember the person who was teaching there [Carlyle Smith], but a number of good-Bob Ebendorf came from that same program. Wendell Castle came from Kansas.

MS. YAGER: Is that where Carlton Ball was?

MR. JERRY: Yeah, it's a person I don't relate to, but there was somebody there for a long time that evidently was a really good teacher. In fact, the whole school probably functioned pretty well, because, like I say, Wendell came from the same environment.

MS. YAGER: Wendell Castle?

MR. JERRY: Wendell Castle here, yeah. Yeah, he's not a metal person, of course, but we all know him for other things.

MS. YAGER: What kind of work was Al Pine doing at that time?

MR. JERRY: Al Pine-you see, Al probably-I don't know how Fred would put it, but Al probably was the reason that Fred Fenster was there, because Al had gone before and Al had gone to California. So I was not aware of-I mean, I was aware of his name; I never saw any work until it started getting published, during the time that he was in California.

MS. YAGER: So people didn't-you didn't see work in the studios?

MR. JERRY: The work from a previous group? No, there was no-like, Stanley used to keep a piece from every student, for instance, and he had a case in the studio. He had one of Al's pieces. He had at least some indication of what had transpired, but not at Cranbrook.

MS. YAGER: I thought they did select work.

MR. JERRY: Well, they might have eventually, but not during that time. The only thing that was left behind was a thesis.

MS. YAGER: So you didn't do a thesis because you didn't stay after that?

MR. JERRY: No, no. One, I was an undergraduate student; I was not a graduate student. I don't know that it was even required of undergraduate students. I'm not sure.

MS. YAGER: And what kind of work was Fred working on?

MR. JERRY: Fred, of course, had come from New York ,so his experiences had been all those folks down in the Village making jewelry that I saw when I was a young student, as a freshman.

MS. YAGER: This was in Greenwich Village?

MR. JERRY: Yeah.

MS. YAGER: Sam Kramer and Art Smith.

MR. JERRY: Oh, Sam Kramer was there, Art Smith was there, a whole number of people, and they were fabricating-you know, piercing and fabricating sheet, and laminating stuff together and so forth, and his experience-of course, as he probably told you, he came from an industrial arts program, but his interests seemed to be at the time-because he had never had the opportunity-is the hollowware side of it. And that's how he and I got together, because I had hollowware experience. So, by hook or crook, he taught himself how to do it, with a little help from me. Dick was spinning at the time. Dick was a spinner. He would design a form and he would send it down to the spinning shop in Detroit and they would spin the shape up. And that was his metalwork.

So the hollowware thing was his, and in fact, in Dick's book-and who's the British historian, Goldsmith [Goldsmiths' Hall, London, exhibition venue and home of the Goldsmiths' Company, London]-

MS. YAGER: Peter Gainsbury?

MR. JERRY: No. I'm thinking of-the head of the Hall [Goldsmiths' Hall] was Graham Hughes.

MS. YAGER: Yes.

MR. JERRY: Graham Hughes's book [Modern Silver, Throughout the World, 1880-1967. New York: Crown Publishers, 1967] has probably Fred's first finished piece of hollowware in it, a photograph of it. So that seemed to be-my memory of it seemed to be his strongest-his interest.

Brent was a different kind of character. He was a very disciplined guy. We did some furniture together. There was a designer who had graduated from Cranbrook who was designing and marketing furniture out of his studio in Bloomfield Hills, and he needed some prototypes for a Chicago furniture market, and so Brent and I and Fred, I think-yeah-the three of us got together and built these couches out of aluminum, and he liked that. I could see that Brent really liked that.

MS. YAGER: How would you make a couch out of aluminum?

MR. JERRY: Well, we made-it was a chair-or, excuse me, a couch-with ribs on it like that Eames chair over there. See the blue one? It had these-

MS. YAGER: So aluminum piping?

MR. JERRY: -multiple ribs tied together by bars that go across and then the cushions were bolted up from underneath. And, yeah, it was a fabricated affair. And so we all got to work on that.

MS. YAGER: Do you remember the name of the designer?

MR. JERRY: Yeah, Hugh Acton. Hugh Acton. He's probably still functioning somewhere. And, again, all these things sort of add-like Hugh Acton, he didn't make anything himself, as far as I could tell.

What he did is he used Detroit, and Detroit has all these little shops that do this and that. There's a spinning shop here, there's a machine shop over here. And he designed the parts, and then he had a warehouse, and he had several people working for him, and they would fabricate these things in the warehouse-just bolt them together. And some of the stuff was shipped that way. So he had this whole line of furniture with Knoll fabrics on them, because Knoll had a showroom up there close to Bloomfield Hills, and he had a whole business running that way. He made some nice stuff.

So we sort of learned a little bit about that. And then Fred, of course, he worked for a fabricator. He did stair rail holders for some new buildings-the bit that comes from the wall out that holds the stair rail. I remember him casting those in bronze by the dozen and finishing that. So he added that to his experience.

MS. YAGER: What were some of the liturgical pieces that you made?

MR. JERRY: The liturgical pieces were-I'm trying to think; how did I get into that?

MS. YAGER: You said with Dick Thomas, would bring the commissions.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, Dick would come in, and on several occasions I ended up with the most complicated piece, which was a chalice, let's say.

MS. YAGER: And now, would you design the chalice-

MR. JERRY: Oh, I would design it.

MS. YAGER: -or Dick would-

MR. JERRY: Oh, no, no, no, no-the whole thing. He said, here it is, here's the people you contact, that's it. It was a pretty brave move, because, I mean, he didn't know at all that much about any of us in terms of what our capabilities were. So designed it, presented it, got the contract to do it, and then we all got busy.

So I would do the chalice if the denomination required it-and most of them did-chalice, cruets, lighting fixtures, collection plates. Oh, what else? It seems like there was some more stuff than that.

MS. YAGER: Do you remember where any of theses churches are?

MR. JERRY: Well, the only-there was one in Bloomfield Hills, but I don't remember the name of it at all. There's-the one in Ohio that we did was the head of the furnishings committee. There's always committees you've got to deal with with these things. And the head of the furnishing committee was Mr. Huffy of Huffy bikes. They were made in-not in Cleveland-I think in Cincinnati. That's all I remember about that. And that was an Episcopalian church. I think the one we did in Bloomfield Hills was a Lutheran church.

MS. YAGER: Would these have had any gemstones or anything on them or appliqués?

MR. JERRY: Some-no, I don't think so.

MS. YAGER: Fairly like modern-

MR. JERRY: Yeah, yeah, a very-[phone ringing.] Excuse me.

[Audio break.]

MS. YAGER: Starting back on track three, you were talking about the liturgical pieces.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, these vessels were generally pretty clean, minimal decoration, traditional to some degree in their shape. What else can I-

MS. YAGER: Did you have to have meetings with people for the design?

MR. JERRY: No, because we dealt with the whole thing long distance. So we did drawings, and, of course, because of my drawing background, I ended up doing that. So we made a formal presentation-mechanical drawings and a rendering of-I think we presented about three different possibilities. They chose one, as simple as that. We came to an agreement on the price and we did it. I remember I got the chalice back on the first one. They sent it back because there was an engineer on the committee and he took a height gauge and he measured around the rim of the chalice. It was off by half a 64th, I think. [Laughs.] They sent it back.

MS. YAGER: Just torque it a little bit with a hand-

MR. JERRY: Yeah, I tortured it a little bit. Phooey. So anyhow-

MS. YAGER: And these were sterling silver?

MR. JERRY: Yeah, they were all in sterling, except for lighting fixtures. We wouldn't do those-we did them in brass. But that kind of got me started thinking about that whole thing, that maybe there was a niche for me, because I wanted to make larger pieces, and so I continued doing it. When I went back to the School for American Craftsmen, I did almost exclusively-I was going to say mostly-liturgical pieces as a student-as a continuing student.

MS. YAGER: Now, these were for commission-

MR. JERRY: No, these were not for commission.

MS. YAGER: -or speculative?

MR. JERRY: This is all speculation. No, commission was not involved, and at the School for American Craftsmen at that time, materials were free.

MS. YAGER: Even silver?

MR. JERRY: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]

MS. YAGER: Really?

MR. JERRY: But you didn't get the piece when it was over, though, either.

MS. YAGER: That's interesting.

MR. JERRY: Oh, yeah. Let's just go over that for a minute. No, at the School for American Craftsmen up to I don't know what year-[phone rings].

[Audio break.]

MS. YAGER: Starting back on track four, let's see, you were talking about the pieces that you were making at RIT, liturgical-

MR. JERRY: Yeah, so my master's thesis, such that it was, had to do with liturgical hollowware: finding out what the requirements were, restrictions on material, size, shape, and then I did, think, probably five pieces, including a monstrance, a chalice and as least two or three other pieces. But, as I mentioned, the materials were supplied by the school. That was true for wood and clay and fiber, but the school owned the pieces, and what they were doing was using the pieces for promotion for the school-small exhibitions that would travel around the country to promote the school-and after two, three, four years, then they would notify you that the pieces were available for the material.

So I could buy-

MS. YAGER: To purchase-

MR. JERRY: I could buy the materials-I could buy the pieces for the materials.

MS. YAGER: Oh, interesting.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, well, it was an interesting scheme, and the problem with it was that was when I was making the least amount of money, and I let most of it go because I wanted new material. [Laughs.] I didn't want all that bent-up stuff. So a lot of it I bought-I did buy a few pieces, but I don't have any of it now. A lot of it I just gave away.

MS. YAGER: And the pieces that you didn't buy, what happened to those?

MR. JERRY: Now, the pieces that I didn't buy-well, the story is they just went into the scrap, but I don't think it ever happened. I think what happened is that-and I saw a small catalogue one time. All the work that was available and had already been checked out with the people who made them and didn't want them-and that includes dining room tables-

MS. YAGER: Or couldn't afford to buy them. [Laughs.]

MR. JERRY: Couldn't afford to buy them-tables, chairs, yard goods, whole sets of dishes, all of that, it was offered to the faculty of the institute for the materials. So the faculty-all of the faculty, the whole institute, many of them have all this stuff in their homes.

MS. YAGER: This is interesting-very wild.

MR. JERRY: It was an interesting way of dealing with it, and then, of course, what would happen then, because no school is-at least that kind of school was in a really wealthy place. Mrs. [Aileen Osborn] Webb would come by every-actually she came by about every semester, and the story was that at the end of the year, whatever was minus, she just wrote a check for.

MS. YAGER: Whatever was what?

MR. JERRY: Minus. So if I took out 100 ounces of silver and I only turned in 92 in finished work, what happens to the eight? Well, one, they used to bill us for that, but still there's stuff lost in that move, and she would just pick up the tab on it.

MS. YAGER: And how much was silver at that time?

MR. JERRY: Silver was 90 cents an ounce.

MS. YAGER: So silver-

MR. JERRY: When it went to a dollar, I thought there was going to be a riot-[laughs]-which is really funny, especially today when I'm paying $7.50 and $8, you know?

MS. YAGER: Now, so a chalice, the cost of it at that time-

MR. JERRY: Well, the cost of-

MS. YAGER: -for you to buy it back-

MR. JERRY: The cost of materials, probably-oh, I don't-the cost of the materials were at the new silver price, not the old price. So if I bought-if it was originally a dollar an ounce and then 40 years later it was $1.75, or whatever, I paid the replacement cost. So it would cost me $40, $50, $60.

MS. YAGER: It would have been nice to have it now.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, well, you always look back and say, oh, gee, what a stupid thing.

MS. YAGER: I've not heard of that arrangement anywhere else.

MR. JERRY: No, you wouldn't.

MS. YAGER: It's an interesting one.

MR. JERRY: No, it was a very-you know, these days, [if] you're working that kind of material, it's on your dime.

MS. YAGER: That's right. Yeah. Goodness.

Hans Christensen, did we talk-

MR. JERRY: Well, we talked a little bit about him, and then, of course, the people-maybe what we didn't spend any time on is the people that I met and worked with when I was at the School for American Craftsmen both times. That's when I came across Olaf Skoogfors, for instance, probably a name that we would most recognize. Burr Sebring, Colin Richmond. Both of those people became head designers for Lunt and for Oneida. That's where they were going. They were older students coming in and-

MS. YAGER: Now, Lunt was-

MR. JERRY: A silver company.

MS. YAGER: And Oneida was-

MR. JERRY: Is a silver company.

MS. YAGER: Silver and-oh, okay. Also china and things like-

MR. JERRY: Yeah, they had a side of china.

MS. YAGER: Okay.

MR. JERRY: China and even plastic-even inexpensive melmac or plastic ware of some sort. They tried to diversify real quick before they all collapsed.

MS. YAGER: And are these both-were they located in New York State?

MR. JERRY: Yes, Oneida's silver company is in Oneida, New York, about 30 miles east of Syracuse, New York. Lunt, I'm not sure [Greenfield, MA]. All those older silverware companies, most of them are in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Rhode Island. That's the center of the metalworking world for a long time, and that's where you'll find those places. They knew where they were going and they went straight there. And, of course, the catalogue that the School for American Craftsmen used to put out, that was one of the things that they were selling, the designer.

And, of course, that's what I wanted to do, too, but I took one look at it and I said, no way in hell am I going to put grapes and bananas on edges of bowls, and that's what they wanted me to do partially. The best offer I got was to sort of take over where Jack Prip was at Reed & Barton, but probably because of my age, I guess, and experience, they wanted me to work half the week in a traditional way, and the other half of the week I could work in a fashion like he did. And I-

MS. YAGER: Which was what? What was the fashion that he worked-

MR. JERRY: Well, his Scandinavian stuff that he did for Barton.

MS. YAGER: I see.

MR. JERRY: You know, he did a couple lines of flatware. He made that onion pot that people know so well. He did a whole series of things for them that he made. The rest of the people are on paper. That was the unique part of Jack's job there. It was the first time in this country, I think, that a designer and the maker were the same person. That's a European thing; that's not an American thing. It's an industrial design thing here. Then, of course, a lot of industrial designers think they can design anything; it doesn't matter whether it's silver or whatever the hell it is. Oh, really? [Laughs.]

But Jack went in and said, listen, you know-and I think they treated him very well-we need a line of pewter, and we'll give you six months or a year, and these are things that we're thinking about, and you go make them. That's what drove him crazy, there because he would come to the meetings with finished pieces and put them down the table, and the rest of these guys had these renderings, and I think he got tired of that after a while, just struggling with-and none of them were good sellers. The industry just wasn't promoting that.

MS. YAGER: Well, I wonder how much-

MR. JERRY: It just died.

MS. YAGER: -of it was marketing.

MR. JERRY: You know, it was all-and I could see it. International Silver [Meridien, CT] was still going at the time I did my tour of all the silver companies looking for a job, and they had every single piece of flatware from day one of almost all the companies on a chart around the wall, and they knew what the sales figures were on all of them. And the sales people came in and said, well, we need something closer to that, closer to that, and that's what the design people did. Are you kidding me? Not for me.

And then at International he said, "I have a hypothetical problem here I would like you to respond to." He said, "How would you feel if we put you on a plane at 3:30 in the afternoon for a trip to Florida, and during the time you're in the air, design a set of flatware for this company who-people you're going to meet when you land."

And what it was was a premium-you know, they used to give away flatware for soap or maybe even cereal. There was a lot of grocery store premiums going on then, and you could get two spoons if you bought this and that and four more next week if you bought this and that, and that was a real thing. They were going down to some company that wanted to give a premium away. They couldn't spend any design time on it, because there was no money in it, so you had airtime; that's it. I don't remember how I responded. My jaw must have dropped down. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: How long did it take to get down to Florida at that time?

MR. JERRY: [Laughs] Oh, man. But that's later. I started talking about people that were there [RIT]. That's how we got off on this.

I did meet some other folks there-a name that you see from time to time, and that's Mary Kretsinger, and Mary came in for, I think, a year at some point, and she was from Kansas and she's an enamelist, and for some reason at the School for American Craftsmen at that time there was an enameling studio-very small but very well equipped-and nobody taught enameling. There was nothing around that indicated that at any time had anything been taught in there. And she came in and did some enameling and added to her metalworking repertoire. So I had a chance to spend some time with her.

Fred Lawrenson, California metal person-Fred was there for at least a year during the time I was there. Fred, I think, taught at the University of Wisconsin for a short while and then ended up in California. I think he's deceased at this point.

I met Bernie Bernstein, a very close friend of Fred's, probably his closest friend. Bernie came in for summers working on a master's degree in summer pieces, so I would see him at the summer session. The School for American Craftsmen ran a quarterly system, so the summer was a quarter-a whole quarter-and a lot of students who were in the workplace already would come in the summertime to add to their mostly-people seeking master's degrees.

Let's see. Ron Sonnugatuck. [Laughs.] Ron came in when I was gone-when I was at Cranbrook. Ron came in, and I only knew him briefly when I came back, and Ron, of course, is in Alaska. He teaches at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. And Ron is a native Alaskan-very, very good silversmith. I ran into some of his work in a museum when I did a workshop in Fairbanks a number of years ago.

MS. YAGER: Does he have a daughter that's a silversmith?

MR. JERRY: Oh, he may have.

MS. YAGER: I believe I just saw a show-

MR. JERRY: Is that right? It's an unusual name.

MS. YAGER: It's a very unusual name, yes.

MR. JERRY: Very, very-I don't know his whole story, but he was a pretty interesting guy. Then there were various other people who sort of wandered off and did other things-became model makers. A lot of people came to the School for American Craftsmen because they liked tools, they liked to make stuff, but they hadn't any ambitions to do anything visual much with it. So they became model makers-a lot of them became professional model makers-really good. And in fact, Ron Pearson, the other part-time person I worked with, was a graduate of the School for American Craftsman, and he was the head model maker at Bausch & Lomb, and he liked doing this on the side. And a number, of course, went off to the silver industry in one capacity or another.

MS. YAGER: Tell me about-

MR. JERRY: As it turns out, on an aside here, is that Lawrence Copeland, who I worked with as a freshman, who was the partner of Hans at that time, Lawrence Copeland becomes head of design at Oneida after he leaves the School for American Craftsmen. Then I lose track of him, and it turns out I met him at a conference somewhere. He went back to City College-NYU maybe-became head of the department or something. He was looking to hire a faculty member when I ran into him, so he was still busy at it. But that was probably 15 years ago now.

MS. YAGER: I'm interested in your-you said that you went around to these different silver companies because you were considering this as an opportunity for a job.

MR. JERRY: Right.

MS. YAGER: Tell me about that. How many companies did you go to? What were some of them?

MR. JERRY: Well, let's see. The ones that I remember most were, first, International Silver. International Silver was still alive and well then. They no longer are. They went under. They were a very, very big company in a broad range of stuff. They were into stainless at that time and then went-their products went from stainless all the way to high-end sterling. And I would say-what I remember-they were dealing then probably with the lower middle of that business. That seemed to be where the heart of it was, including premiums. That's where that one question-then the other side of it was Reed & Barton, which is a really classy old, old, old company. It goes all the way back to Paul Revere, just about making the high-end silver. A lot of it's sold in Texas and the South, and very little on the stainless end and the plated end, from what I can tell. And Oneida was sort of in the middle, also a company that's taken a dive. It doesn't even exist anymore, I don't think, except the name.

Lunt, a very small company-pretty traditional. They were all very traditional, and that was the disturbing part of it. I had this vision that I was going to change everything and that the people-general public-wanted something more than this, but as it turned out, they didn't, and the silver companies never promoted anything else; they just rode it out and now, of course, they're stuck with their own miseries. International went down. Oneida is now a marketing name only; all the stuff is made in Korea.

The last time I was in there, they had this huge new plant-huge new plant. The design department was automated, and it was computerized. They could make dies right out of the design department through the computer. They were set up really well, but they couldn't compete. So we walked around the plant, and there were people with clipboards going around looking at machines trying to figure out how they could use them to make toys or anything else to try to get this plant going.

And there was a palette of ice buckets, I remember. I said, "Oh, what about this, you know?" He said, "See those?" He said, "Those just came in from Korea. We can buy them in that shape, already stamped out. We can buy them in shapes cheaper than we can buy the materials here."

MS. YAGER: Goodness.

MR. JERRY: Oh, geez. [Laughs.] Oh. So, the history of American silver companies would be very interesting to explore.

MS. YAGER: Did you know Margret Craver?

MR. JERRY: No. No. The name is very familiar. She was connected with Handy & Harmon during-

MS. YAGER: Right.

MR. JERRY: In fact, didn't she run that program for them?

MS. YAGER: Yeah.

MR. JERRY: Yeah. No, that's before me. That's closer to Ron Pearson's beginning. That would be probably mid- to late-'40s, early '50s maybe.

MS. YAGER: Yeah, it was right around World War II.

MR. JERRY: Yeah. And that was-you know, Handy & Harmon was very-still, when I was a student, so very kind and anxious to have business, and then all of a sudden they decided they didn't want to deal with anything under 400 ounces or whatever it was, and they sort of walked away from the craft thing, and-what is it?-St. Louis sort of picked up, and then some of the other refiners, like Hoover & Strong, got bigger. Now Handy & Harmon doesn't exist anymore.

MS. YAGER: I'm not sure.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, I think it was bought out and then it went under. It's amazing-just amazing.

MS. YAGER: All right, let's see.

MR. JERRY: Well, if I could, before we move forward, just looking at my own notes and coming across another name which will pop up maybe a little bit later, but as a young person, late teens, and as I would come home from school-from college, I got to know Michael Monroe very well. And Michael grew up in Racine. He went to a different high school than I did. He was younger than me by about five years, I think. He decides to go to art school, and he ended up in Chicago at the School of Design for awhile, and then I think he ends up at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and then eventually Cranbrook. But during all of that time he's working for my father. He's doing the advertising, he's hanging exhibitions, he's getting the basics of the museum business.

MS. YAGER: Now, Michael, I read that he started taking classes at the Wustum-

MR. JERRY: Yeah.

MS. YAGER: -when he was four or five years old.

MR. JERRY: When he was a young kid. Yeah, that I wouldn't be certain about, but I got to know him as a young adult. In fact, he and my brother were very close for a while and hung out together, young bachelors. But Michael did-Michael worked night and day for my father. He was a major contributor to the Wustum. He did all the advertising, as far as I can tell. He did all the signage, hung shows, did all of that stuff. And of course-

MS. YAGER: And that led him over to the Renwick [Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC].

MR. JERRY: Well, yeah, and he went to Cranbrook and-he was a very talented guy. In some ways I wish he'd stayed in the studio, but he goes to Cranbrook and-well, do you know his story at all? Well, he goes to Cranbrook as a painting student, I think, meets his wife-to-be at Cranbrook. She was a student there. He doesn't even finish. He's a semester away from finishing, and they come from New York and grab him for the museum job at Oneonta, the State University of New York at Oneonta.

So he goes there without finishing his M.F.A., and somehow he finishes it by mail, or he goes back and forth and does some work, whatever, and they finally give him his M.F.A. Then from Oneonta they just come get him for the Renwick. They say, hey, you want to come work for us? And he was running the gallery there, but he had his start at the Wustum with my father-very close; very close to the family. He gave a really nice Wendell Castle-big Wendell Castle piece to the museum in honor of my folks.

MS. YAGER: To which museum?

MR. JERRY: To the Wustum. His ties are pretty heavy-duty to that place. And, of course, the last time I talked to him, both his parents are still alive.

MS. YAGER: And now that would be at the Racine Art Museum, I'm assuming?

MR. JERRY: Yeah, well, you know, they have these two-

MS. YAGER: The collection-

MR. JERRY: They have these two buildings now, and I don't know how that's operating-you know, what shows happened where and so forth.

MS. YAGER: Yeah.

MR. JERRY: But it becomes a part, that piece of furniture becomes a part of the collection that the Johnson lady gave to the-

MS. YAGER: Karen Johnson Boyd?

MR. JERRY: Karen Johnson Boyd gave to the museum, which I'm sure gave impetus to the structure that's there now-I don't know whether financially or not.

MS. YAGER: It's a beautiful building.

MR. JERRY: But those are all-you know, the Johnson folks-the company never really gave a whole lot to the museum. They did those two major shows-"Objects: USA" and then they did that big painting show, and they gave some things when it was over, gave some things to the museum, but they never were-they'd give about $500,000 a year to the Racine Art Association-that was all-but the women-[laughs]-that was another thing. And my father spent a lot of groundwork on that. They would always-they'd come out and they'd chat with him for a couple of hours and leave a check for a thousand or two, and he didn't know about it, but in the end it paid off. It's amazing, because Johnson built the museum at Cornell [Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY], not in his hometown. Geez. Oh, that really got to my dad, I'll tell you. Oh, big time. Cornell was a school he did not graduate from, I believe. [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: So, too close-

MR. JERRY: Yeah-[laughs]-geez. They ought to figure that out. But anyhow.

MR. JERRY: The level of philanthropy from the Johnson family and other leaders in Wisconsin is pretty astounding.

MR. JERRY: Is it?

MS. YAGER: I mean, Ruth Kohler is there.

MR. JERRY: Oh, yeah, the Kohlers. Well, the Kohler case, they have-the Kohler Works [Kohler Co., Kohler, WI] had-and I still think they have the record-the longest strike in the history of labor in the United States. Oh, terrible-they shut that place down. There were boycotts by all the contractors. It went on for years, and finally somehow, when they settled it, all these good things started to happen. And trying to regain their reputation, I think that's a lot of what motivated that.

They do shows in the gallery up there, and I've been in a couple of those, and I see their brochure; they're sending these packets of stuff, you know-very busy at it in that little tiny town. But anyhow, they have a nice guest artist program and it's been fruitful. Good for them.

MS. YAGER: Let's see, I'm looking at some other peers. Philip Fike is one.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, well, Phil was older and he was already teaching at Wayne State when I arrived at Cranbrook, and I don't recall whether I met him there or not. I have a feeling not. I think my first contact with Phil was at a SNAG [Society of North American Goldsmiths] conference in Chicago many, many, many years ago. And he was always a great storyteller. He had these great stories to tell about students. And he would go on for hours and hours, and that's what I remember. He was a very, very interesting guy. Then, of course, I always look him up at conferences when he comes, so I got to know him a little bit, and heard a lot about him from Stanley, of course, over the years, and was aware of his fibula thing. I think I visited the shop when I was in Detroit once, so I stopped by.

MS. YAGER: How about Earl Krentzin? He was a Detroit metalsmith as well.

MR. JERRY: Oh, Earl, no. I don't think I ever met Earl. We were talking about him earlier. He had already been-he's older-been through the University of Wisconsin. Well, he may-I think-Fred used to talk about him a little. He may have been even hanging around in Madison when Fred first started to work. I don't know if Fred-

MS. YAGER: He taught one year, I think, in Wisconsin.

MR. JERRY: Oh, he taught one year with Art-with Vierthaler.

MS. YAGER: I believe so, yes.

MR. JERRY: Yeah, that sounds about right. I know he hung around a little bit afterwards, but I wasn't too sure how long. No, I never ran into him. I was teaching up in Menomonee, Wisconsin, at that time, and it was 250 miles away. I didn't get down there very often, especially in the beginning.

MS. YAGER: How about Paul Mergen or Skip Hunter?

MR. JERRY: No. Hunter is one of Fred's former students, I think-maybe Buffalo, University of Buffalo. No, those folks are not in my range of-

MS. YAGER: Now, you talked-let's see, so you-

MR. JERRY: So I did the silver conference.

MS. YAGER: Yeah.

MR. JERRY: We were kind of on that a minute ago. I did-at the encouragement of the director of the School for American Craftsmen, who was-what was his name-[Harold] Brennan-and he tried to be as helpful as he could to find jobs for people, and he was pointing me in that direction, so it seemed reasonable; it was in the catalogues, so it was part of-seemed part of the mission of being there. The other option, of course, was to open your own studio and get to work.

MS. YAGER: And you already had a family at this point.

MR. JERRY: No, I had no family. I was married, but no children.

MS. YAGER: Oh, okay.

MR. JERRY: Children didn't come along until almost seven years later. No, I was flexible, and I went to look at these jobs, and I felt that they just weren't for me. They were not something I wanted to spend my life doing, so then what were the options? So while I was hanging in limbo-it was summertime after graduation already, and I had made this trip. I knew I didn't want to do that. My option was probably to stay with Ron Pearson and develop that into something, like Barry Merritt's brother did, but on the other hand, I knew I'd get probably swallowed up in Ron Pearson. I didn't want to make his work forever. So that didn't look too good for the long run.

And so Harold Brennan, who was the director of the program at RIT, he was on the phone with somebody and said-one day he called me in and he said, "Would you be interested in teaching?" I said, "Well, what's the deal?" And so he had some connections with some people in Minneapolis who had connections with people in northern Wisconsin, and they told me about this college that had some real strong industrial ed programs and they needed a designer. They needed to sensitize these kids visually, and I said, "Well, okay, let's take a look." And so I got involved with looking at that, and I decided, well, the clock was ticking and I needed a job, so I was back in Wisconsin, which was familiar territory.

So I took the job, and it was one of