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

Interview with William Keyser, Jr.
Conducted by Edward S. Cooke, Jr.
At the Artist's daughter's home in Sudbury, Massachusetts
April 25 and May 2, 2003

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with William Keyser, Jr., on April 25 and May 2, 2003. The interview took place in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and was conducted by Ned Cooke 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.

William Keyser and Ned Cooke 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

NED COOKE: This is Ned Cooke. I am interviewing Bill Keyser at his daughter’s home in Sudbury, Massachusetts, on Friday, April 25, 2003, and this is disk number one.

Bill, I’d like to start off talking about your childhood, in essence, leading up to where you were as a furniture maker, teacher, designer, and now even a painter. When and where were you born?

BILL KEYSER: I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1936. My hometown was actually a little bit out of – sort of north of Pittsburgh, a little town called Perrysville, Pennsylvania. And my father was a cabinetmaker – well, actually he was a contractor in the early days of my life. He was in business building homes. He had two partners, two brothers that he was in partnership with. And my earliest recollection of his activities were, you know, working on houses. And I didn’t have an awful lot to do with that. I was, you know, very young and – but later he –

MR. COOKE: But you watched him, or you were aware of the construction process and –

MR. KEYSER: Yes.

MR. COOKE: – sort of both roughing in, as well as finished work?

MR. KEYSER: Right, right. Of course, at that point I was very young. I think he – he then left the partnership; they dissolved the partnership. I must have been, I’m guessing, maybe first or second grade perhaps. And then he went in business for himself, and his business was based at our home. He initially had a small shop in our one-car basement garage.

MR. COOKE: I was going to ask whether he had a home shop or was it a –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah.

MR. COOKE: – what sort of tools and materials that you were aware of in the domestic realm.

MR. KEYSER: Well, he had a very small – like an eight-inch, early Delta table saw with a table that was about 15 inches square. Ironically, he’s given it to me, and I’ve been tempted to throw it out several times, but for nostalgic reasons I just can’t part with it. And eventually he ended up getting a thickness planer and a joiner and things like that. But he was – started out mainly doing renovation work: remodeling kitchens. Recreation rooms were a big thing. This was in the –

MR. COOKE: The basement recreation room or –

MR. KEYSER: The basement recreation room, and knotty pine was the material of choice. [Laughs.]

MR. COOKE: The early '50s, right.

MR. KEYSER: Right. And so he started doing that, and he built up a clientele that was just very supportive, and he – I think he ended up doing very well. He worked very hard. He was a product of the Depression. He had – he and my mother had just gotten married and they had built a home. That was when he was in the contracting business. And the Depression came along, and I think he told me they had a mortgage of maybe $3,000 or something, and they lost the home.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: He couldn’t come up with – you know, with the payments. So he was a very work-oriented person. He didn’t want that to happen again and he had to make hay while the – you know, while he could.

MR. COOKE: So, I mean, it really results in a certain mentality to building and making instead of knowing how to apportion one’s time, in essence.

MR. KEYSER: That’s right. That’s right. And –

MR. COOKE: People talk about the idea of a craftsman’s mindset as opposed to someone who can just be self-indulgent at different points.

MR. KEYSER: He definitely had – most of his jobs had either self-imposed deadlines or client-imposed deadlines. You know, they wanted a recreation room for a New Year’s Eve party or something, and he always had two or three jobs lined up. So he was – he kept very busy.

MR. COOKE: But he was still able to have you in the home shop in the garage too?

MR. KEYSER: Well, I can remember him coming home in the evenings, and he would come home with a list of materials that he – or moldings and things that he had to prepare for the next day to install on-site. So he would work in the evenings and I would go down – in the early days I would just go down and, sort of, watch, you know, and maybe ask some questions and that sort of thing. At that point I would be happy to just take some scraps over in the corner and do something with them, you know.

MR. COOKE: So he left you on your own to –

MR. KEYSER: Yes.

MR. COOKE: – explore?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, he did.

MR. COOKE: – because he was too busy and thinking about what he needed to do for his job.

MR. KEYSER: Exactly. Exactly. And I guess I must have expressed some interest or something, or he saw that I was interested in this, and so my Christmas presents tended to be tools. I ended up – you know, he –

MR. COOKE: What did he start you with?

MR. KEYSER: It was a small jigsaw, a little vibrator jigsaw. I’m not even sure they make them any more. But it was something that I could cut, you know, up to eighth-inch-thick wood with maybe – or something, you know, I’d cut some little parts out. At one point he made me a little disc sander out of a – I think it was a fan motor with a little faceplate mounted on the front of it, and he made a little table that – I’m not sure if it angled or not. And so he must have sensed that I got a lot of enjoyment out of these things, and so he sensed that I was interested. Later I got a bigger jigsaw [laughs]– a real one.

MR. COOKE: You knew you had arrived.

MR. KEYSER: A real Craftsman jigsaw, you know.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, I knew that I had arrived at that point.

MR. COOKE: So was the association of it, you know, the smell of sawdust, the tools, and the level of activity that was really –

MR. KEYSER: I tell people that I was weaned on sawdust. I really did participate at a very early age, if not actively at least passively, you know, watching and asking questions and things like that.

I can still remember the first Saturday – it must have been maybe second or third grade, something like that, when I was a – when he took me out on a job with him on a Saturday. You know, my mother packed lunches for both of us and we went out on a job. I can still remember vividly the client whose home we were in and that whole day, that first day on the job so to speak. From then on I went out pretty regularly with him, and, you know, as I got further along in grade school, I was able to be of more help to him. And then during high school I used to work, like, vacations and weekends and things like that with him.

MR. COOKE: And you were trusted at that point, you know, that he knew your standards were equal to his and that you knew –

MR. KEYSER: Well, I’m not sure my standards were –

MR. COOKE: – with a little instruction or –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, yeah. He would tell me what to do and watch over me and guide me, and more and more he trusted me with, you know, more and more responsibility, I guess. But I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit, I guess. Somewhere along, it must have been seventh or eighth grade, I became very interested in building my own projects, and the first was the Soap Box Derby. That must have been around the late '40s or early '50s.

MR. COOKE: I was going to say that’s usually when you’re about 12 or so. Is that –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah.

MR. COOKE: That’s the age – I think there’s an age limit usually for –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. I’ve forgotten what it was. I know there was a specific time period that you could be in. I think I entered a total of maybe five years and built a new car each year. And he was not discouraging, but he was not actively encouraging either. To him – you know, he was very pragmatic and very practical minded, and I don’t think he could see where this might lead. To him it was –

MR. COOKE: A little bit frivolous or –

MR. KEYSER: Frivolous or –

MR. COOKE: – leisure time and –

MR. KEYSER: To use his phraseology, it was, sort of, “damned foolishness.” And so I found myself actually sort of withdrawing from him for a while. I mean, I would – I can remember working on these things like after school, say from 3:30 to 5:00 or something like that.

MR. COOKE: Did you work at school or at your home shop?

MR. KEYSER: At my home, yeah. At that point he had built a shop connected to the house, but a separate building. The equivalent of a one-car garage – well, an enlarged one-car garage, but it had a basement and it had an attic in it, and he used the basement and the attic for storage, and then his work area was on the one ground floor. At that point I inherited his bench in the garage portion of the house basement, and it had a built-in bench against one end, behind where the car pulled in, and I had my jigsaw there and my bench and, you know, hand tools and things. And I can remember, sort of, cleaning up and putting away my things before he got home because I didn’t want to subject myself to his criticism, I guess, or –

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: Not that he was – he wasn’t discouraging, but I had the feeling that he didn’t appreciate what I was doing at that point. Later, when I achieved some notable success, I guess, or recognized success in a couple of other competitive things, I think he got more appreciative of what I was doing, or more – you know, realized that it could be leading somewhere. Neither my mother nor father went to college. My father, I don’t think, went beyond third or fourth grade. He was pretty much a self-educated individual. His father was a plumber. He was in a railroad accident and had lost both legs, and so my father and his three brothers had to – or at least my father – my father was the second oldest son. His oldest son and my father – his oldest brother and my father immediately, sort of, went into the plumbing business with my grandfather, and my father told stories about him pulling my grandfather on a wagon to the jobsite, and then he would, sort of, supervise. Apparently he was a very large man. He died before I was born. And my father and his brother did not get along well, and so my father decided he was not going to pursue the plumbing trade as a profession, as an occupation, so he started out working for other carpenters, contractors, in the area.

MR. COOKE: Learning from them.

MR. KEYSER: Learning from them. And then he attended Carnegie Tech [Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, PA]. At that point they had, like, an industrial, or an occupational studies, evening program on construction, house construction, and they used to make models, I guess, you know, with – two-by-four stick models of the structure of a home, and then they would mock up full-size complete sections. They would have a – you know, the bricklaying – the carpenter crew would come in and stud up a wall or a section of a home, maybe involving a corner and some windows, and then the bricklayers would come in and lay the brick around it, then the electricians would come in and wire it, and things like that. Then they’d tear it down and the next class would do the same thing.

So he went – I don’t know how long it was, but he did attend classes out there where he learned more about the construction business. And that led then to him going into business for himself.

MR. COOKE: What were you thinking about in terms of building these soap box cars? You were intrigued with motion, other kids doing it? Was it the project basis?

MR. KEYSER: I think it was the project that formed the motivation. The competitive part of it, I guess, was part of it. I mean, it was something that I could see how I was doing against other people who were doing similar things.

MR. COOKE: And it was a competitive sphere that you felt comfortable in, as opposed to sports or necessarily, sort of, grades in the classroom or something like that? I mean, it seemed to be that this was – you had a sense that this was your sphere, or –

MR. KEYSER: It was something that I enjoyed doing and something that, I guess, I thought I had the potential of doing well at. I made decent grades at school, but I had to work hard. The grades didn’t come easy. But during high school and so forth – I mean, I think I was on the honor roll my share of the time. I was probably –

MR. COOKE: I didn’t mean to say it was one or the other, but there is this idea – sort of pleasurable, that it seemed enjoyable, an enjoyable form for competition in some respects.

MR. KEYSER: It was very much so. And it also kept me very busy. I talked about my father maybe looking down his nose a bit at some of my early building experiences, but he very much discouraged sports or athletics. I mean, that was really foolishness, you know, to go out and kick a ball around and – that sort of thing was just – and so I – this was something that I could gravitate to with some promise of being good at, I guess.

MR. COOKE: How did you – I mean, you were talking earlier about the way in which – you know, there weren’t kits for doing soap box cars or anything. How did you come up with some ideas? Did you have friends, did you read magazine articles, and then – how do you come up with your own ideas?

MR. KEYSER: I was –

MR. COOKE: I’m just curious about the process.

MR. KEYSER: I was an avid reader of technical stuff. I had an uncle who subscribed to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines, and while I never asked my parents for a subscription, he used to save all his magazines and recycle them to me.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: And I had huge cardboard boxes with, you know, years worth of these magazines that I saved, and I could – I had sort of a category system in my mind, I guess, where I could remember an article, and I could almost go to the exact magazine, you know, remembering the cover, and pull out the article. And I think the Soap Box Derby, after the Second World War, started up around ’46 or ’47, and that’s when I first – I found out about it through one of these magazines that my uncle had given me, and I thought, boy, that would be really neat. I read about this kid out in San Diego, I think, that had won the first one after the war, and it talked about his car and the construction and gave, you know, exploded-view details. And I thought, boy, that would be really neat to be able to build those. And that was two or three years before I was eligible, age-wise, to compete, and so I started just constructing cars in –

MR. COOKE: Wheeled things.

MR. KEYSER: Wheeled things in this basement shop that I had.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: – and without access to axles and good wheels and things like that. I mean, it was just, sort of, wagon stuff that was around and that sort of thing that I cobbled these things together with.

And so I – and I started scrapbooks on Soap Box Derby articles, you know, that had been in the paper. The local newspaper was a sponsor of the local race, and every week they would have something about the Soap Box Derby. And the thing that interested me, I guess, was the idea of designing something, coming up with a design. I never tried to pattern my cars after something that I had seen. I thought, well, now there’s – you know, is there a better way to do this, or is there a sleeker way, or what would this look like if it were a little different? I didn’t know – I knew nothing about design.

Art was kind of nonexistent in our home. I was never taken to museums or anything like that. There were none in the immediate vicinity of my home, and so I wasn’t exposed to an awful lot of that sort of thing. And I can remember later when I started designing other things, I thought, gee, there ought to be some texts available or something that would help with this. And, you know, I got into some basic three-dimensional design stuff later, but that was much later. But there wasn’t an awful lot available at that time on designing, so it was a kind of a seat-of-the-pants sort of thing.

My father –

MR. COOKE: That’s interesting because in some respects Carnegie was one of the first industrial design programs in the 1930s.

MR. KEYSER: Exactly.

MR. COOKE: And yet this is a universe that is unknown to you.

MR. KEYSER: Right, right. Yeah. It was a whole sphere that I had no idea of.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: Now, the Carnegie Museum, which is down the street from Carnegie Tech, Carnegie Mellon, had a Saturday art class for high school students that you could go to. I think you had to qualify in some respect. But I never participated in that. I never got the particulars on it or the motivation to do that, so the Soap Box Derby was kind of my initial thing –

MR. COOKE: You were really driven by design – both mechanical design as well as product design and, you know, the exterior in some respects, and wood just happened to be an easy material you could work with.

MR. KEYSER: I could work with and I had the advantage of a supply of materials. [They laugh.]

MR. COOKE: Thanks, Dad.

MR. KEYSER: That my father did furnish me with. And he never hesitated in doing that. You know, he always gave me whatever I needed – didn’t get an awful lot of instruction. I can remember my first racer was basically a stack laminated, which I had read about in Popular Mechanics or something, and he didn’t give me an awful lot of – as I remember – an awful lot of guidance. I was pretty naïve at that time. I had never driven anything, you know, in terms of – other than maybe a tricycle and a bicycle and a wagon.

But I can remember my father – my very first race my father – my uncle – my uncle had a pickup truck, so we loaded my car. And then there was an older – a kid who was a little bit older than I was, and his father owned a gas station kind of around the corner from our home, and he had entered – I think my first year was his second year in it, because I had seen his car and was really interested in, you know, what he was doing. So the two of us, they were going to take us out to the course one evening for a trial run. And they stopped traffic, and then we started – the two of us started down the hill. I mean, I was really naïve and I – you know, the childhood experience of driving a car is like [laughs], I mean, I started out and pretty soon I was going this way –

MR. COOKE: Compensating and –

MR. KEYSER: – and each time I – you know, I was zigzagging sharper and sharper, and I crashed into the curb, and it broke the axle and bent the wheel and stuff like that. So we had, like, two days to the race. So we brought it back to the shop, to the basement shop where I was working, and talked about it. My uncle, who is a plumber, and my father, you know, the carpenter, and they suggested some things to do. So I went out the next day and bought some new turn buckles for the steering system, and I think the Chevy dealer furnished me with a new set of wheels or something. So I got it done in time for the race. And then they said, “Don’t over-steer.” [Laughs.]

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: Slight adjustments.

MR. COOKE: Right, just a little bit.

MR. KEYSER: And the steering action was pretty quick on those things. You know, you’d turn like this and the axle went like that.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: So the ratio was pretty quick. At any rate, that was kind of the first designing and building involvement that I had.

MR. COOKE: And then that was followed, you said, in high school with some of these projects in terms of automotive design and some of the models?

MR. KEYSER: Yes, Fisher Body Division of General Motors sponsored a program every year, and they had a junior and a senior division. The junior division was – it seems to me it was – I did my first one maybe when I was in eighth grade. And I think it was eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh were the four years that I entered. That would have ended up around ’53, I guess. And it was to design and build a model car, and they gave us some basic specifications, that it had to accommodate, you know, so many people and have so much room for legroom and vision angles out the windows and things like that.

So there was a basis to start from. And then they published, periodically, a leaflet that went out to all the people who were registered, giving tips on model making, various techniques and what kind of clay to use for your clay model. So we started with sketches and then a full-size clay model. When I say full size, full model size, which was about maybe 16 to 18 inches long. And, you know, you did a clay model, and then you decided how you were going to build it and how to construct it. They were solid. There was no interior furnishings or anything. And my first ones were extremely crude.

My third year into it I placed – I guess it was -- first in my region, which was Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I believe, and I was awarded a trip to Detroit. And it was like a long weekend perhaps; it may have been as long as a week. And we toured some of the General Motors plants and saw what was going on there, the way metal was fabricated for the bodies and things and the engines. And also there was a recreational aspect. They took us out to Mackinac Island, or something, and we had the tour of the resort area there, and there was a swimming pool. And then they had a banquet when the national award winners were announced. And of course all of them – the models of all of the youngsters that were there, the regional winners, were on display. And so it was mind-boggling to see the level of craftsmanship that these models incorporated.

MR. COOKE: And people were using different materials too?

MR. KEYSER: Different materials.

MR. COOKE: I mean, you used wood, but other people might be using plastics or –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, exactly.

MR. COOKE: – metal, you know, entirely metal or –

MR. KEYSER: Exactly, and various finishing. You know, I was brushing on the enamel whereas others were spraying lacquer and rubbing it out with rubbing compound and everything. And it really opened my eyes to the level of craftsmanship that I was up against. So I came back from that with a goal to raise the level of what I was doing.

MR. COOKE: And the way it played out where in some of these models, the fabrication plants and – I mean, that’s where some of that precision and, really, finesse work came through in terms of some of these science fair competitions?

MR. KEYSER: Well, actually before that, the next model I did then was a quantum leap in terms of skill level. As I look back on the models now, it kind of amazes me where I had gone from one year to the next year in terms of just the quality of the work. And it was a result of seeing the competition and the challenge of rising to that. And that was my last year in the junior division, I guess. I was a junior in high school, I believe – sophomore or junior level in high school, and I ended up winning third national that year, and then I was no longer eligible. But in the senior division, you know, a lot of those people ended up at that art center out in Los Angeles and places like that, industrial design.

MR. COOKE: I mean, really in mainstream, you know, working with Harley Earl or going out to Pasadena to the art college [Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California]–

MR. KEYSER: Exactly.

MR. COOKE: – in terms of some of those real centers of automotive design.

MR. KEYSER: Yes.

MR. COOKE: But yet you chose to go in a different direction.

MR. KEYSER: I was very naïve and lacked a lot of counseling, I guess, or exposure at that point. Along about that same time, junior and senior year – well, sophomore, junior, senior year in high school, I started participating in a science fair that was sponsored by the Buhl Planetarium in Pittsburgh. It was the local planetarium there and they had various divisions: engineering, biology, science, that sort of thing. It was pre-computer days, so there wasn’t a computer section. But –

MR. COOKE: It’s interesting. I mean, the planetarium rather than the museum is the pull for you –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah.

MR. COOKE: – from the shop into something different.

MR. KEYSER: Right. And so my first exhibit was a towing tank, which they used for – which I had read about in Popular Mechanics, again – that they used to test boat hulls. It was a tank, like a long thing that – they had an overhead trolley that, sort of, dragged the –

MR. COOKE: MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA] I think had one.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, yeah. And so mine was a model demonstrating what one of those might look like. And it had water in. It was a circular thing, so that it went around in a circle, and it was a little propeller-driven boat that ran around. And then the second year I did a – as a result of having gotten that first trip to Detroit for the Fisher Body competition, I decided I wanted to do an automotive plant. I entered the engineering division, and I did a scale model of what I could remember or perceive as a stamping plant, which had stamped out automobile bodies.

And so it consisted of a number of these stamping presses, and I actually rigged it up so that it would stamp out a tinfoil fender, and it was kicked out of the press then by a couple of little fingers onto a conveyor belt that ran along and changed directions, and then the part dropped down and the tinfoil advanced through the press, and another one came down for the next cycle. And it had a superstructure of what – it was like a skeleton of a building. And a lot of it was constructed, you know, from looking at pictures of industrial plants and just sort of speculating on how it might look, and having seen some of it in Detroit. And that was – it was very successful. I took, I don’t know, five or six awards that year in the engineering division.

The following year, my senior year, I did a model of a steel rolling plant. And there I actually contacted a local engineering firm that designed rolling mills for the steel industry, which of course at that time –

MR. COOKE: Which was still active at that time. [Laughs.]

MR. KEYSER: It was still active, right. We still had it. And they furnished me with a complete set of blueprints for the rolling mill, and then I did a scale down and did a scale model.

MR. COOKE: Out of wood?

MR. KEYSER: Out of wood predominantly, but it involved some metalwork and some plastic work and things like that, hooking up motors and mechanisms to achieve the automation – or the animation -- that I wanted. And I took a number of awards that year as well. All of these things led people to believe that I – and I believed them – that I ought to be an engineer.

MR. COOKE: And being in Pittsburgh, the natural step was thinking about Carnegie Mellon [Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania]?

MR. KEYSER: Yes, yes.

MR. COOKE: And probably a mechanical engineer of some sort? Is that –

MR. KEYSER: That’s what I went into, yes, because a lot of these early things involved mechanisms and motors and devices to achieve results. And I went to a parochial grade school, a Catholic high school, and I was on an academic track in terms of my high school program through college –

MR. COOKE: Right, as opposed to vocational/technical sort of thing?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. And they had an art department – you know, like an art room, and that was not open to anybody in the academic – in the –

MR. COOKE: The college track.

MR. KEYSER: The college track.

MR. COOKE: Amazing.

MR. KEYSER: I can remember passing the room and looking in and seeing what they were doing, and I saw – you know, I would see some figurative sculpture, some painting going on. I never really made the connection, I guess, between that and what I was involved with, with Fisher Body and the –

MR. COOKE: And the engineering and the plants?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. And I enjoyed math, and everybody – friends of my family and my mother and father, you know, who were – one particular fellow who was working as a draftsman for an engineering firm, he said, “You ought to be an engineer.”

MR. COOKE: And that appeals to your dad in terms of, sort of, it’s measurable, it’s understandable and –

MR. KEYSER: It was, quote, an education.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: And he really insisted –

MR. COOKE: You know, with a practical goal.

MR. KEYSER: With a practical goal and a future of employment.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: So I stayed on campus. Carnegie Tech at that point was at the opposite end of town from where we lived, and my parents thought that I ought to stay on campus and experience that life. And so I stayed on campus, and it was the first time that I realized that there was – that I was exposed to the whole idea of art, architecture, music, theater, because they had a wonderful fine arts department, which covered the whole gamut from theater to music to architecture, graphic design, industrial design, sculpture, painting, and it was all in one building at that point.

MR. COOKE: So all those different parts were in a single building?

MR. KEYSER: In one building, right. It was like a four- or five-floor – including the basement – building that I used to just love to roam through there and see what these people were doing. And I can remember as early as halfway through the first semester of my freshman year saying to my parents, “You know, that’s what I would like to be doing.”

MR. COOKE: Did your engineering major give you much freedom to sort of cross over into that? Or was your curriculum really strict in –

MR. KEYSER: No, it was very lockstep at that point. And Carnegie Tech at that point was very theoretical, no hands-on, kind of, making things and figuring out how things worked.

MR. COOKE: No real shop component to the engineering?

MR. KEYSER: Exactly. I can remember they had a metal lathe in one of the – in the basement of the mechanical engineering building that was over in the corner, covered with dust and debris and stuff. I don’t think anybody had touched it for years.

MR. COOKE: That’s the whole association with trade, right? You know, that’s the trade –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. It may have been a leftover from that, yeah.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: And so, I could not get excited about working for a week on a theoretical problem and ending up with a stack of papers and a theoretical answer which, you know, had no tangibility to me. And what I came to realize from then on was what motivated me was the tangibility of making something, seeing something through from conception to finished product and then having the tangibility of that.

MR. COOKE: Yeah. I mean, it’s a material or physical sort of process that you’re engaged in problem solving; it’s not a theoretical problem solving.

MR. KEYSER: Exactly. Exactly. I’ve often said since then, if I could redesign my education –

MR. COOKE: We always want to when we look back.

MR. KEYSER: Right [laughs]. I would start out, I think – well, I always said – before I started painting, I’ve always said that what I would do is study architecture, because there you get the combination of the math and the theoretical and the structure and the aesthetic end of it.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: – and end up at furniture, but through the journey of architecture. And of course, you know, some of the well-known industrial furniture designers have gone through that.

MR. COOKE: So how did you come to grips, you know, sort of realizing halfway through your first semester wandering through this building? Did you just tough it out in terms of your engineering, or did you –

MR. KEYSER: Well, that –

MR. COOKE: Did your summers sort of compensate for the strictness of that curriculum?

MR. KEYSER: Well, I talked to my parents about switching as early as halfway through the first semester, and they said, “Gee, the architects we know don’t make much money,” and, “What does a painter and a sculptor do?” And of course they were right. [Laughs.]

MR. COOKE: That really flew in the face of what your dad was thinking about, right?

MR. KEYSER: So, you know, it had no employment or practical potential to it in their eyes.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: So they discouraged me from doing it. I think if I had had the intestinal fortitude to say, look, you know, this is what I really want to do. I’m not worried at this point how I’m going to make a living, but I think I can get an education. If I’d had the foresight and the intestinal fortitude to take that stance, they probably would have gone along with it, but –

MR. COOKE: But your exposure was just, sort of – you know, it’s incremental.

MR. KEYSER: Exactly.

MR. COOKE: You’re getting a little bit more aware and a little bit more aware of –

MR. KEYSER: And I didn’t know what was beyond that next step, you know.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: And so I just toughed it out. In those days – or at least in those days I felt an obligation to, kind of, when I started something, to finish it. It was – you know, each time I started a Soap Box Derby racer, regardless of any difficulties that I might have along the way, I felt an obligation to finish it in time for the race.

MR. COOKE: That’s a postwar mentality in some ways, you know.

MR. KEYSER: Oh, yeah.

MR. COOKE: Grin and bear it, right?

MR. KEYSER: Exactly. So I grinned and beared it. I made – I could never see myself being anything other than a mediocre engineer. My grades were mediocre; I had very little interest in what I was doing. I mean, studying internal combustion engines – not how the pistons work and all that business but rather analyzing the fuel that went into it, the dynamometer reading of the power delivered from it and the temperature heat loss of the gases out through the muffler and the exhaust pipe and figuring out the efficiency, you know, that was, quote, the internal combustion engines course.

MR. COOKE: Right. So what did you do to tap into something that was developing inside of you?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, I did everything I could to try to occupy myself with things that I was really interested in. I belonged to a fraternity. I pledged a fraternity in my first year there, and I think they rushed me because they had known of my Soap Box Derby involvement.

MR. COOKE: Your reputation preceded you. [Laughs.]

MR. KEYSER: Right. I can remember the housekeeper of the church of the parish that we belonged to had a nephew who belonged to this fraternity. He was a couple of years older than I was. And I think she put the message in his ear, you know, you ought to try rushing this guy because he could help you with your – they called them buggies. Carnegie Tech had an annual competition held during – Spring Carnival they called it -- and mainly the fraternities each designed at least one buggy. It was a combination pushed-pushing event, the buggies. It was like a Soap Box Derby, but they had a push bar on the back of them and a team of pushers pushed it up a couple of hills and – so about half the race was uphill pushing or level-stretch pushing. The actual finish line was on a level stretch, so that ended up to be a sprint to the finish line – a combination of that and free-roll, downhill free-roll.

And so I got the job of – I mean, I didn’t need to be encouraged much. I took on the job of being the buggy chairman for my fraternity and –

MR. COOKE: As a freshman even?

MR. KEYSER: Yes. During my freshman year we used the previous year’s buggy and just, sort of, updated it a bit and changed it a bit. Then between my freshman year and my sophomore year, that summer, I built another buggy pretty much single-handedly in my home shop, because the fraternity house didn’t have a shop or anything to work in. So that was one of the activities I participated in.

MR. COOKE: I call them “sanity keepers,” you know –

MR. KEYSER: Exactly right. Right.

MR. COOKE: – as you’re forcing yourself into something else. It’s obvious that there’s this inner spirit that’s moving you in a different direction at this point.

MR. KEYSER: Exactly.

MR. COOKE: So how do you sustain that?

MR. KEYSER: That was one of the things. I started thinking about sculpture, I guess. I can still remember the day I went into the bookstore and I had seen this book. I think it was Carola Giedion-Welcker, her book Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space [New York: George Wittenborn, 1955], I think it was called. You know, it was a book about an inch-and-a-quarter, inch-and-a-half thick.

MR. COOKE: Uh-huh.

MR. KEYSER: And I plunked down – probably at that point it was, maybe, 20 bucks. [Laughs.]

MR. COOKE: A significant amount.

MR. KEYSER: And I bought this book and I digested it. I mean, I – you know, it was my first introduction to the world of sculpture. I got to know a lot of the names of the sculptors that were working and what they were doing. The curriculum in engineering was very lockstep. Our senior year was the first time we had an elective.

MR. COOKE: Oh, joy. [Laughs.]

MR. KEYSER: And the choices were Near Eastern religion and a couple of other, sort of, humanity-type electives. And I went to the dean of engineering and I said, “I would like to take a sculpture class at night. It’s something I’m very interested in.” He said, “Well, we’ve never had this request before.” [They laugh.]

MR. COOKE: Thinking outside the box, right?

MR. KEYSER: Right. So he had to get together with the dean of fine arts to okay my proposal to take this elective. So I took a full year of sculpture at night with a fellow by the name of George Koran, who was a local sculptor. I think maybe he had gone through the Carnegie program. He was middle-aged at that point. He had some work on campus. I remember one was for the Industrial Management building, kind of an exterior mural of low-relief, bas-relief – a mural that he had done. It was, sort of, WPA [Works Progress Administration]-type –

MR. COOKE: So he was still figurative –

MR. KEYSER: He was figurative.

MR. COOKE: – working in the figurative tradition?

MR. KEYSER: But interestingly enough, he approached the class not from any point of view. You went in and it was pretty much a plaster class. He said, “This is how we mix the plaster, and you can use an armature if you’d like, or you can just start building with the plaster.” And I really got a lot out of that fella. I owe a great deal to him. I talked to him about drawing. I’d done, you know, mostly mechanical drawing at that point through the engineering and – but I had a sketchbook and talked to him about these very primitive sketches I was doing. He said, “Well, there are ways of developing ideas.” He said, “Just put a mark on the paper and then in response to that mark put another mark and then gradually build it into some type of a format.” And then he said, “Then you can translate that the same way into materials. You know, you can start with an element and then decide what you’re going to add to that and how it’s going to relate to that” -- [END TAPE 1 SIDE A.] “and then maybe add a third one and how it’s going to relate.” And so, as a way of sort of getting going –

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: – getting started.

MR. COOKE: So you don’t have a creative block or anything like that.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, exactly. And I really enjoyed his class. It was one night a week for three hours, so you didn’t get a lot of exposure to it.

MR. COOKE: Did you work through problems based on what you had read in this earlier book on modern sculpture? Did you set – assign my task, oh, I want to understand the way somebody is doing this, or were you really –

MR. KEYSER: No.

MR. COOKE: – just unencumbered and tried different things?

MR. KEYSER: No, at that point I think I was – as a result of my experience with the Soap Box Derby I didn’t want to have mine turn out looking like one of the ones in the book. And yet I studied them, you know, in great detail.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: I also, that senior year, started – you know, I had to start thinking about job interviews and things, and I decided that maybe what I would do would be to go with a company that made consumer products that would have an industrial design department in-house, that maybe somehow I could work myself into a position where I could, sort of, bridge the gap between engineering and industrial design.

MR. COOKE: Right – slowly, sort of, stretch a foot out. [Laughs.]

MR. KEYSER: Exactly. Exactly. And so I thought, well, gee, I ought to know something about industrial design. So I went to the industrial design department and talked with a fellow by the name of Richard Felver, who was teaching the seniors at that point, and told him what I was interested in. And I may have even had some photographs of some of the things that I had done at that point to show him. He said, “Why don’t you come into our senior industrial design class and, sort of, be the engineering consultant for this class?” And so I did that during my last semester there. And I didn’t get much experience functioning as an engineering consultant. They were designing ranges or something when I first got into the class. It may have been a leftover from the previous semester project or something, but they were already, kind of, started on it. And they were pretty much just working appearance design with a pretty standard range format, so there wasn’t an awful lot of – well, is there room for the burners, and that kind of –

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: – thinking in –

MR. COOKE: They were in the final leg?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. So there wasn’t much that I could contribute there. But I ended up doing a project. The last project was a packaging assignment, and it was to pick a product that was pretty nondescript whose package would have a real influence in the marketability of the product.

And so I did that project, and it was – I’m sure – we never had a final critique or anything that I participated in. I can remember taking my project in the last class meeting, or maybe it was even the last – during finals week or something I took the project in and showed him. And I’m sure, you know, in terms of senior industrial designers that it had to look pretty damn amateurish. But I kind of went through the steps and so that helped some. But the sculpture, I think, I got more out of than anything else.

MR. COOKE: So you – as you finish up at Carnegie, you’ve got – you’ve done your engineering degree – that’s been your major – you’ve got a little bit of sculpture, a little bit of industrial design. Did you already have your next step in mind at that point?

MR. KEYSER: Well, at that point I had taken ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps], so I had an obligation – an active-duty obligation. At that point there were two choices: six months active duty, and something like nine years Reserve or two years active duty. And I was not an armed forces type person, so I –

MR. COOKE: This is right at the Korean War?

MR. KEYSER: Just before that, I guess.

MR. COOKE: Just before that, so ’53 or –

MR. KEYSER: This was – well, when was – this was ’58 when I graduated.

MR. COOKE: Okay, from high – from college? Okay. So it’s after Korea.

MR. KEYSER: Okay. Yeah, it was after Korea. I chose the six-month, and I interviewed in a number of consumer product companies and I got a job offer from – I think it was Schick electric razor company and Hoover vacuum cleaner company. I know I applied to Kodak, but I don’t think I got an offer from them. I interviewed with them, but I didn’t get an offer from Kodak. So I ended up going with Hoover vacuum cleaner in Canton, Ohio. It was within traveling distance to Pittsburgh. I was – my wife and I were – had met at Carnegie Mellon and – Carnegie Tech and had gone pretty steady from my sophomore or junior year on.

And so I started at Hoover, and I think I worked through the summer of my first year out of college, and then my active duty was – I had to leave and go to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, for my six months' active duty. While there I worked at the post – they had a post hobby shop kind of facility, and I tried doing some sculpture kind of things there – didn’t have a lot of time and didn’t do an awful lot. Went back to Canton, Ohio – North Canton, Ohio – and decided I was going to see what Kent State [Kent State University, Kent, Ohio] had to offer – they were within travel distance – in the way of an evening class. I wanted to get into a drawing class, a freehand art –

MR. COOKE: Drawing from life, yeah.

MR. KEYSER: – drawing-from-life kind of thing. I remember I had photos of some of the things that I had done in high school and college, and I started knocking on some doors up there, and the drawing instructors that I talked to said, “Well, you know, have you done any drawing?” “No. Well, I’ve done some mechanical drawing, but” – “Well, you’re not qualified to come into our drawing class.” So the last door I knocked on was a jewelry class, and a fellow by the name of Mel Someroski was teaching this jewelry class. He taught – I think his main media was textiles or ceramics, or maybe both, but he obviously taught a number of different media and this jewelry-making classes. And I showed him pictures of what I had done, and he said, “Sure,” he said, “come on into my class,” he said. “I’d be glad to have you.” And I owe him a great deal.

After class I stayed on a couple of evenings and started talking to him about my dissatisfaction with engineering. I didn’t enjoy the job. You know, my parents had said, “You get out and you’re making money in engineering, you’ll enjoy it a lot more.” Well, wrong.

MR. COOKE: Not. [Laughs.]

MR. KEYSER: I lived for the weekends when I could travel back to Pittsburgh and see Joan, and I just – you know, I hated to get up at 8:00 in the morning and go to work, and I thought to myself, this is insane. I mean, I’m going to be a street person or an alcoholic or something going through life this way.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: So I started discussing with Mel Someroski my dissatisfaction with engineering and my thinking that there must be something in the creative field that – and I’ll never forget the evening he went over – and it was a typical classroom with these bookcases built in along one wall with masonite sliding doors. And he slid open this door, and it was stacked with old magazines, and he brought out this old Craft Horizons, it was called at that point – shook the dust off of it, and he leafed through, and in the back he said, “Here’s this place called RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York].” He said, “You ought to go up and check it out.” He said, “They have furniture and they have metal.”

MR. COOKE: So he hadn’t been a product of RIT, but he was –

MR. KEYSER: No.

MR. COOKE: – just aware of it from Craft Horizons?

MR. KEYSER: He was aware of it, yeah.

MR. COOKE: Just sort of knowing that the School for American Craftsmen was there.

MR. KEYSER: Existed, yeah. And probably was aware of some of the faculty. He’s deceased now, but I know he’s a Fellow of the American Craft Council, so he was recognized as an educator, I guess. I never saw much of his work, but –

MR. COOKE: So he was the one who –

MR. KEYSER: He was the one that planted the seed. So I went up to RIT, interviewed with Harold Brennan. And Harold Brennan had come from an architecture program at Carnegie Tech, so that was sort of a bit of a bond there.

MR. COOKE: That made it easier to talk.

MR. KEYSER: [Laughs.] Yeah, right. And, again, I didn’t have a formal portfolio; I just had, sort of, a collection of snapshots of some things that I had done. I think I maybe had taken a couple of pieces. I had – in this metals class with Mel I had done, sort of, a hollowware form, sort of a candy tray kind of form, with a metal tray and a lignum vitae wooden base, sort of a – kind of a Calderish form set on a Henry Moore [laughs] was what it looked like.

MR. COOKE: Or not?

MR. KEYSER: And I think it was small enough that I could carry – you know, to take that on the bus with me, and a couple of other things. I think maybe I had taken some jewelry that I had done with him. So I talked with Harold Brennan, Tage Frid, and Hans Christensen.

MR. COOKE: So it was wood and metal that came up because of your experiences in the materials?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. And it was at that point I can – I mean, I can remember, you know, thinking pretty seriously, well, this is a toss up; I’ve got to make a – and at that point there was not a chance – it wasn’t obvious to me that there was a chance of maybe combining the two or taking a dual major or something. It was, you know, you major in this area and that’s it. You don’t even take electives at that point. It was very lockstep.

MR. COOKE: So it wasn’t even a foundation program or anything like that? You were just right into that medium, and, you know, it was wood or metal?

MR. KEYSER: You decided before you got there what you wanted to be, which is a little bit absurd thinking about that, but that’s the way it was.

MR. COOKE: And this was for an MFA that you would be going on for?

MR. KEYSER: No, this was for – I knew nothing about MFAs at that point. I was intending to stay two years. My liberal arts were all finished because I had done those at Carnegie Tech.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: I was figuring on trying to double up my freshman and sophomore year in terms of the studio and try to get a bachelor's in two years –

MR. COOKE: Okay.

MR. KEYSER: – or two years plus. I know I was – I went the summer between my first and second year. Ironically, I think it was my first year there that it was the first year that the School for American Craftsmen was – that’s what it was called at the time, Craftsmen –

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: – that a master's was offered. And it was a one-year MFA program, pretty much just studio of your choice. You know, you majored in one studio.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: A written thesis, no thesis show. So that was the –

MR. COOKE: It was pretty undeveloped.

MR. KEYSER: Pretty undeveloped at that point. That was the first year that they offered them. I know one of my close friends that I’d made during that year, he was in the master's program, so he was there for just one year. He came from an interior architecture program out in Oregon, I believe.

MR. COOKE: So you ended up interviewing with Harold, with Tage, and with Hans?

MR. KEYSER: Right.

MR. COOKE: What were your interviews like with Hans and Tage? I mean, was there a way in which the interview helped, sort of, push you in a certain direction?

MR. KEYSER: I don’t remember much about the interview with Hans. Maybe it was because I couldn’t understand him. [Laughs.] He spoke very broken English.

MR. COOKE: Okay.

MR. KEYSER: But I don’t think – I mean, that’s just – I don’t remember an awful lot about my interview with him. I remember being very impressed with the hollowware that was being done, with the quality of the metalwork that was being done. I mean, the students really learned how to move metal. I remember much more in detail the interview with Tage, and I remember asking him, “Is it possible to make a living at this?” And he said, “Most certainly, yes.” And he had me go over to Shop One. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Shop –

MR. COOKE: Yeah, yeah.

MR. KEYSER: He said – it was within two blocks of the school. He said, “Go over to Shop One and see the things that they’re marketing there.” And at that point Shop One was started and owned by –

MR. COOKE: It was Hans and Jack and Tage.

MR. KEYSER: Yes, and I think maybe Karl Laurell, who was teaching textiles. I think he may have had a hand in it as well. But it was, yeah, Jack Prip –

MR. COOKE: Jack Prip –

MR. KEYSER: And I think Ronny [Ronald] Pearson was –

MR. COOKE: He actually came – I think he came into it as well, and then Hans – and Wildenhain was the other person.

MR. KEYSER: Frans Wildenhain.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. I don’t think Hans Christensen – he wasn’t one of the – I think it was Jack Prip.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: Jack Prip, Tage Frid, Frans Wildenhain, and possibly this Karl Laurell were the ones who started it.

MR. COOKE: So seeing those things at Shop One –

MR. KEYSER: It was a revelation to me. I mean, I – you know, I had not seen – had not been exposed to a retail outlet like that before.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: And it was one of the early ones I guess.

MR. COOKE: It was incredibly important. I mean, in some ways people from that area talk about it being more important than America House in terms of, sort of, the quality, the range of work that could be shown.

MR. KEYSER: And he had also, with a former student, started a company called Hardwood House [Rochester, NY], which was a – strictly a furniture designing and building firm. And I think there was just Tage and this fellow Bob [Robert] Donovan.

MR. COOKE: Bob Donovan?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, who had started it. And then they took on – at a later date I think they took on a couple of more graduates. I know there was a fellow by the name of Jack [John] Stevens was involved. He had been a graduate of the school. A fellow that ended up the president of the company after – many steps later; I’m trying to think of his name. He’s out on the West Coast now; he’s retired. Jim Bailey – Jim Bailey was his name, and then Dick [Richard] Wakamoto. And at the time, I guess, when I was a student there, there was Jim Bailey, Dick Wakamoto, Jack Stevens, and I think Tage had sort of separated himself somewhat from it because of his teaching obligations. But he was still, I think, somewhat active.

MR. COOKE: Yeah, it’s a nice link between what’s going on in studio, in school, as well as sort of practical concerns.

MR. KEYSER: Exactly. Exactly.

MR. COOKE: It’s one of the things that I keep hearing about Tage’s influence is, you know, instilling, again – like your father, instilling these values that you’ve got to be efficient, you’ve got to make every motion count, and the idea ultimately is to have accountability for your time and having goals and – I mean, I hear it from Hank Gilpin [furniture maker; Lincoln, Rhode Island] and various other people that, you know, it’s – you’ve got to make a living, you’ve got to make a living out of this. So it resonated well with you.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. I can still remember, it had to be my second year there, I decided I was going to do a stool, and I came in with some drawings and showed them to Tage. He said, “How long do you think this is going to take you?” I said, “Well, I think I should probably be able to get it done in maybe a week, week-and-a-half.” He said, “Design a stool that you can make in a day.”

MR. COOKE: That’s what you can charge for a price, you know, for a stool.

MR. KEYSER: I said – yeah. He said, “Who’s going to be able to afford a stool that you spent a week-and-a-half on?” I went home and I – you know, I revised – I designed and came up with something I thought – made out cutting lists and procedure lists and everything. Damn, I was – well, it took me two days to build it, but it was, you know, one-third of the time it would have taken me had he not provided the challenge.

MR. COOKE: Yeah, exactly. So after you interviewed there and, sort of, walked around in the shop, in the studio, saw Shop One – I mean, it was instant that this is the place to go in terms of getting out of Hoover?

MR. KEYSER: It was – I went back, talked it over with my parents, and decided to apply to RIT and to Carnegie Tech. I guess I heard first from RIT. Well, I think I pretty much knew coming back from talking with Brennan that I would be accepted. I heard at a somewhat later date Carnegie Tech put me on a waiting list. It was – this was, like, during the summer, I believe, so –

MR. COOKE: For that fall?

MR. KEYSER: For that fall. So, you know, it was late and they were probably full. Well, I’m – at any rate, I was put on a waiting list.

MR. COOKE: For industrial design or architecture at Carnegie?

MR. KEYSER: I think it must have been for industrial design. I don’t remember. Again, I was interested in an undergraduate – I mean, you know, I didn’t know anything about graduate programs.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: So it may have even been for just fine arts – you know, visual arts kind of thing.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: You know, I may not have had to specify at that point. I guess I was a bit put back by being on the waiting list, thinking, well, gee, I graduated from there in engineering and, you know, I’m accepted at this other place; why didn’t they accept me? So I immediately turned in my acceptance to RIT. My father’s opinion sort of was 180 degrees from where it was back when I was a freshman studying engineering. I had gotten the, quote, education, so I had satisfied his criteria. And I decided in talking it over with him, and pretty much decided myself, that it was going to be wood. I was, you know, in his realm and so there was a – you know, and from then on I think my father had never been – we’ve never been closer, because we had things that we could talk about and experiences we could bounce off of one another. So I went ahead and got my army out of the way and finished up at Hoover, and in September I went up to RIT.

MR. COOKE: So you arrived, and you were there at one of these great moments, in essence, in terms of the history of RIT, in terms of some of the students who – this is fifty –

MR. KEYSER: This was 1960.

MR. COOKE: So it’s 1960. I was going to say ’59 or ’60.

MR. KEYSER: ’60 -'61 academic year.

MR. COOKE: Okay, we’re all set. So you arrived at RIT in the fall of 1960?

MR. KEYSER: Correct.

MR. COOKE: Ready to go.

MR. KEYSER: Ready to go.

MR. COOKE: Thinking, this is finally it. [Laughs.]

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. And it was a wonderful time. In contrast to my undergraduate work in engineering, I was really into what I was doing, whereas in engineering I avoided doing class work as much as I could, you know, seeking diversion in things that I was really interested in. Here I could immerse myself in what I was doing. Joan was back in Pittsburgh; she hadn’t graduated yet, so other than going out for a beer now and then with some of my fellow students and stuff, I could pretty much immerse myself in what I was doing.

The studios were set up – the School for American Craftsmen, as it was called in those days, was located in an old mansion-type home that had been divided up into the various studios, kind of a labyrinth-type environment where you, sort of, walk in. I remember the ceramics students had to walk through the woodshop to get back to the – what was, sort of, the carriage – not the carriage house, but, like, the stable or the garage section to the rear of the building. We had a small exhibition area in the front and the dean’s office was right there and there was one receptionist, his secretary; no copying machines, no computers.

MR. COOKE: Not even a fax machine. [They laugh.]

MR. KEYSER: Not even a fax. They had a – what do they call those things?

MR. COOKE: Mimeograph machine?

MR. KEYSER: Mimeograph machine, yeah. I guess it was an older building. It was very informal. If you wanted to hang your coat up, you just drove a nail in the wall kind of thing. Not that it was abused, but it was informal and it was a livable environment. It wasn’t pristine or offensive in any way. The work schedule was like 8:00 to 5:00. The studios were closed in the evenings. There was an evening school program, which was taught by a separate instructor, and that was off limits. Day school students had to be out of there by 5:00. So I used to utilize the evenings either in the library or designing, or I would take my drawings home with me and make out cutting lists, procedures – a procedure list for the next day. I found it was advantageous to do that. I wouldn’t spend time standing at my bench scratching my head and figuring out what I was going to do next; I would kind of know what I was going to do.

MR. COOKE: Pre-plan and ready to go.

MR. KEYSER: Right. So I tried to maximize the use of my time in the studio at that point. During my second year there you could apply for a job, kind of as an assistant to the night school, and gain access to the studio that way.

MR. COOKE: Sort of being a shop assistant and –

MR. KEYSER: Right.

MR. COOKE: – keeping track of the machines and help out.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. The main job, as I remember, was sharpening circular-saw blades, [laughs] keeping them sharp.

MR. COOKE: And truing joiners and making sure the band-saw blade was –

MR. KEYSER: Actually it didn’t even go that far.

MR. COOKE: No?

MR. KEYSER: We kind of did that during the day school in, sort of, a regular machinery maintenance session. But it was mainly, kind of, taking care of the circular-saw blades and taking care of anything that the particular instructor might, you know, want done. But it got a few more – so I applied for that job and got – I think I had it maybe one semester, or something, my second year.

MR. COOKE: In terms of the curriculum in your first semester there, what – you know, what sort of studio time versus drawing class or furniture history, or what –

MR. KEYSER: Okay, that is a good question. First of all, we majored as freshmen, and I was kind of on an undergraduate track. I was trying to do freshman and sophomore work –

MR. COOKE: In one year you said?

MR. KEYSER: In one year.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: I did not have to be out of the studios. I remember most of the liberal arts classes were scheduled, like, over the noon hour or evenings. I can’t remember – students obviously had to take off – or maybe they were scheduled real early in the morning or something. But basically, as I remember, we had good blocks of time. Like, it was 8:00 to 12:00, kind of, in the morning and maybe 1:30 or 2:00 till 5:00 in the afternoon.

The faculty set up a system of – we had a break in the morning, like at 10:00, and we had a meeting room down in the basement of this little mansion. It was called the coffee room, and we went down there and the janitor made coffee – he sold coffee and there was a Coke machine there. So we would take – it was, like, 15 minutes and it was pretty well adhered to. You know, people went down at 10:00, and at 10:15 they started coming back upstairs to their studios. And it was a time when people from the different studios could get together and mingle and exchange ideas and so on. In good weather we got our coffee and went outside, you know, on the porch or something. There was a lot of camaraderie and a lot of interaction amongst the students from the different shops, which years later in a different environment on the new campus, that sort of went by the wayside, I think, or a lot of it.

MR. COOKE: Do you think the domestic nature of the building sort of promoted that as well, and then also the evenings that you couldn’t get into the studios and therefore that fostered some of that time?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. I think people were more willing to schedule their activities pretty precisely: to work for two hours in the morning, and then to go down and have coffee for 15 minutes and, sort of, get rejuvenated again, and come back out and go back up and put in their time. The – you’ve mentioned the residential. Probably that – I never thought about it, but that may have had something to do with it. It was a very homey-type atmosphere.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: And I think probably the students responded to that.

MR. COOKE: It wasn’t sort of institutional or –

MR. KEYSER: Exactly.

MR. COOKE: You know, people sort of – you’re marched along here, there and –

MR. KEYSER: Right.

[Audio break.]

MR. COOKE: This is Ned Cooke interviewing Bill Keyser at his daughter’s home in Sudbury, Massachusetts, on Friday, April 25, 2003. This is disk number two. And we were just talking about Bill’s initial time in the fall of 1960 at RIT, and talking about the physical layout of the School for American Craftsmen and about to delve into some of the curricular issues.

MR. KEYSER: The schedule was, as I remember it, Fridays, I know we had – as a freshman/sophomore, we had two- and three-dimensional design and drawing. One of those must have been on a Monday, too. I think perhaps, like, Monday morning or Monday afternoon was – may have been three-dimensional design, and then, I think, on Fridays we had – in the morning we had three hours of drawing and in the afternoon three hours of two-dimensional design.

MR. COOKE: When you’re in those drawing or two- or three-dimensional design, is it only the wood people who were there, or is it people from all the different shops?

MR. KEYSER: They were all the – they were all Craft School students.

MR. COOKE: So that was another chance where you were mingling together?

MR. KEYSER: Yes, yes. The sort of – I think one of the deficiencies at the time was that we were not in the same classes as the art majors, so we were segregated in that respect. And, I think, the length of the time in those classes – it was a shorter scheduled class time than what the art majors got.

MR. COOKE: Who were in a separate building entirely?

MR. KEYSER: Well, we went to it – the two-dimensional and three-dimensional drawing classes were all taught in a separate building from the Craft School.

MR. COOKE: Okay.

MR. KEYSER: The only thing that was taught in the Craft School were the shop – were the studio classes.

MR. COOKE: So the main emphasis, really, is the shop curriculum, which is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then even part of Monday?

MR. KEYSER: Part of Monday, I believe, as I remember. And there was a reluctance among a lot of students to pull away from the shop and go over to these two- and three-dimensional design classes that they – I think a lot of them viewed them as being unnecessary, nonproductive time.

MR. COOKE: Right. Time was tight; they’d much rather spend it at the bench with the machines, et cetera.

MR. KEYSER: Right, making sawdust.

MR. COOKE: Right.

What was Tage’s approach? He was obviously the head, but then Michael Harmes was there as well working with him at that point?

MR. KEYSER: He was perceived, I think, as the head but mainly because he had been there longer than Michael. When I arrived as a freshman, I think Michael had been there only one or two years prior to that. I did not meet him when I went up for the interview.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: It must have been on a day when he was not teaching. So I think Tage was perceived as being the head, but you would not know it from any organizational chart or anything other than sort of thinking, well, he’s kind of in charge. The two of them were just a wonderful team in terms of seeing eye to eye on what should be done, how it should be approached, and supporting one another. Also, on an informal, kind of friendly basis they were – you know, we had annual parties out at Tage’s house. Michael was just living in an apartment close by the school, so most of the social activities revolved around Tage’s house, who lived down in Victor at the time – Victor, New York.

But it was the first time that I perceived a department as being an organized group of people, more than one. I mean, in engineering it was – you know, somebody taught thermodynamics and another person taught statics and another person taught strength of materials, and there was never – I was never aware of a cohesive department as such. This was the first time that I had experienced that and I was taken with the coordination between the two of them.

MR. COOKE: So they really complemented – I mean, did they each have individual strengths that –

MR. KEYSER: Yes.

MR. COOKE: – together sort of –

MR. KEYSER: Yes, I think so. Tage was very much the – very well versed on the technical side of things. I mean, he knew wood inside and out. He had been trained in Denmark and had come from the apprenticeship program and everything. I guess he had had some design training over there, but it was mainly Danish-modern type influence. Michael was trained, I believe, at the Royal College in England [Royal College of Art, London, England] and – but he was a maker as well as a designer. I gathered over the years when I’ve talked to people about the Royal College that they have a team of technicians who do nothing other – I mean, they’re perfectly willing to execute a student’s designs for them.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: Is that correct?

MR. COOKE: Yeah. I mean, I think by and large its main focus was in the design end of it rather than – you know, RIT and the School for American Craftsmen had always had that reputation of designer craftsmen, like, somebody who does it all and you had to get both parts of the equation.

MR. KEYSER: Right.

MR. COOKE: Or in some ways even more of an emphasis on the making of it in those early years.

MR. KEYSER: Well, Michael, I think, was certainly versed in the design end of it, and either he came with experience at making or he gained that through Tage and the other students within a couple of years of being there, because he was actively building furniture. And he did not have a shop of his own, so he used the school facilities on Saturdays.

MR. COOKE: During the day, not at night. [They laugh.]

MR. KEYSER: Well, we could only work in the shop on Saturdays if Michael was there, so we had to have a sign-up sheet for Saturdays if he was going to be there. So we would always press him on Fridays, you know, “Are you going to be here tomorrow, Mike?” So he would open the shop. And he was actively involved in producing mainly commission work during that time.

MR. COOKE: With their pedagogical structure was it cumulative in terms of building up skill and – you know, from what I understood, sort of Tage doing demos and then trying out an exercise to use that and build up your skills. Was it project-oriented in terms of how to develop designs and work through that? Can you talk at all in terms of how it goes together?

MR. KEYSER: Well, each quarter or each grading period we had an assignment, and they were usually oriented around either a – in the early years, at the beginning, a technique.

MR. COOKE: So it would be a dovetailing technique or a carving technique, or something like that?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. And then later as you got a few of those techniques under your belt, then the assignment was usually an item – a particular item of furniture, a chair or a table. At the beginning the first-year curriculum involved hand tools mainly for the first – I think we were on the quarter – we must have been on the quarter system at the time, like an 11-week quarter – three 11-week quarters comprising the academic year. At least the first quarter we spent strictly with hand tools. And the projects were – and we made our own drawing board, kind of a breadboard-type drawing board, with side cleats to control the warpage, and then we went into a dovetail box and – to start getting function into the thing. I guess it had to hold our drawing supplies. And the third project may have been either a stool or a small table.

MR. COOKE: Only if you could do it in one day, though, right? [They laugh.]

MR. KEYSER: No, that was later.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: That was later.

MR. COOKE: So you did a stool or seating – you know, small seating. Is that it?

MR. KEYSER: Well, as I remember it was a table. At least, I did a table.

MR. COOKE: Okay.

MR. KEYSER: The first furniture piece was a table.

MR. COOKE: Okay. Do you remember what came after that?

MR. KEYSER: Well, I was trying to do the freshman and sophomore together. I know the whole sophomore year was devoted to a dining room ensemble.

MR. COOKE: So you had to do a whole table, set of chairs, and sort of sideboard or credenza?

MR. KEYSER: It was a – ideally, it was an expandable dining table, a set of at least six chairs, a veneered cabinet piece, whether it be sideboard or china closet or whatever. And, I believe, they tried to get a solid wood construction, a solid wood carcass piece, as well. I found myself kind of hitting the high spots. I never did do the drawing board; I went right into the dovetail box for drawing supplies and the – we had to plane a board, I guess. We had to plane a –

MR. COOKE: Hand-plane it? You know, not use a joiner or a surface planer, right?

MR. KEYSER: Right. Hand-plane and true, you know, to get a six-inch, parallel-sided board, uniformly three-quarters of an inch and exactly 24 inches, or some such thing.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: And I did that, and then he said, “Well, why don’t you forget about the drawing board and go right into the dovetail box?” I did that and I did a table. During that first year I did a turned stool that was kind of a monolithic, kind of just a U-shape, but in plan view it was circular, so it – and I did the dining chairs; I did the expandable table; I did the veneered sideboard. I did not do a solid wood carcass. I did that – that was my first piece that I did –

MR. COOKE: Sort of in your –

MR. KEYSER: – the summer session between the first and second year.

MR. COOKE: Between most people’s sophomore and junior year. [Laughs.]

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, right. I picked up this solid wood carcass piece, chest of drawers. And I’m trying to think what else was in that freshman year. I can’t recall now what else was in that. I don’t think they did a chair. I think the first chair they did was as a sophomore, and it was a prototype for the production chairs.

MR. COOKE: Well, they would do it for the dining room ensemble.

MR. KEYSER: The dining room ensemble, yeah, but it was a dining chair.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: I can’t recall what the other first-year projects were.

MR. COOKE: I mean, that makes sense in terms of, I mean, just knowing what some of Tage’s students then went on to base some of their work –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah.

MR. COOKE: – projects.

MR. KEYSER: And, you know, it was logical, too, in terms of progressing from the simpler to the more complex. You mentioned demonstrations. I can remember, I think, the dovetail demonstration Mike Harmes did. So he –

MR. COOKE: Interesting.

MR. KEYSER: He demonstrated some of the techniques as well. One morning a week we had design. It was sort of a separate, graded class, and it was called production planning, or something, and we – there was one drawing room in the building and the woodshop –

MR. COOKE: For everybody, all the different media?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah.

MR. COOKE: And you sort of rotate – you had your certain drawing time?

MR. KEYSER: Exactly. Right, and that was conducted by Tage and Michael. I think that was on a Wednesday morning when both of them were there, and so they were both in on that and they, sort of – it was to work on the designs for your next project, basically, and so they circulated around the room. It was not a very structured thing, and it was – again, the students were – had anxiety attacks about being up there. They would much rather have been down in the wood – it happened to be on the second floor.

MR. COOKE: Yeah, much rather be in the sawdust –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, right.

MR. COOKE: – than in a drawing studio.

MR. KEYSER: And that was a hard thing to combat, even later when I started teaching there, you know, to get them to realize how important the design phase was. So that was a separate class and it carried –

MR. COOKE: And they shared it? I mean, it wasn’t as if Michael was, sort of, a little bit more active there? I mean, I’d always imagined –

MR. KEYSER: I can remember Michael giving mechanical drawing demonstrations. I remember him giving a watercolor illustration or rendering class during the year. But it wasn’t very structured in terms of coming in in the morning: “Now, this is the assignment for today and you have to have it done by 12:00” kind of thing. It was much more open. And resource material at that point was extremely limited. I don’t know whether – slides, for instance, were nonexistent – slide presentations. Exposure was mainly through Mobilia magazine and Domus, and the department subscribed to both of those, and those magazines would be around. So when the typical student would sit down to design something, they would, sort of, immediately go to Mobilia and start paging through to find the chest of drawers, you know, that were being done.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: So that was, sort of, the main point of illustration – the main source of illustration, or inspiration I should say. I was – I don’t think I was unique in that there were a number of other students there who were trying to make themselves – trying to expose themselves to more influences, but I would spend a considerable amount of time in the library. They had a fairly decent periodical subscriptions section, and the bound volumes were – I guess at that time they were as extensive as I was aware they should be.

MR. COOKE: Right. Did that fly in the face at all in terms of – I mean, when you read Tage Frid about, you design around construction, one could almost get a sense that he wants you to be on the shop floor and figuring out ways of doing something expediently, practically, you know, and that’s, sort of, the basis of design. Was the library considered different to him, or –

MR. KEYSER: No, I don’t think so.

MR. COOKE: That just wasn’t his own style.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. His own style, I guess, was working more from the materials, from the construction and from the Danish modern, you know, in a vogue that was going on at the time.

MR. COOKE: Yeah, because he seems to have, sort of, a repertoire of images that he works off of at that particular point in time.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, right. [END TAPE 1 SIDE B.] I think as he went along, I think he expanded his vision as well over the years. I mean, I didn’t keep up with a lot of his work but I – you know, a few key pieces that I've seen, I think he, sort of, pushed out a little bit further. Michael, I'm not sure how much furniture he did after he left RIT. He went up to Canada and was teaching at the Ontario College of Art [Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Ontario]. He may have started at a different college up there, but he ended up, I think, at the Ontario College of Art.

MR. COOKE: When did he leave RIT?

MR. KEYSER: He left – let me get this straight. Okay, I graduated in –

MR. COOKE: Sixty-two?

MR. KEYSER: ‘61. Yeah, the end of the ’60-’61 school year.

MR. COOKE: Now is that right, because you said you started in the fall of ’60, so that would have only been one year.

MR. KEYSER: Oh, I guess I started in the fall of ’59.

MR. COOKE: ‘59. Okay.

MR. KEYSER: So I was there ’59-’60, ’60-’61.

MR. COOKE: Okay.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. And they left one year after I had graduated, so they left the end of the ’62-’63 school year [June 1962].

MR. COOKE: So he and Frid both left at the same time.

MR. KEYSER: They left simultaneously, yeah.

MR. COOKE: Which we’ll come back to – when you were there was also – you know, thinking back to Frid’s, sort of, expanding some of his vision or thinking about what Frid and Harmes as a team were encouraging, you were there at a point when the student body had some extraordinary makers who went on to also become well known teachers and makers, that some of the people who were there at the same time were –

MR. KEYSER: Jere Osgood was there, Dan Jackson – Jere was finishing up his last year there, I believe, the first year I got – I'll take that back; I think he was a junior when I got there.

MR. COOKE: That sounds right.

MR. KEYSER: I think he was a junior. I think he graduated the same year I did. Dan was only a sophomore.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: Then that summer, between my two years, Skip [Clifford R.] Johnson came. He had been teaching at Buffalo State [Buffalo State College, Buffalo, New York], and he came for that summer session, and then I believe he stayed on in the fall and went at what was my second year, and I think he and I graduated together.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: There was another fellow by the name of Don Dean who – we came together. He had done some time at Cornell University, was older, and I think had been in the army. And so we were about the same age, I believe, and a year or two older than most of the students other than Jere Osgood and Skip Johnson. There was another fellow, Bob Howe, who had been a high school teacher up in Vermont, and he had gotten a associate degree from RIT years before, had taught high school and had come back to pick up his bachelor’s degree, so he was there for two years. Those are mainly the –

MR. COOKE: Did you feel as if that was a special group of people? I mean, could you have anticipated that these would be major contributors to the field? Did you get a sense of them pushing boundaries at that point, how they related to the curriculum, or sort of, a thirst for knowledge in terms of the library and in the shop?

MR. KEYSER: Well, Jere was very impressive. He was obviously a cut above most of us. He had been in business – he had studied architecture, I guess, for a couple of years out in Illinois, I believe.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: I think he had been – I got the idea that he had been in business and selling through America House and stuff, either before he came to school or concurrently with being a student. I know he was producing production items and marketing.

MR. COOKE: Trays and things like that?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. And his design was very – it was more sophisticated than most, and his technical ability was pretty good. I don’t think it was as outstanding as it is now, but then none of ours were. [They laugh.]

MR. COOKE: Right, exactly. It’s early on.

MR. KEYSER: It was a learning situation.

MR. COOKE: You were students, come on.

MR. KEYSER: Right. But he was very innovative and had a good command of drawing skills. When I say innovative, it was certainly based on historical furniture forms, but he had his own personal twist that he put on things, which I think was very unique, at least amongst students that were working there at the time. I think he was well respected, too, in the shop by the other students.

MR. COOKE: Yeah. Quiet and going about his work.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah.

MR. COOKE: Yeah, I always thought that he’s somebody who had a concept of three-dimensional design, for instance –

MR. KEYSER: Right.

MR. COOKE: – and how he could – you know, he thought with depth, whereas sometimes people have a hard time sort of thinking about design, going from two-dimensional to three-dimensional.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. He also, I think, benefited greatly from his year or two in architecture in terms of his grasp of volume and form.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: Dan and he were roommates. They rented a house together with – in fact, the house was owned by Ronny Pearson, the metalsmith. It was right off campus, very close, and I think they shared it with, I believe, a weaver, Leroy – I can’t remember – Wilce I think was his last name.

And so Dan and Jere were very close. Dan, at the time, was doing furniture, but he was also –

MR. COOKE: Still doing his fish sculptures and things like that.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, he was doing some early sculpture.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: I think he had done – he done, sort of, the fish forms and things, but I think he was on the verge of moving on beyond those into some sculpture which, of course, matured later. Not too many people were doing sculpture.

MR. COOKE: But he also had a sense of historic furniture as well.

MR. KEYSER: I believe he did, yeah.

MR. COOKE: Apparently he’d been restoring furniture and –

MR. KEYSER: I didn’t know that.

MR. COOKE: – an antique dealer back in Wisconsin.

MR. KEYSER: Okay, okay.

My second year I just sort of scratched the surface on some sculpture. There was a competition to design a mural for a local company, R. T. French Company, and I entered that and did a wood and metal and lacquered wall relief, non-objective-type design. I think that was the only sculpture that I got into.

MR. COOKE: Yeah, because it does seem – I mean, and Skip was doing some of his turnings with the little mountain men and things like that –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, exactly.

MR. COOKE: So that there was this little whimsical aspect of using some of these furniture techniques but not necessarily looking at sculpture as sculpture.

MR. KEYSER: Exactly. Yeah, he was doing those mountain men and things. In fact, I think his thesis may have been turned figures or something to that effect.

MR. COOKE: Yeah, exactly.

MR. KEYSER: You know it’s funny; we never had, like, a thesis show. It was a one-year master's program. I guess maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, because I spent the first year as an undergraduate trying – my objective in coming to the school was to get another bachelor’s degree. I knew – I was unaware of a master's, and during my first year there was, I believe, the first year that RIT – that the School for American Craftsmen -- offered a MFA. It was a one-year program. There was a written thesis and a body of work, but there was no thesis show. The wood shop had no critiques – and I'm not sure whether any of the other shops did either – but I do not remember, you know, sitting in on a critique, like, at the end of a marking period or after finishing a project.

MR. COOKE: Would Tage or Michael give you feedback at the end or anything?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah.

MR. COOKE: I mean, you said you knew where you stood, but it was more just the instructors talking to you individually or –

MR. KEYSER: Exactly, exactly. And it was pretty much a combination of, well, now you’ve done this, and you’ve, you know, you’ve done these aspects pretty well. Now on your next project I want you to concentrate on this kind of thing, kind of a reflection on what you had done plus some suggestions for the next kind of thing. But that may have been a five-minute conversation at the end of finishing a piece prior to starting the next thing.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: So there was no in-depth critique as such, and I didn’t know what we were missing at the time, [laughs] as I had never been exposed to critiquing before.

MR. COOKE: Right. One could say there are trade-offs either way.

MR. KEYSER: Exactly, yeah, yeah. They did have a walk-through at the end of each – I believe it was at the end of each grading period, but it was more for the instructor’s use than it was the students. All the work that had been done that quarter was put out. The students had to leave the building and the instructors walked through.

MR. COOKE: In all media?

MR. KEYSER: My impression was that the instructors from all the media got together and as a group circulated through the building.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: And that, you know, we did not know what took place. Apparently it was a time when they could reflect on the curriculum and how things were going in terms of, you know, achieving their – what they perceived as their educational goals or whatever.

MR. COOKE: Right. Do you feel that the absence of a critique affected not just the idea of reflection and trying to understand what you were doing, but did it affect that or did it also affect the way in which you might communicate with one another, knowing what was going on with other people’s work? Do you feel like a lot of the work – that you as a student were working in relative isolation, and if anything just with the two instructors? I'm just curious as to the chemistry.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, to some extent perhaps, but it was a small shop. There were only 18 students maximum, as I remember at the time. Well, that’s what our capacity was, and perhaps the bench room wasn’t even full at that point.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: But, you know, it was one room. The bench room was one room, and then we had a machinery machine adjacent to it. And then down in the basement was the wood storage area with a trapdoor to shove planks up. And so, you know, you may have been somewhat isolated but not by a great distance, you know –

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: – because you could look right across the bench and see the one across from you, what he or she was doing.

MR. COOKE: Do you feel like there was a lot of learning from each other and talking about the field at all?

MR. KEYSER: I think so. Yeah, I think so.

MR. COOKE: I mean, I'm just thinking about where all those people then went on to teach, you know; it seems like it’s almost one of these formative years, and you could almost see everybody at their bench and sort of thinking, boy, if I have a chance to teach, you know, this is what I would do or I'd respond in this way, and whether there were conversations that would foreshadow that direction.

MR. KEYSER: I don’t know if any of us thought we would ever teach at that point.

MR. COOKE: Or whether you had a certain, you know, drive to do something in the field, that you were going to be setting an agenda in the field, in essence, through your work?

MR. KEYSER: Well, I think all of us had had thoughts of doing something in the field. They probably differed from individual – I'm sure they differed from individual to individual. But my own thoughts at the time were pretty much to get the knowledge that I needed, and go out and open up a shop.

MR. COOKE: So your goal was a one-person – one-person or a small shop –

MR. KEYSER: Yes.

MR. COOKE: – coming out of that, that you were getting the type of skills and input that were finally tapping into what you considered yourself ideally talented for?

MR. KEYSER: Exactly, exactly. And it wasn’t until toward the end of my second year that I started thinking about teaching. I had taught a little bit during that six-month stint in the army, and I can’t remember the context of it, but I know I had to do some teaching there.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: Then Tage, with his advanced students, was, like, the seniors. He had them prepare a class and teach it to their peers. And it was usually a tangent or a more in-depth study of what they had been taught in one of the classes that either he or Michael had given. And so I had done that during my – I think it was my second year. And I thought, gee, this is kind of neat. I enjoy, you know, the researching on – I think I did mine on solid wood carcass construction or something, and kind of organizing my thoughts and putting together a presentation that I could give to the students.

And so those two things, along with, I guess, a growing feeling that, gee, I'm just sort of scratching the surface design-wise and I want to keep growing, and I wonder if I'm going to get out and, having to pay rent on a studio and all this business, whether I'm going to be able to have time to experiment and grow, you know, form-wise. I guess I've always thought of myself as kind of a form-maker; always been from Soap Box Derby days on.

MR. COOKE: To the car designs and then even thinking about the stamping plant that you’re stamping parts for forms?

MR. KEYSER: Exactly, yeah. And then I thought, gee, the teaching, you know, on one hand I'm very interested in and I think it would be a really rewarding career to do that, although I don’t think I was thinking, you’re going to spend the next 30 years doing that, but I thought, well, gee, that would offer a real possibility and then afford me some time to also do my own thing and continue to grow. I don’t know if I'm getting ahead of myself here in terms of –

MR. COOKE: Well, it seems to be logical, I mean, talking about your two years getting your BA at RIT. Some of that is starting to come into shape in your second year.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, at the end of my first year I went – I was going to go to summer school between my freshman year and my sophomore year because I wasn’t able to pick up everything that I needed to get to become a full-fledged junior, so I had registered for the summer session. But it was like – it was a month or a month and a half open time there between the end of the regular school year and the beginning of the summer session. And I know Hardwood House had offered a couple of us summer jobs if we wanted them.

But my father was in business down at Pittsburgh, and I decided to just go down and work for him. And he was – his retirement program, being self-employed, was to buy single-family dwellings, convert them into multi-family dwellings, and then rent them, and that was his retirement plan. And so he ended up – when he retired – he, quote, retired at 62, but he’s 96 now and still puts in at least four or five hours a day in the shop. He’d like to put in more, but my mother is in a nursing home and he likes to go to visit her daily. But he ended up at, like, 62 with, I don’t know, six different individual pieces of property.

At any rate, to make a long story short, he was, I think, siding the house, one of these places during that summer. And I went home and worked for him, so we were up on scaffolding, you know, putting on siding. And it was a wonderful switch that sort of turned on in my development. During that first year at RIT it was very meticulous and, you know, worrying about everything fitting absolutely perfectly and the ultimate in craftsmanship.

MR. COOKE: Close tolerances.

MR. KEYSER: Close tolerances. And then suddenly to be immersed in this siding project, which, you know, if it was a 16th of an inch, it was super close; an eighth of an inch was just fine.

MR. COOKE: Right, caulk will be fine. [They laugh.]

MR. KEYSER: Caulk will be just fine, right. So I finished up a month or month and a half with him and came back to the summer session, and it was like – I liken it to a switch that turned on. It was sort of a combining of the close-tolerance work with the desire for speed afforded by the siding job. They sort of came together, and suddenly the processes started falling in place that this would be the normal flow of a way a project should go, and I think my speed increased tremendously without any losses. Kind of like a speed-reading class, you know, where you can increase your –

MR. COOKE: Your Evelyn Wood, right.

MR. KEYSER: – your speed, you know, by threefold without any loss in comprehension.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: Well, it was the same thing with this. So I think that was kind of a terminal point for me, that summer session. I came back and did a chest of drawers, and then I did a dressing table and stool. I don’t think I completely finished that by the end of the summer session, but it was a very productive time for me, and it was also, I think, a time when my designs started – I started to see some progression in the design. During that – as I remember, during that spring quarter of my first year in that production planning class that I talked about –

MR. COOKE: For the dining room suite, or –

MR. KEYSER: Well, I'd already done the dining room – or I was finishing up the dining room suite. I think the assignment for the next project for the juniors may have been a bedroom ensemble, because I had done the production – I had done a series of boards, illustration boards, with orthographic drawings and a rendering of each piece that I was proposing to do. And so then I started on executing those during that summer, my chest of drawers and the dressing table.

At that same time, I guess it was during that spring quarter, I was suddenly aware of the graduate program at RIT and the requirements for entry into it, and at that time it was a bachelor’s degree in some discipline -- it didn’t have to be in furniture or even in art or design -- but a bachelor’s degree in some field plus a minimum number of credit hours in, quote, the field. And I had achieved the minimum credit hours during that first year and I had the bachelor of science degree in engineering.

So I applied for the graduate, but I thought, well, gee, that sort of coincided with my beginnings, thinking about teaching, and I thought, well, gee, you know, I'm getting the same training, I might just as well get the master's degree as the bachelor’s.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: So I applied and got into it, so my second year then was at the graduate level.

MR. COOKE: You’re accelerated. [Laughs.]

MR. KEYSER: So I had – not only had I not completed all of the sophomore work, but I never even got into the junior or senior.

MR. COOKE: Junior or senior, right.

MR. KEYSER: So I began immediately then on my thesis, which was kind of a takeoff of the dressing table – kind of led into the thesis.

MR. COOKE: Which was on what, since you had to do a body of work that was thematic?

MR. KEYSER: It was an investigation into structure as a design element, thinking about something other than four legs, or certainly something other than four vertical legs, to hold up a piece, thinking about more dynamic configurations.

MR. COOKE: Radical at that time for –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, yeah.

MR. COOKE: – for the wood program at the RIT.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, and I know one of the pieces was a sculpted easy chair that I ended up lacquering, and it was like that was the first – colored lacquer, opaque lacquer. That was the first time that I think any opaque lacquer had been used on furniture at RIT.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: I did some molded plywood. Frid came to me at one point, I think it was during my second year, and he said “You’re an engineer.” He said, “I've heard of this technique of vacuum forming.” He said, “Why don’t you design a press?” So I thought about it a while, and he had already bought a rotary vacuum pump, and he said, “I think we can use a rubber blanket on it.” So I essentially built a plenum chamber with holes in the top surface and a gasket around the top, and then we put our forms on there and put an opaque eighth-inch-thick rubber blanket, thinking – well, my thought was that that would stretch and come down around the mold for vacuum forming.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: And I had done a couple of pieces of molded work on that which tied into my thesis using a curved plane as structural support for furniture.

MR. COOKE: It’s interesting, because Frid was very interested in veneer and basic ordinary veneers –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah.

MR. COOKE: – more so than people, you know, probably give him credit for, that I know – I think he was showing zebra wood veneered objects and, you know, was encouraging Hank [Gilpin] to find a niche within the veneer market. So that it was always on his mind, so it’s curious how he’s put your background together, in terms of form giving and engineering with this interesting veneer to, sort of, encourage you to go in that direction.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. Yeah, he was perceptive. He sensed that I might have the ability to do that and sort of planted the seed. And then it wasn’t until later one of my students said, “Well, you know, it would be a whole lot better if that blanket wasn’t opaque, if it were, you know, transparent, so we could see what the veneer was doing underneath.” And I thought, yeah, it would be a lot better. So he ended up doing his thesis on vacuum forming and ended up writing an article for one of the early issues of Fine Woodworking.

MR. COOKE: On a clear vacuum-bag technology?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. And he actually tailored bags to fit the item that he was veneering. And he also got into tailoring veneers so that – like a bucket chair or, you know, a seat which was – a seat, arms, and back could be essentially molded and then veneered by tailoring the veneers by cutting darts in it so that the veneer could be bent around –

MR. COOKE: Got it.

MR. KEYSER: – three-dimensional curves.

MR. COOKE: Yep.

MR. KEYSER: Very tedious work, but he did it.

I started – I wrote the thesis, got the body of work done, got the written thesis done before the end of school. I think that was sort of a retreat into academia for the last three weeks of the quarter, kind of, you know, not going into the shop and just working on the typewriter at that point –

MR. COOKE: Right, exactly, writing. Something very different.

MR. KEYSER: – yeah, and took it in. I don’t think Frid ever read it. I'm not even sure he ever saw it. I turned it into Michael and I think he read – he probably read it or read at it. It was not a literary tour de force by any means. But I never got any feedback on it.

Tage did not want to teach that summer session.

MR. COOKE: ‘61 – the summer of ’61? Because you said you graduated in ’61, so –

MR. KEYSER: ‘61 or ‘62, yeah. He did not want to teach. He had a job, a production job that he was involved with, producing some spice racks, I think, or something, and so he wanted to work on that. So I don’t know whether it was Brennan that approached me or whether it was Michael Harmes who approached me to teach with Mike that summer session after I graduated at RIT. And I had, you know – in addition to writing my thesis I had put together a portfolio and a résumé, and flooded the market with résumés for teaching positions.

MR. COOKE: At this point you are teaching – thinking of teaching, yeah.

MR. KEYSER: At this point I was thinking teaching, yeah. And so when the idea – when the opportunity arose to teach that summer session with Michael, you know, I jumped at the chance. I was getting married the fourth of July, and I think the summer session started on the third or something like it, and Michael said, “Well, I'll take the first three days and get them started. You come back the fifth,” I think it was. So Joan and I had a two-day honeymoon [laughs], and we were back teaching. And it was a wonderful opportunity. You know, the more I think about it, the more my life has been a series of just wonderful things falling in place, and it always continues to amaze me the way things have fallen. I think I'm the luckiest guy in the world.

MR. COOKE: Serendipity. Why not?

MR. KEYSER: So, at any rate, I was teaching that summer session. Michael and Tage had taught the previous summer session that I'd taken as a student, so –

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: – so up until that point they were team teaching the summer sessions. And so Michael and I taught that summer session. I think a fellow by the name of Dan Valenza -- I don’t know if you have come across that name?

MR. COOKE: Right. He went down to UNH [University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire].

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. Well, he was at U of H –

MR. COOKE: UNH.

MR. KEYSER: University of New Hampshire, yes. He was up there teaching. He had gotten an undergraduate degree from RIT, but I think they were probably putting a little pressure on for a master's. So RIT had this program where you could come, I think it was five summers or something, and get a master’s degree. So he was one of our students. I think it was that first summer. And then I had him for a number of other summers up until he got his degree.

I remember at one point, it may have been after I came back to teach full time, there was a fellow that was taking a workshop, Don McKinley –

MR. COOKE: Yep.

MR. KEYSER: – did a session. It may have been just, sort of, a one-week workshop thing that he came – I think he was still a designer for Gunlocke [Wayland, New York] at that point. It was before he had gone to –

MR. COOKE: Before he went to Sheridan [Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Oakville, Ontario]– or Alfred [Alfred University, Alfred, New York].

MR. KEYSER: Well, to Alfred. He went to Alfred first, yeah. So there were interesting people passing through that I came in contact with.

MR. COOKE: So the summer went well, sort of got your appetite – it gave you some stability there, and then –

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, it was a wonderful kind of reprieve from having to go out into the real, hard, cruel world, you know. [Laughs.]

MR. COOKE: Right, exactly.

MR. KEYSER: And I had the market flooded with applications. And I'll never forget the – I was renting a room – well, during the second year that I was a student I was renting a room adjacent to campus, or just off campus, from a couple. And then Joan and I, after we were married, we were renting a different apartment for that summer. And I was teaching, and along about noontime my former landlord came over and he said, “Here, you got this phone call,” and it was from Ohio University [Athens, Ohio]. And it was basically offering me a teaching position.

And so I went back home for lunch and called the – I guess it was a director; he wasn’t a dean, he was a director of the art school at Ohio University – you know, “What does this involve?” He said, “Well, you’ll be teaching industrial design, jewelry, and a beginning two-dimensional design class.” I said, “Well, I guess I could do that.” I think I could handle the jewelry – I was probably most comfortable in the jewelry class because of my craftsman background.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: And, you know, with Mel, and the confidence of working with materials. My next class that I probably felt sort of quasi-capable of was the industrial design, and then the two-dimensional was my weakest area.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: And so I said, “Well, do you want me to come out for an interview? When can we schedule an interview?” He said, “Well, you don’t have to come out for an interview.” He said, “You’ve got the job if you want it.” [Laughs.]

MR. COOKE: Different climate, right?

MR. KEYSER: I had sent him a portfolio, you know. Apparently he had responded in some way for me to send a portfolio, and I had three portfolios that were circulating. And apparently he had seen enough from the portfolio. But it was, like you say, a different climate, and the program, it was a professional stage, which was not of the highest caliber, I guess, at least in terms of the industrial design program. But I said, “No, I think I'd like to come out and look at it.”

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: So Joan and I drove out over the weekend and looked at the program and I ended up taking it, so it was a – you know, it just sort of fell in my lap. That was an interesting year.

MR. COOKE: But that was a one-year – I mean it ended up being a one-year appointment.

MR. KEYSER: It ended up being a one-year appointment. We rented a house that had a second-floor apartment and then an unfinished attic. The reason I wanted to rent it was because I could use the unfinished apartment, or the unfinished attic, for a studio. I think I only built two small pieces that year. I was really – you know, I was keeping, like, one day ahead of the students.

MR. COOKE: Right. First time teaching is always –

MR. KEYSER: It’s just unbelievable. I had visions of doing all kinds of work, you know. My own power equipment was basically nonexistent in terms of stationary power equipment, and the industrial design department was in a basement which flooded periodically, this old house, and a Sears jointer was about the best piece of equipment they had and then a Sears not-quite-so-good table saw, and that was about it.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: So, I wasn’t able to work that much, and I was keeping one day ahead of the students. I'm not sure whether I would have stayed beyond the first year or certainly beyond the second year or not.

MR. COOKE: Right. Well, it seems like that’s what a lot of people were doing. I mean, I remember that Dan [Jackson] graduated and then took a job at Illinois for one year in which, again, limited resources, he could do some carving and that was about it. It was a sculptural time: some teaching within – and it began more within an industrial design sort of curriculum.

MR. KEYSER: Right. I can’t remember. I think the industrial design people that I had were – I think there only three of them and they were all seniors.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: And they were basically paper designers. They could render much better than I could, but in terms of knowing how things worked and knowledge of materials – so that’s what I tried to impart with them the one year I was there, tried to give them some idea of investigating how things worked and figuring out how things could be fabricated.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: And working with three-dimensional models rather than strictly two-dimensional sketches.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: So I think I provided some value to them, but beyond the one year, I'm not sure how much more I could have added to the program.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: Jewelry, I think I did fine there. Two-dimensional design – I was sort of keeping one day ahead of the students.

MR. COOKE: That was the hard one, yeah.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, because of – you know, my own background was limited in it.

MR. COOKE: So what were you hearing about Rochester at this point, with the School for American Craftsmen, because this is just prior to a shift in terms of what they were doing curricularly?

MR. KEYSER: I had no – I don’t think I had any communication. This fellow, Don Dean, who I mentioned, was a friend of mine; we maybe exchanged letters a couple of times during the year. Beyond that I wasn’t aware of what was going on. One afternoon I was at home, I guess I didn’t have class – I may have had class in the morning and then I was home in the afternoon – the telephone rang and it was Dean Brennan. And he said, “Are you interested in teaching here?” And I said, “Well, let me think about it a minute.” [Laughs.]

MR. COOKE: So this was in the spring?

MR. KEYSER: This was the spring –

MR. COOKE: The spring of ’62? Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: The spring of ’62, yeah, because – yeah. I said, “Well, gee, that sounds awfully good.” And I had entered the – one of the pieces I had done during that year I entered in the “Young Americans” show in 1962 [Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York] and had won a prize. And I think the piece was purchased by Lee Nordness, who ended up curating the “Objects” –

MR. COOKE: “Objects: USA,” [1969, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC] a couple of years later.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah. And Wendell [Castle] had also entered “Objects” –

MR. COOKE: “Young Americans?”

MR. KEYSER: “Young Americans,” yeah. And I believe his piece was pictured in American Craft.

MR. COOKE: I’m trying to think of what it was. It was the –

MR. KEYSER: The scribe stool.

MR. COOKE: Adult high chairs and scribe stool thing.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, right.

MR. COOKE: And yours was?

MR. KEYSER: It was a small chest of drawers, very industrial designish looking. At that point I guess I had – what little of the Danish modern that had – that I still had in my work after the two years there, I think I had pretty well shed by that time. And so I was into a more international hard edge, so it was a walnut three-drawer chest, sort of a jewelry chest size, with aluminum handles.

MR. COOKE: Almost like George Nelson – you know, sort of a Herman Miller edge to it.

MR. KEYSER: It was certainly an influence there, yeah. Even the handles had an industrial look to them. I mean, it was eight-inch-thick aluminum that had been profiled and then bent to form a handle that protruded out from the surface. It extended across the entire drawer front – it was, sort of, embedded into the drawer front.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: And then aluminum legs that lifted this off of a dresser or a table where it would sit.

MR. COOKE: So Harold had seen your work in the “Young Americans,” or –

MR. KEYSER: I’m not sure he had seen it. He was probably aware, you know, through – it was pictured, I think, in the same article where Wendell’s piece was pictured in American Craft. But I think he had remembered me from a year before when I was a student and teaching that summer. So he had invited me back, and it was obviously the best place I could be at the time.

MR. COOKE: So Michael and Tage had left, or were leaving.

MR. KEYSER: They were leaving. They had left by the time I had gotten up there.

MR. COOKE: I mean, that was on their own initiative? I was always unsure as to whether Brennan decided to take the program in a different direction, or whether Tage was already being offered a position at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island], or what was going on.

MR. KEYSER: I don’t know what happened. I got the impression from talking with Tage later that he had left RIT before he had the RISD position, that the RISD position turned up after he had either resigned or had been let go or whatever happened.

MR. COOKE: Right.

MR. KEYSER: And I think that may have been – I think maybe Jack Prip may have been his – because I think Jack was already at –

MR. COOKE: Was already at RISD.

MR. KEYSER: – at RISD. So that may have been some – how should I put it –may have had an influence on his going there. But my impression was that it was after, because I remember him saying, “I went home to Emma and I sat down on my porch and I thought, what in the hell have I done?” [Laughs.]

MR. COOKE: Right. So he might have felt like RIT was going in a different direction than he was comfortable, or something?

MR. KEYSER: I don’t know.

MR. COOKE: The fit wasn’t there, or –

MR. KEYSER: I don’t know what the situation was. And I never got into detail – I never felt it was any of my business to ask him, and I never opened the subject with Michael.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: So I don’t really know –

MR. COOKE: Because Michael went at the same time?

MR. KEYSER: Yep. And they were both out of town by the time I got there. I think we started teaching a summer session.

MR. COOKE: And you and Wendell came in together?

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, we came in simultaneously. So I don’t know what happened in that whole thing. I mean, I’ve heard different stories, but I would be just adding to the rumor.

MR. COOKE: Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t asking for conjecture; I was just trying to fill in pieces from the sequence of what you remember.

MR. KEYSER: I always had the impression that the two of them were very close-knit and that whatever transpired, they felt it should be done together.

MR. COOKE: Yeah.

MR. KEYSER: That’s been my impression.

MR. COOKE: Their two fates were inextricably connected.

MR. KEYSER: Yeah, yeah.

MR. COOKE: So then you and Wendell come into town, and there’s – did you feel like the program became very dif