Elliott. Both had KOG backgrounds--Elliott in sales, Wright in production. But more importantly, both were family--direct descendants of the company's founding fathers.
When the call came in 1984, Elliott was air-lifted from his position as a captain in the U.S. Army, training personnel with the 197th Infantry Brigade at Ft. Benning, GA. He rolled up his
sleeves and set about rebuilding the company.
With the advantage of a fresh face and no political history, he went to the distributors and did a lot of listening. Eventually he hammered out a tiered price structure, allowing small studios to buy direct if they chose, but at prices which would not compete with distributors'. "Now," he reports, "everybody's happy."
The company has also regained its direct connection to the past; P. E. Hoss, its first president, was Elliott's great-great-grandfather. Wright, current Vice President and production manager, is the great-great-grandson of Learner. And there's a great-great-grandson of Blacklidge on the board of directors today--still another direct descendant.
"Not much has changed," says Frank Widner, a 26 year veteran employee and Kokomo's current production foreman.
"Basically, the men are still walking across the floor with a ladle full of lava." On a chilly Indiana winter's day, as we meet, the heat wafts from the open building, and the men sweat as they work.
The 12 portals of the furnace glow infrared; the fiery behemoth roars, as it does 24 hours a day, converting the dry, raw ingredients to magma. The room smells wonderful, like an alchemist's basement--a delectable, mysterious mixture of sweet and pungent aromas.
Big barrels of glass slag, the remnants of each batch, stand everywhere, awaiting the proper mix to be re-melted, recycled. Next to two of the hungry furnace's white hot mouths 'batch wagons'--the 80 year-old carts brimming with sand, soda ash and other ingredients--await their turn to be shoveled into the flames.
Glassmaking begins with one man and a shovel. "Sometimes modernizing can put you further behind," says Elliott.
"Ten or 15 years ago we had an automated system, delivering the batch to the furnace through vacuum tubes. But the new loading system broke up the clay pots!" Concealed by a wall of firebrick and heated by flame from the furnace's center, the clay pots, in which the glass is actually melted, usually last from three to five months.
Each batch, up to 1,000 pounds of raw material, melts slowly into hot glass--then is dipped out, one sheet at a time.
A typical two-color mix requires two ladlers, working in unison, but more complicated color combinations produce a hotglass parade of up to five men crossing the floor at once.
The ladlers stand at their posts by the furnace, panting a bit, wearing sunglasses and/or face shields to protect them from the infrared light. Their business arm and leg are cloaked in
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THE SQUEEZE IS ON--as the molten gather, once mixed, is fed into a set of steel rollers similar in concept to the rollers of a wringer washer.
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A STEEL TABLE--moving at the exact rate that the rollers feed the sheet through, catches the glass at the mouth of the annealing lehr.
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protective sleeves. Every minute and a half--two minutes, for a ripple texture--a bell rings.
They dip into the flaming 2,500 degree F furnace simultaneously, and hustle across the floor to drop their molten component onto the mixing table. Each ladler must learn to run evenly, bouncing the ladle to keep the molten glass rolling so it won't cool unevenly. Two to five gathers, depending on the intended composition of the glass, hit the table within a few heated seconds and are hand-mixed and rolled into a flat sheet.
On the steel mixing table, the two colors--or more--are blended. The 'art' of art glass, as opalescent glass is sometimes
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