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A GENTLE PUSH coaxes the seven foot long sheet of rapidly cooling glass into the lehr, ensure its cooling temperature is closely controlled to assure stressfree cutability.
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hasn't been altered at all."
Certainly the critical color-mixing hasn't changed. Wright prepares every batch himself, with the aid of a tiny chemist's balance scale. His grandfather's recipe book, in fading italic script, is handy in an unlocked desk drawer.
"We match colors from this book that go back to 1904," he says. "There's no order unheard of; I'll try anything. Any trouble, and I just go over and see Dad"--Judson
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called, may be largely attributed to the mixer. For it is his deft hand and discerning eye that determine when the glass is mixed 'just right.' Over-mixing produces glass too homogeneous and indistinct; under-mixing produces unevenly colored, blotchy glass. Because each component mixes somewhat differently, time and experience alone are the best teachers.
Kermit Pyles, a mixer for Kokomo for over a dozen years, lifts the hot 40 pound gather of glass with a two-pronged fork, drops, drapes, stirs and caresses it with an intuitive feel for when it is 'just right.'
When satisfied with the color mix, he feeds the now combined gathers into the textured metal rollers at one end of the table, a sort of industrial version of wringers found on old wringer washing machines. These rollers promptly extrude it on the other side as a soft, still-glowing sheet of glass.
A large steel plate, moving at the same rate of speed as the rollers feeding the glass through, catches the emerging sheet until the sheet is completely through the rollers and at the mouth of the annealing lehr.
Now beginning to cool to its natural color, the sheet is pushed gently onto a flattening stone with the aid of a 20' steel pole and very good depth perception; and from there, onto a conveyor belt. Once the glass is safely on the conveyor belt, the electric lehr takes over, gradually cooling, or annealing, the glass through a series of temperature controlled chambers.
On the other end of the lehr, the sheets, as they emerge, are checked for consistent thickness, color-ratio and cutability. The full-size, 32" wide sheet, just off the lehr, is almost 10' long. Most sheets of this length are cut down into two sections between 36" and 42" in length.
The cutters work with heavy studded arm-protectors, swinging the still-warm sheets easily on the metal table and throwing off-cuts into a huge bin for re-melting.
No two pieces of this glass are the same. As Elliott puts it, "It's measured with a ladle; it's art glass, not toothpaste. Some customers, wanting to make thousands of identical lamp shades wonder why each sheet doesn't look exactly the same, and whine, 'This one has more blue in it!!!' But you're talking about a guy using a 35 pound ladle as a measuring spoon! We make glass here the same way it was made 70 years ago, though with slightly better processing machinery. The individualized part
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Wright, living in nearby Greentown--". . . who's 76, now, going on 40. He sits there with one hand on the head of his golden retriever, looking at the samples I'm trying to match, and tells me, 'This is what I'd try!"'
In his own recipe book, Wright tracks "all the mistakes and what came out right for the past 20 years. You never know what you'll need to match, or what effect might turn up by accident.
"One year a certain blue/amber/opal mix, marked 222, came out a little bit light; it was designated 222X. Customers went wild, they wouldn't look at 222 anymore. Same thing happened with 8X; it was a blue opalume, and one batch turned lilac. Since we knew how we did it, we sent it out, and bingo! a new best-seller. You could call it trial and error, or trial and success," Wright beams.
The result of these trials, accumulated over decades, is an astounding color palette. Kokomo has over 300 recipes on the books for single cathedral colors alone, and over 500 documented color combinations. Add dozens of formulae for more or less density?deep opal, medium opal, wispy, and opalume?and 13 textures, such as granite, catspaw, flemish and wavolite; and the mind boggles.
"What it comes down to," says Elliott, ". . . is a color selection that's effectively infinite. Our distributors and, for that matter, our sample box, can only carry a fraction. We're a small company with a big paintbox. In addition to having the 12-pot furnace, we start with a smaller sheet, which when divided, is more lively. A bigger sheet costs less to produce per square foot, but also is more homogeneous?easily overmixed.
"People gravitate more to Kokomo for the colors that fill gaps that the big guys don't want to bother with. You're likely to go away with a case of 50 different colors rather than filling up half your box with one.
"It's funny; we just had a guy make a computer program that would chart the Kokomo big sellers. Lo and behold, no single color sold over 2 1/2 percent. The graph was practically flat?but for us, that's good health."
The company does pay for all this variety, partly through tearing up their furnace with dramatic regularity. Readers planning a visit to the Kokomo factory should try to see this, if they have the time and the nerve.
Ladlers and mixers alike put on heat-resistant gear, and
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