Paul Vickers Gardner on starting work with Frederick Carder:
Since Carder had been raised on the apprentice system, he felt every designer should serve time in that status before being allowed to assume a more responsible role. Accordingly, when I arrived at Steuben, fresh from the college campus, to work as Carder’s assistant, he outlined my duties and put me to work as an apprentice in the etching room, with the comment, ‘You’ll be no damn good to me for three years!’ This two-months assignment in the heat of melting wax combined with acid fumes and augmented by the summer temperature was to test my mettle, Carder admitted later, and see whether I could adapt to factory working conditions.
After this tour in the etching room, I settled into the factory routine, but still was treated as an apprentice. My first duties were to make line drawings to scale for the factory catalogs and full-size outlines of Carder’s designs in ink on tracing paper, to be blueprinted for use by the gaffers in the blowing room. In these first months, Carder’s visits to my office were usually fairly serene. He would make random checks of the work at hand, spotting at once the wavering of a line with such comments as, ‘Can’t you see that damn’ flat spot on the goblet’s bowl? They’ll make it rotten enough in the blowing room without your help! You’re nothing but a damn’ Yankee kid, and more trouble to me than a row of ‘ouses!’
He would then demonstrate, with a sure swift stroke, how the line should be drawn, humming softly to himself meanwhile and watching to see if the technique was being absorbed by his probationary assistant. When a line was particularly cramped, his favorite criticism was, ‘You’re drawing it pinchey-cot’– a word he never defined, but which made his point.
After a few months, he apparently felt I had gained sufficient facility to make finished drawings of engraved designs. At first he assigned me practice drawings of the simpler floral shapes, stressing the necessity of memorizing each element in a flower and its position in relation to the other parts. After these and other motifs were mastered, I was allowed to copy patterns, first from Carder’s sketches and then from actual glass objects, usually new additions to the Steuben line.
The first time I was given a glass object to copy, the results were disastrous. The object was a clear glass goblet, ten inches in height; it had a black glass casing over the bowl with an elaborate cut and engraved pattern. This handsome piece was the only sample of a new design scheduled to retail at about $185 a dozen. Carder gave the sample to me late one afternoon, with instructions to keep it in my office and complete the drawing the next day, so I left it on the drawing table when I went home for the night. Next morning, to my horror, I found the goblet shattered on the floor– a victim of the vibration caused by the Erie Railroad trains passing outside, combined with the slight tilt of the table-top. For the next long hour and a half, in the company of a sympathetic John Graham, I awaited Carder’s routine arrival. The fragments of the goblet were tenderly piled on the drawing table.
At last Carder came in For a brief uncomprehending second all was well. Then, spying the wreckage, he shouted, ‘Sacrébleu!’ and strode cursing to the table. After giving me one piercing look, he shouted, ‘Glue it!’ and departed at once in a mood that boded ill for his next contact. I worked all day gluing the pieces together.
Fortunately, the accident was an isolated instance. Carder left the patched-up goblet in the design room where it served as a sorry reminder that may have paid off rather handsomely. I cannot recall smashing another Steuben glass piece of any importance during my twelve-year career as Carder’s assistant.
As the months passed, more interesting tasks came my way, such as carving plaster-of-Paris models for architectural glass molds. I was also gradually allowed to include my own ideas and work out original designs, which Carder criticized on his visits.
-P. V. Gardner, The Glass of Frederick Carder, 45-47
