Vol. 18, No. 37	July 22, 1999

Working in stained glass

The summer between high school and college, when I was 17, I worked at Baut Studios, a company that created stained-glass windows for churches, in Swoyersville, Pa.," James Butkiewicz, economics, said. "I never thought they would hire me, but they were the first place that called, so I took the job.

"I would do the menial jobs, like sweeping up the glass in the workshops and transporting the broken glass to pits in the rear of the property," he continued. "I think back to how in 1967, we thought nothing of dumping barrels full of broken glass in open pits in a residential neighborhood! Today, this type of dumping would be considered toxic dumping," he said.

"One of my favorite parts of the job was putting the glass pieces back together like a puzzle after they were fired in the kiln to bake in the colored paint," Butkiewicz said. "I also brushed on the final putty, used a scrub brush to work it into the window, wiped the excess off and then bent the lead down over the putty.

"It was a major crime to break certain parts of the glass, like the hands and faces in the windows," Butkiewicz remembers. "The flesh-colored parts of the window were each done as a continuous piece, and, if you broke them, the entire piece had to be redone."

Other less important pieces of glass could be repaired with putty and the cracks hidden with lead. "I only remember breaking a couple of small pieces, never the face or the hands," he said.

The most sensitive part of the job was unloading the large 3-foot-square crates of glass, each with eight to 10 pieces of glass. "It took several workers to unload a crate of glass," Butkiewicz said. "I never saw anyone seriously cut, but we were carefully trained about how to handle the glass because the potential for serious injury was always there.

"I used to go out on-site occasionally to help install the 5-foot-by-10-foot windows," Butkiewicz said. "One time, when I did this, I was able to see the completion of the church windows in a new church in Scranton.

"From this summer job I learned not only to work with glass," he said, "but I developed a lot of respect for the men who worked there. Most of them didn't have a lot of education; some didn't even finish high school. Yet, each had a special and different talent or skill. I learned how to work as part of a team to get a project done.

"One guy in particular looked out for me," Butkiewicz said, "and from him I learned to care for people new to an organization and help them to learn the ropes and to feel welcome, as he had done for me."

-Gail E. Walford
Photo by Robert Cohen