Gordon Smith speaks about discovering paperweights through the Kontes Brothers and being part of a tiny population of makers. Oral history interview with Gordon Smith by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, November 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:39.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Gordon Smith relays how he discovered paperweights. Clip length: 01:11.

Gordon Smith: Well, I started being formally trained as a scientific glassblower as many of the other—you know, Paul Stankard was, I think Rick Ayotte did it as well. Charlie [Charles] Kaziun did that. There were a number of us that that was our background, our formal training. And from doing that, I found myself working at the Kontes Glass Company in Vineland in 1980. And I had no idea that the Kontes Brothers, Jim and Nontas Kontes, two of the three brothers that own the business, I had no idea that they were paperweight makers. It was something they did as a hobby. But I saw one of their paperweights one day while working there as a laboratory glassblower, and it just kind of—I had this moment where I just went, ‘Holy smokes. What the heck is this?’ You know, I had never seen anything like it, it just became—and from that moment on, I became obsessed with wanting to learn about it. And just learn more and more. And that’s how it started. 

Time stamp: 01:13
Clip 2: Gordon Smith talks about how small the paperweight maker community was when he started. Clip length: 00:25.

Gordon Smith: First of all, when I became the newest paperweight maker in 1982, there were—including me at the time—I think I represented the eleventh or twelfth person in the world that did that. So that’s a really, really small group of people. You became among the—a very elite group if you were able to accomplish that.