Hank Murta Adams talks about redesigning Blenko’s water bottle mold. Oral history interview with Hank Murta Adams by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, June 7, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:47.

Hank Murta Adams: You know, the famous Blenko water bottle, which was designed in, I think the thirties, of which I had—it was one of my first assignments, was I had to redo the water bottle molds, and they never had many iron molds at Blenko. Blenko was mostly a wooden cherrywood mold system. They did have some metal molds and some aluminum molds in the blow division; they had what’s called ‘spinware’ as well, and they had what’s called ‘dumps,’ which are basically iron or aluminum, solid bookends, frogs, things like that. So those were done on the antique division at night, and so the bulk of the molds there were cherrywood molds and wood, and they had these beautiful 10,000 gallon steel cylinder tanks that were cut in half, with legs on them, in the shop—they had them in the shop so in the winter they wouldn’t freeze, and they had a couple of them outside. So I think there were three in the shop, and so they—although, cherrywood molds were submerged in there on a chain with a number on them, and the mold boys would come in a half an hour, an hour earlier and get all those molds ready for the blow floor for the day. But those molds—as I said earlier, I’d come in from New York. The first line I did for them was all symmetrical, it was all pretty traditional, but they had no skill, really; their skill was pretty bad, they couldn’t blow things thinly—they didn’t want to—so it was a very clunky, heavy line and just getting them to put a bit on a piece, even a lip wrap or anything was pretty hard—for them to—they just didn’t want to do it. And they had control, because it’s all handmade and what are you gonna do? So I had to talk them into, like—I had to become a psychologist and really talk them into finding a new way.