Hank Murta Adams talks about cullet and remaining stocks of glass. Oral history interview with Hank Murta Adams by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, June 7, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:00.

Hank Murta Adams: I’m getting work prepared for a show right now which is two specific colors, and there was a cullet supplier named [O.J] Gabbert in Marietta, Ohio. And he died several years ago, and it was bought by a farmer and he’s been selling off the stocks of what this whole conversation has revolved around, about these hundreds of plants that were in the Ohio Valley from the 1800s on. And this guy Gabbert would buy this cullet for nothing, or they would give it to him, and he would stockpile it in these bins, but he would market it to the glass scene. And so for years and years and years people were buying mostly—not glass from Blenko—Blenko might have been giving it away or selling some of it wasn’t their—they weren’t active and really active in doing it, it was sort of a buy thing. But for Gabbert, who was a dealer in cullet—and he was collecting mostly glass from Fenton, and that’s the glass that I’m using right now, and Fenton just—the building has been razed. Last year it was razed and all the stuff was auctioned off, so Fenton doesn’t exist anymore. The molds do, though, and I can tell you where a lot of them are [laughs], you know? So to the ‘cullet’ question—and I’ve, you know—this farmer that bought this—very nice guy and I know his staff and I was just there about three weeks ago, in Ohio, because I’ve been buying some of the late stocks of glass—and these are the final stocks and there—I can tell you right now, there’s no more yellow in this country from that era. And I don’t know if you know an artist named Amber Cowan, she’s young, she just had a show with Doug Heller—I think like her third show with Doug—very popular in the glass gallery scene now, and she does lampworking. And she has been using a lot of those old stocks as well, but they’re gone. I mean, her and I have the last stocks of them. So these cullets—and to me it’s a real—it’s another real hammer-blow in the coffin to—it’s the last of this industry, and it’s the last—you’re not even going to be able to buy the cullet anymore that were the remnants, the scrap remnants, of these factories. It’s gone.