Gay LeCleire Taylor, Gordon Smith, and Bob Banford talk about Johne Parsley. They discuss Parsley’s personal history, his fascination with paperweights, and his eventual collaboration with Gordon Smith. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Gordon Smith by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, November 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:43.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Gay LeCleire Taylor speaks about Johne Parsley. Clip length: 01:10.

Gay LeCleire Taylor: Okay, next to Paul Stankard, and then Gordon Smith in between, is a gentleman by the name of Johne Parsley. He was fascinating. He developed a Woolite kind of a soap, but he’d gone to the 1938 World’s Fair in New York. Is that 38? And he saw the people that Charles Kaziun worked for that were demonstrating flameworking and he set up a little torch down in his basement and until he took a trip and came to visit Wheaton Village, did he ever see paperweights. And he and Gordon next to him almost became partners. The two of them worked really, really closely together and made paperweights, but Johne lived in Reading, Pennsylvania and we were in South Jersey, in Millville, South Jersey, and he was a pilot and had his own private plane. So he would fly from Reading to Millville’s airport. Somebody would pick him up. He would volunteer the full day in our crafts building, demonstrating to our visitors and everything, and then fly home at night.

Time stamp: 01:13
Clip 2: Gordon Smith discusses how he and Johne Parsley met. Clip length: 01:52.

Gordon Smith: I had been a paperweight maker since—like I said, since I started in 1981. And then I was a full time paperweight maker at the time Johne and I met—I was also volunteering at Wheaton Village working in their craft building—demonstrating flameworking on a very small scale, making miniatures and kind of button-size and pendant-sized items to sell in the gift shop there. And one day, Johne Parsley and his wife, Anne, came through Wheaton Village and he came over to the craft building with his wife and they were walking through, and I had some of my paperweights sitting there up on the counter next to where I work, and he was just like a little kid in a candy store. And he introduced himself and he said, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything quite like that.’ He told me a little bit about his background and some of his glass experience—more geared in the  blown glass world, little miniature figurines that he would blow out of tubing in a laboratory. He was a chemical engineer by profession, and he had been retired—sold his company, and—but he had a background in glass going back a number of years. So that’s how we met—just one, you know, just one day at Wheaton Village, and then we just became inseparable from that day on. He came back a few days later; he lived in Redding, Pennsylvania, which was about two and a half, three hours away. And he would drive down. There in the beginning, he drove down a couple of times a week to get together, and he wanted to learn everything he could from me and learn how to make paperweights.

Time stamp: 03:08
Clip 3: Bob Banford discusses Johne Parsley’s enthusiasm for glass. Clip length: 00:35.

Bob Banford: Johne Parsley was a glass enthusiastic, did it as a hobby and got into paperweight making, Geez, he must’ve been in his sixties when he got involved in trying to make his first paperweights, but he was always a glass enthusiast, learning different techniques and, oh, I think he worked at one of the World’s Fairs in New York or somewhere, and he used to, he was a big fan, you know, if he heard of any glassblowers or anybody doing anything, he would run and go, you know, go watch them or learn whatever he could from them.