Randall Grubb talks about discovering a flyer for Penland’s flameworking workshop. Oral history interview with Randall Grubb by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 24, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:10.

Randall Grubb: You know, Steve Correia at the time was a big name, doing the Tiffany copies with the iridescent feather patterns, and all that beautiful type of glass. And I was an equipment builder at Correia [Correia Art Glass, Santa Monica, California], and it was there that I met Chris Buzzini, who was the resident paperweight maker, and he was making these beautiful torchwork paperweights, and it was there that I saw a flyer for a, a lampwork paperweight. And it talked about Paul Stankard and some of the other lampwork—you know, and the antique French pieces. And so I took that flyer and I asked Steve about it. I said, ‘Hey, what’s these—what are these paperweights? Well, I’ve never seen paperweights like this.’ And Steve’s answer was, ‘Well, now those are really specialized; they’re really hard to make. There’s only one or two guys that even know how to make those things. And, it’s a real specialized market. And don’t worry about it cause they’re too hard to make.’ And so it was at that point that, you know, being a entrepreneur student, competition is not your friend, specialization and hyper specialization is, there again, dad’s mantra, you know, ‘Be the best cobbler, not just any cobbler.’ So for some reason, I decide I want to learn how to make these paperweights, and I’m talking to Chris Buzzini at lunch one day and he says, ‘Well, I know something about that. You know, I lived in New Jersey and I met those guys back there.’ And it was a very—the only guys that knew how to make these were Paul Stankard and a couple other guys, and they were all New Jersey-based. And it was the best kept secret in New Jersey. And, and since Chris worked—had a studio in New Jersey, he had started to crack the code a little bit, and had a little bit of information. And so I step in and he needs more equipment, though; he doesn’t have a vacuum pump and some other things. And my grandfather’s vacuum pump from his dental office is still, to this day, the vacuum pump that Chris Buzzini uses. It is my grandfather’s dental vacuum pump. So here again, I put the—I helped Chris get the equipment together and we started to play around with, ‘How do we make these paperweights?’ And so that’s when it came up that Paul Stankard was going to teach this class at Penland. We both jumped on it.