Debbie Tarsitano, Bob Banford, Gordon Smith, and Victor Trabucco discuss the tradition of secrecy in paperweight making and their own sharing of techniques. Oral history interview with Debbie Tarsitano by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, April 18, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, 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 Victor Trabucco by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 16, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 07:51.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Debbie Tarsitano discusses independent paperweight makers. Clip length: 00:30.

Debbie Tarsitano: But how they felt about it. I think cause it was such a small group—remember, there maybe was in that picture, that was it—except for the people from Europe, which were mostly factories, but that’s it. I mean, and there were at the time that picture was taken, there were probably hundreds of glassblowers. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand or more—glassblowers. So you got this little tiny group of people that can do this. So they were very protective of it. I don’t think it was—they were bad or anything. I think it was because they just—it was precious.

Time stamp: 00:33
Clip 2: Bob Banford talks about the history of secrecy in paperweight making. Clip length: 00:23.

Bob Banford: That was always, and that was always in the very beginning and back in the seventies this information wasn’t shared, so you had to root out all these places on your own. It was much harder. Now you can take classes, you can see videos, you can do all kinds of things to learn the craft that back then it was just passed on from person to person, or you learned it on your own.

Time stamp: 00:59
Clip 3: Gordon Smith talks about the Kontes Brothers and secrecy in paperweight making. Clip length: 01:16.

Gordon Smith: Yeah, that was still the days that, which goes back to some of the secrecy thing. Back then, no one would teach you anything. For whatever reason, I could never understand it. It was never really explained to me other than that, now when I look back, it’s always been a big secret. The glassblowing tradition, even going back to the Island of Murano, there are really closely kept secrets that just stay secret, or it’s just something about glassblowing and that art form, secrecy is a big thing. But back in 1980—‘80 and ‘81 and ‘82, it was still like that, very much so in the paperweight world, and especially in the flameworking world. So although the Kontes Brothers were great encouragement and they had a way of just kinda cheerleading me on, they never showed me anything. But they definitely encouraged me when I went home and started to experiment and just try to figure it out on my own. I’d bring ‘em in my latest and greatest experiment and they’d say, ‘Okay, this looks good. Why don’t you try working on this part a little bit.’ That’s kind of how they encouraged me.

Time stamp: 02:18
Clip 4: Gordon Smith talks about secrecy versus sharing in paperweight making. Clip length: 00:54.

Gordon Smith: As far as us working together—that’s a big deal compared to 1982; paperweight makers, we would get together at these conventions and we were all handshaking friends, but after that, we all went back to our studios and we didn’t want to talk a whole lot about what we were doing with each other and how we were doing it. Today there’s a lot more camaraderie there, and we get together and we share ideas and share some of our thoughts about what we’re working on or if we have a problem or something, you know, just something is an issue. I’m not afraid to say something to another paperweight maker and another paperweight maker’s not afraid to approach me and say, ‘Hey, you know, what do you think about this? I tried it. It didn’t work. What do you think?’ So that kind of thing, you know, it’s evolved that way. A lot more openness.

Time stamp: 03:15
Clip 5: Gordon Smith discusses his openness in sharing paperweight making techniques. Clip length: 01:19.

Gordon Smith: I swore that because of what I went through as a new paperweight maker—I made a promise that I was not going to be like that. Some of my own personal techniques for how I create a specific look or a color combination for my personal work, that’s mine. But as far as the techniques on how to make a flameworked paperweight—to me, just because I struggled so much and I didn’t know what the big deal was, I swore I was not gonna do that same thing to anybody else. So I showed up with my vacuum pump and all my equipment, and I just set it up because if I was going to do a demonstration in front of people, I wanted to do it showing them exactly how we do what we do. I felt like they deserved that. I felt that collectors come to these conventions, they pay good money to get there, they pay good money to buy the work that we create, and I’m not going to sit there and show them some false example of exactly how we make what we make. Because I just felt like—that it just wasn’t being honest with them. So I showed them whatever I did.

Time stamp: 04:38
Clip 6: Victor Trabucco discusses doing public paperweight-making demonstrations. Clip length: 00:53.

Victor Trabucco: But I would do demonstrations. People would come, and I had a torch set up, and I had a little screen, you know, of glass—plastic screens around me so that nobody, you know, would get hit by any of the glass flying—you know, if any particles fell or flew off or anything like that. But I did that for about a year, and a demonstration would be anywhere from 15 to, you know, half an hour depending on what the, you know, what the piece was. It was just to get people to come to you, and I had everything set up, and my wife was there too, and so we would sell some of the finished work. I used to—when I finished a piece, I—even in those days, I annealed the work, although some of the guys would make smaller pieces not even anneal them to sell them, but I always annealed all my work. So anything I demonstrated went home, and then I annealed it and brought it back the next day. 

Time stamp: 05:41
Clip 7: Victor Trabucco talks about his own tendency to be secretive as a paperweight maker. Clip length: 02:09.

Victor Trabucco: I’ve always been really, probably more secretive than a lot of them. But because the way I make weights is a lot different than the approach that a lot of them do, and it’s some of the tooling and some of the equipment that I’ve designed. And I’ve never really shown anybody, other than my sons, exactly how we encase. There’s never been anybody in our shop to see that. So—and I understand. To me, I think being secretive somewhat helped. It, you know, keeps the industry healthy because you keep your prices up as the information gets so disseminated, and so many people are doing it, it just keeps reducing the prices and the value of the work. And I felt as though—I remember telling this young man when I was up at RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York], he said, ‘Why are you so secretive?’ And I think I said, ‘I’ll tell you a story about, like, Nick Labino.’ When he first entered the field and everything, I talked to him a number of times on the phone, and things like that, but he had that Veil glass, where he’d fume the glass and everything, and that was kind of highly regarded. But then that got exposed, and it got so thrown around that all the production studios were using it, and it wasn’t even regarded as much of—you know, ‘Eh—it’s just fuming the glass. No big deal.’ Well, that’s what happened because before anybody knew what the chemistry was and how he did it, it was a huge mystery. But once the mystery was gone, it just got devalued. It just got produced as just something of a throwaway technique. And that’s the way I always felt and so, even when I teach my class, and I’ve been credited with really teaching a lot, and how the technique is done and everything. But, say I’m going to teach you a lot about how to use the flame, how to make your shut ups and everything, and how to develop your technique, but I only take them so far, and it’s up to them to find and solve the final questions of how do you encase them, and keep them so clean, and keep the distortion away and all that. And that only comes through practice.