Bill Gudenrath discusses how he first began blowing hot glass with Joe Upham at NYEGW. Oral history interview with Bill Gudenrath by Barb Elam, March 23, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:23.

Bill Gudenrath: I was a laboratory glassblower growing up for summer jobs beginning in 1963 when I was 12. I got a chemistry set when I was eleven, that was 1962, which, of course, is the legendary year of the birth of the studio glass movement, so that’s, in retrospect, kind of ironic. Anyway, I was a very serious laboratory glassblower, loved it, was madly in love with it, and practiced glassblowing just like a kid practices the violin or the piano. And I worked for a large laboratory glassblowing company in Houston for the summers, and I did take home work the rest of the year, and by the time I was about fifteen I was a pretty good laboratory glassblower. And that stopped in 1967 because a couple of years before that I had begun to fall madly in love with music and the keyboard and the organ and the harpsichord and piano. So that began my period of activity in music, which I would say officially ended in 1979, when my glass career got back in gear, and I had found a laboratory glassblowing company in the Bronx, a real hole in the wall place that I was working at. And one Friday afternoon Joe Upham—everybody knows the name Joe Upham, one of the founders of New York Experimental Glass Workshop, now UrbanGlass—he came into this place to buy some glass tubing, and he and I started chatting, and I had always wanted to try furnace glassblowing cause when I was fourteen, in 1965, I made a pilgrimage to Corning from Houston where I grew up to see the library and to see the museum and above all to see the Steuben Factory [Steuben Glass Works, Corning, New York]. So I sat there for an afternoon, watched the glassblowers gathering the glass and I just pined to do that for years, never suspecting that I’d get the chance. And Joe said ‘We’re furnace glassblowing down in the Village,’ or SoHo, whatever he said, and I said, ‘What do you mean furnace glassblowing?’ and he said, ‘Well with the blow pipes,’ and I said, ‘When can I go and try this?’ and he said, ‘How ‘bout tomorrow morning?’ So that was a Saturday morning in 1979 and I didn’t leave, really, until we moved to Corning in 1995.