"MR. LIPOFSKY: Then I got in. Yeah, good thing I got in. It was on his recommendation. Harold Schultz was his name, so he helped. So my first class – I had been to Europe that summer, and I had been to Murano. I had walked by the glass studios but never paid any attention to them blowing glass. My first class that I – was a ceramics class, and – because I wanted – I went there with the intention of making ceramic sculpture. And I walked into the class. There were a few students, half a dozen students standing around. There was a little short guy who seemed to be the professor, and as soon as I walked in, he said, “Who are you?” And I didn’t answer, and he said, “Are you married?” And I didn’t answer. And then he said to the girls in the class, “I know you’re all here to get your Mrs. degree, and if you learn how to make good soup, you can find a husband; that’s how my wife got me: she made good soup.” And that was my introduction to Harvey Littleton.
Then he said, “Do you want to blow glass?” And I said, “I have never heard of it.” And he was just at that moment gathering – and these were all students who had been with him before, I was the only new student in that group – gathering together to blow glass for the very first time in the United States. He had done his two workshops in Toledo that summer, and – prior to that, reintroduced – they had built a little furnace, they introduced glass. And then he had come back home, and in his garage built a furnace and started blowing glass that summer. So, I eventually became part of that group. Everybody in the class were part of the group. Even though we were in the ceramics class, he wanted us all to come out to his farm, and we each got a day out at his farm to blow glass. I actually did not officially sign up for the class because I said, “Well, I want to make sculpture;” I’m not, you know – [laughs] – I didn’t feel I could do that. But I went out several times with one of the other students, Tom Malone, and we would go out there and blow glass, and I would assist him and do things with him. And then Tom worked for Harvey. He would – Harvey made clay in his barn, and he – pug mill – and so Tom pugged the clay and bagged it up, and I would help him do that once in a while and hang out a little bit as it got dark. And then Harvey’s wife, Bess, would say “Oh, you – have – you boys haven’t eaten dinner yet, why don’t you come in and join the family?” So we would go in, and so it was a way of getting dinner –"
Oral history interview with Marvin Lipofsky, 2003 July 30, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/lipofs03.htmAccessed April 5, 2009.
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