When my father was in his early 20s, he enlisted in the army. They gave him all sorts of aptitude tests and discovered he had incredibly strong mechanical ability. He was placed in technical training at Columbia University where he learned to fabricate scientific instrumentation from glass—which it turned out he had a real gift for. He was recruited to join the Manhattan Project and wound up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a top-secret location where they were working on refining uranium for the atomic bomb.
After the war, my dad went into business making highly specialized instrumentation for chemistry research—and he was able to buy a really nice house in Queens. I remember him drawing these incredibly complex machines, perfectly rendered systems, on napkins and then disappearing into his lab to bring them to life. Those napkin sketches are gone, and all I have of his work is one piece of glass—an osmometer, an instrument made of a series of glass tubes. This piece of glass represents everything I have in my life right now: When my father died, he left me the house in Queens. I eventually sold it and used the money to buy a 130-year-old, 15,000-square-foot dilapidated factory in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. My wife and I converted it into an art hub with galleries, a visiting artist studio, a restaurant. We hold concerts, run workshops—people come from all over. Our home and the community we’ve created here, all of it exists because of what my father could do with glass.
~ Victor Stabin, painter and illustrator, Jim Thorpe, PA