Terry Gess
I met Jeff at Penland School of Craft. I was downstairs assisting Yeh-Wen Kuo and Jeff was upstairs assisting Clary Illian. I’d come up the stairs and see Jeff sitting slouched at the potters wheel. No matter the time of day, he’d look over at me with the same dry, dull, gravelly voiced demeanor, and say, “You got any beer?” His comedic sense of timing was perfect.
One Friday late afternoon when I told him that we were getting ready to head out for a river swimming trip, I found him forty-five minutes later still sitting slouched at his wheel.
“Jeff! We’re leaving! Are you ready to go?" I said.
“You got any beer?" he said.
On and on like that.
He came to grad school the summer I completed. He rented the same tiny, vintage, two-room, two-story cottage (one room on top of the other with a hatch between them). I had found in the classifieds in the local paper (long before tiny houses) at $200/month. I ended up back at Penland School as a Resident Artist and Jeff and Susan ended up back at his studio in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. We remained friends. When Jeff and I both planned to do the American Craft Council’s Baltimore Craft Show, we decided to room together. We continued our hotel residency partnership every year late February for many years.
The Baltimore Craft Show is a very arduous event. A week long, it begins with close to 900 exhibitors all lined up in vans and trucks and trailers waiting to get into the cavernous convention center to unload. Then there’s two days for each exhibitor to set up their personal 10 x 10 foot space.
Jeff’s pottery display was built with hard wall panels, 8 feet high, with a cornice trim at the top and a full carpet underneath. When it was all set up it looked like a designer’s vision of a fine interior living space. But it took Jeff every available moment to get it all set up, and it meant that he was often the very last to leave the Convention Center when the show ended and the building closed at midnight on Sunday evening. One year he arrived late; his neighbors on both sides had finished constructing and appointing their spaces and had inadvertently crossed the tape line, leaving Jeff with a bit less than his required 10 foot clearance. Can you image the exasperation, maneuvering, coaxing and squeezing that it took to fit his hard wall booth into that space?
After the two long days of set up, then it was time to get to work. The first three days were open only to potential wholesale buyers, then an evening to switch over pricing and displays before another three days of potential retail buyers. Some days dragged on with little attendance, and other days the aisles would jam with spectators, craft enthusiasts, craft students, entourages of shoppers, families with strollers, people in electric wheel chairs, service animals, and celebrity sightings - basically the entire gamut of possibility and potential interest. By the end of the week, it became daunting to step outside of your personal 10 x 10 foot world.
Some years Carmen exhibited at the show, and Jeff, Susan, Carmen and I shared the hotel room. I often was able to reserve a corner room on a top floor of a tall glass-walled hotel, with picture windows that slid open to the frigid winter air and views out over downtown Baltimore.
Every morning was the same, with Jeff providing a dry gaiety to our ordeal of dressing up in our show clothes. “I think I’ll wear my fancy alligator shirt today,” he’d say. “It’ll drive the shoppers wild!” And then, when we’d made it outside to the sidewalk, in the not quite snowing chill, he mumbled, “Oooh, its icy! I’m sure glad I didn’t wear my heels!”
Most days we’d not get out of the convention center until after dark. We’d stumble a few blocks up from the Inner Harbor to an ancient downtown tavern, then wander the rest of the way up hill to our hotel.
One year, we were laying in the big beds, lights off, curtains open to the city below us, everyone settled in, drifting off to sleep, when Jeff croaked out into the dark, “Do you think there’s an afterlife?”
Susan said, “Unbelievable!”
And then the room was full of uncontrollable laughter.
Terry Gess
I met Jeff at Penland School of Craft. I was downstairs assisting Yeh-Wen Kuo and Jeff was upstairs assisting Clary Illian. I’d come up the stairs and see Jeff sitting slouched at the potters wheel. No matter the time of day, he’d look over at me with the same dry, dull, gravelly voiced demeanor, and say, “You got any beer?” His comedic sense of timing was perfect.
One Friday late afternoon when I told him that we were getting ready to head out for a river swimming trip, I found him forty-five minutes later still sitting slouched at his wheel.
“Jeff! We’re leaving! Are you ready to go?" I said.
“You got any beer?" he said.
On and on like that.
He came to grad school the summer I completed. He rented the same tiny, vintage, two-room, two-story cottage (one room on top of the other with a hatch between them). I had found in the classifieds in the local paper (long before tiny houses) at $200/month. I ended up back at Penland School as a Resident Artist and Jeff and Susan ended up back at his studio in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. We remained friends. When Jeff and I both planned to do the American Craft Council’s Baltimore Craft Show, we decided to room together. We continued our hotel residency partnership every year late February for many years.
The Baltimore Craft Show is a very arduous event. A week long, it begins with close to 900 exhibitors all lined up in vans and trucks and trailers waiting to get into the cavernous convention center to unload. Then there’s two days for each exhibitor to set up their personal 10 x 10 foot space.
Jeff’s pottery display was built with hard wall panels, 8 feet high, with a cornice trim at the top and a full carpet underneath. When it was all set up it looked like a designer’s vision of a fine interior living space. But it took Jeff every available moment to get it all set up, and it meant that he was often the very last to leave the Convention Center when the show ended and the building closed at midnight on Sunday evening. One year he arrived late; his neighbors on both sides had finished constructing and appointing their spaces and had inadvertently crossed the tape line, leaving Jeff with a bit less than his required 10 foot clearance. Can you image the exasperation, maneuvering, coaxing and squeezing that it took to fit his hard wall booth into that space?
After the two long days of set up, then it was time to get to work. The first three days were open only to potential wholesale buyers, then an evening to switch over pricing and displays before another three days of potential retail buyers. Some days dragged on with little attendance, and other days the aisles would jam with spectators, craft enthusiasts, craft students, entourages of shoppers, families with strollers, people in electric wheel chairs, service animals, and celebrity sightings - basically the entire gamut of possibility and potential interest. By the end of the week, it became daunting to step outside of your personal 10 x 10 foot world.
Some years Carmen exhibited at the show, and Jeff, Susan, Carmen and I shared the hotel room. I often was able to reserve a corner room on a top floor of a tall glass-walled hotel, with picture windows that slid open to the frigid winter air and views out over downtown Baltimore.
Every morning was the same, with Jeff providing a dry gaiety to our ordeal of dressing up in our show clothes. “I think I’ll wear my fancy alligator shirt today,” he’d say. “It’ll drive the shoppers wild!” And then, when we’d made it outside to the sidewalk, in the not quite snowing chill, he mumbled, “Oooh, its icy! I’m sure glad I didn’t wear my heels!”
Most days we’d not get out of the convention center until after dark. We’d stumble a few blocks up from the Inner Harbor to an ancient downtown tavern, then wander the rest of the way up hill to our hotel.
One year, we were laying in the big beds, lights off, curtains open to the city below us, everyone settled in, drifting off to sleep, when Jeff croaked out into the dark, “Do you think there’s an afterlife?”
Susan said, “Unbelievable!”
And then the room was full of uncontrollable laughter.
Terry Gess