Altamont, New York · 1962

I threw a football that ricocheted off one of the stained-glass windows of the Chapel. The Prefect told me to fix it. I’m guessing he reasoned my competence at this because I maintained the vehicles in the “motor pool”.

Our small college property’s buildings included an old leaning “shop” full of antiquated farm instruments and junk. I found a huge electric soldering iron which had been used on metal roofs and several toothpaste tubes I cut into lead strips and some small pieces of flat butterscotch colored bottle glass.

The end result was not pretty. What I managed to do, however, was an improvement over the 4-inch square piece of cardboard covering the broken glass at the bottom of the window. During chapel services after “the fix” I would position myself in the chapel so that I could see the light that I had resurrected. Thirty years passed before I started cutting glass again.