Chapter 3 

Archie Bray

I can’t remember the first time I’d met Archie, but I think it was at Meloy’s early that summer of 1951 when Voulkos and I went to Helena. He was cordial to us and invited us to come work in the brickyard. He had met Voulkos earlier and on Pete’s recommendation agreed to hire me too. We’d have jobs in the brickyard as laborers, it was agreed, but as the pottery building progressed he would gradually phase us into that part of it. This was how our arrangement at the brickyard began. 

Kelly Wong, another art student, joined us that first summer. Kelly was a good artist and friend from high school in Butte, who also studied at Bozeman. We worked many hours that summer from early morning to late at night laboring in the brickyard by day and laying brick in the evening. There was volunteer help from town as well, Pete Meloy and many others who helped build the pottery. 

Since we were on a break from graduate school that summer, Lela and our young son Arne, who was two years old at this time, stayed in Bozeman with the DeWeese family. Lela wanted to attend summer school, and studied lithography. But I had now started what became my apprenticeship in the brickworks and my life in ceramics with Archie Bray. 

Archie was a 19th-century patroon, foreman, boss, capitalist. He was about 5 feet 6 in height and wore a battered old hat with a sweat-stained band. He was a brute. He was generous. He was ornery. He was sentimental. His family emigrated from England and were pioneers settling in Helena in the late 19th Century. The brickyard was managed by his father since the early 1900’s and was later turned over to Archie and his brother, who ran a coal and fuel business as well as the brickyard. Archie’s Dad originally bought the brickworks from the Kessler Brewing Company nearby. Archie himself was an engineer, trained and graduated from the first ceramic engineering class at Ohio State University. 

The whole brickyard was scaled to Archie’s height. A taller man had to stoop to get around the brickyard, since all the steam pipes, overhead obstacles, the ceilings in the drying room, gangways and passages were just high enough to clear Archie and his hat. He would cuss at his men, but would be generous and helpful to them in his own rough way. He was the patroon; he took care of his help by housing them in bunkhouses and feeding them generously at his own boarding house at the plant. No one ever went hungry there with three square meals a day cooked by an ample and kind Indian woman named Helen, who managed to also feed members of her tribe with food left over. Archie had a few key laborers: Emil Olson was a Swede from the old country who’d worked the pug mill for thirty years. Emil had his own shack near the chicken house. There was also Earl who ran the payloader power shovel and mixed the raw clay. Earl lived nearby with his family and continued on years afterwards as the guardian watchman over the defunct ruins of the brickyard. There was the extraordinary Bill Cuniliffe also, a Cornishman from England who’d given up the Butte Mines, and a genius in the machine shop. Old Bill could build anything. He built the wheels, kilns, the framework, trusses, and anything else for the pottery building based on the rough plans Archie would draw him on square yellow scratch pads. Old Bill also ran the old Corliss steam engine and fired the boilers. He and his family had a house on the premises of the brickyard. 

Elmer was a German from the old country who was an expert at stacking brick in the kilns and a tireless worker. There were other laborers, less steady. Archie didn’t pay them much since most of them were bachelor winos he’d nurse back to health in the two weeks before they could draw their pay. His plant would pretty much operate on their state of health. He would feed them well before they went to town on their binges. Then he’d take them back exhausted, red-eyed, with their money gone. At one point when the Kesslers owned the brickyard and the brewery, it was said they only had to have one payroll, since the men would make the brick, draw their pay, and drink up on Kessler beer. 

When Union representatives tried to organize his workers once, according to the story told, Archie took a pickaxe handle and hefted it over his shoulder as they approached to bargain with him. Without saying a word, Archie drew a line across their path with the axe handle and said, “The first sonofabitch that crosses this line gets to bargain with this!” The brickyard was never organized. 

Community concerts were heavily supported by Archie. It was known that Archie brought to Helena well know opera personalities of the time--like Nelson Eddie and Jeanette MacDonald--who played in such operettas as “Naughty Marietta.” When Lela and I moved there, one of the first things we did was assist Archie in doing a sentimental old English play called “My Friend Hannah” in which Lela did the background painting while Archie underwrote the production costs. At another time he sponsored the famous Ballet dancer Svetlova and was tremendously pleased to be photographed with her trying her hand at pottery on the wheel as “Pete Voulkos” instructed her in throwing pottery. The beautiful Svetlova looked obviously delighted in the photographs as her entourage stood around.

During the workdays in the brickyard Archie would browbeat his men and push them to their limits. They were sissies if they couldn’t work like mules and carry staggering loads of brick around the yard. Wheelbarrows would groan as the men hauled greenware to the kilns for loading; the nippers who stacked green brick off the pugmill were Indian boys tawny and lean as mountain lions. Their endurance was incredible. Whenever Archie shouted “take five” he didn’t mean a five minute break. He meant to carry a stack of no less than five bricks at a time. 

Archie’s day would never end. He was the first one at the plant in the morning, and the last to leave at night when he made the rounds with his railroad switchman’s lantern checking the kilns and boilers and making plans for the following day. He was tireless as he ran the office, flattered the architects, sold brick to the builders, made the bricks, ran the plant, fired the kilns, planned the menu at the boarding house, supervised the delivery trucks and shop, engineered Brickyard projects, supervised the Blossberg clay pit, and met the payroll. 

With all his rusticity, Archie was a sensitive man who would go home each day to play his piano and see to it that Effie, his wife, would get her cortisone shots administered each day. He took care of his aging mother who lived in the family manor on the brickyard grounds. “Grandma,” we called her, and she would stab her walking cane at us as she made her daily walk around the new pottery construction. 

Archie didn’t spend much time at home. Sadly, he showed no affection for her [Effie], and Archie spent more time with the high school drama coach during his younger years. Susan Eaker’s teaching contract was not renewed, it was said, due to Effie’s interference with the school board. Archie subsequently set her [Eaker] up with a nice little bookshop in the center of town which in time became something of an art center of its own and sales outlet for our pottery. Susan Eaker became her own institution and was a wonderful friend to us. 

As a youngster Archie had built a potter’s wheel. It seemed to be a functional design considering he had no instruction on how to make one. It had a crank type kicking action with a wooden flywheel. From what remained of it one could judge it appeared to be functional enough but I don’t believe Archie ever threw pots. At least there was no evidence of Archie’s thrown pottery around. 

He would design ornamental bricks having a simple pattern which were dry-pressed and used for paving bricks. They were quite beautiful. I wouldn’t dare guess about the ornamental bricks found in odd corners around the yard since Archie never mentioned their origins to me. Archie did construct a large Greek styled vase with delicate lines about four feet high from the blue clay he was fond of for its plasticity. The vase at one time stood in his triangular-shaped garden near the entrance to the brickyard. It was stolen from the garden many years later during the foreclosure sale of the brickyard by the bank in the 60’s. It may well be returned someday, or so it’s been hinted. 

Ornamental terra cotta was another of Archie’s interests. I suspect that some of the classical motif of ‘egg and dart’ bricks may have been designed by Archie. Almost certainly some of the terra cotta work around Helena was made at Western Clay. Anything ornamental was not fashionable in the early fifties. By the time we arrived, straight functional brick was the order of the day and preferably buff colored brick at that. Builders were crying for buff brick. Red brick was out. The beautiful salt glazed and rug faced tapestry brick and the funky old clinkers Archie was so fond of were shamefully rejected by all and favored only by old fogey architects whose post-colonial designs were passé stuff. Archie was sad about this as were many of the old architects who still did ‘Shades and Shadows’ in their drawings--but Archie was reasonably open to what was happening in new ideas and new architecture. That was one of the reasons he looked with interest upon the designs and ideas we were making then. At times he would look at our ‘Picassos,’ shake his head, and say, “Ribs, guts, and belly-buttons!” but not in an unfriendly way. I think he was pleased and somewhat surprised at what was beginning to happen. 

Meloy as a lawyer had set up the foundation and established its non-profit legal structure. Somewhere during the planning, Branson Stevenson, an artist by avocation and an oil company manager, was also invited to be a trustee along with Archie and Pete Meloy. It may be Branson had some business connection with him but in time they became good friends. The Meloy brothers had also known Archie for quite a while. Archie had bought a few of Hank’s paintings in the past and Pete Meloy ordered pottery supplies through Archie’s brickyard connections. They also had community theatre interest in common. 

As I mentioned before, Voulkos and I had met the Meloys when we were seniors in art school at Montana State College. At that time we were students with Frances Senska in ceramics. Our contact had been brief and introductory since Pete and Hank had principally come to the school to see our “electric kiln,” and the ceramics department. The kiln had been built by Chuck Stablein under Frances Senska’s guidance as part of Chuck’s graduate thesis. 

On another day when Pete and I visited Helena, Hank Meloy gave us a friendly tour of the historical society museum. We looked particularly at the paintings of William Standing, the Northern Cheyenne Indian painter who’d popularized a series of cartoons. These cartoons were humorous episodes of Indian life but William Standing also had a respectable reputation as a painter. Some of Standing’s paintings were western landscapes. One in particular was a scene of a cabin on the prairie which I felt was pretty “western.” We’d been brainwashed by Cyril Conrad, the head of our school, to have contempt for western art, a polarity of modernism versus regionalism, and a widely acceptable elitist view. Charlie Russell was an uncouth romantic to Conrad’s mind. Standing’s stuff wasn’t contemporary either--the view to which I was now committed--and so this was another bad example of western art. Standing’s work in the light of my newly discovered truths just wasn’t up to par. 

Hank Meloy the educator went to work on me--and I think on Pete too. He began to point to the fringes of the paintings and admiring the painterly quality of the work, suggesting we take a closer look at this and that passage, to feel its mood--and pretty soon we began to see the wonderful things Hank saw in it. Hank was in every respect ‘a modern,’ a living example of our new credo--and here he was--admiring “western art!” He made beautiful drawings and paintings himself--and some of his work was as abstract as Kandinsky’s! 

Hank was talented and capable of doing everything. His drawings were the product of skilled talent and much observation and study. His pottery decorations were simple, beautiful, and in perfect harmony with the pots they decorated. I learned much from Hank, even though our personal contact was brief. Hank tragically died of a heart attack in New York City about two years later. Nevertheless I was inspired by him and his work--years after he died--just by looking at the hundreds of drawings and paintings he’d made which his brother made available to me. 

After the first summer at Brays the brickyard work was more or less behind us. We spent more time laying brick on the pottery quarters. Pete and Archie busied themselves building a stoneware downdraft kiln, while my job was bricklaying. I build [sic] an enormous smokestack with Archie’s guidance, plus laying the face bricks on the building and doing the greater share of the facade. I learned on the job. When I laid up the office entry area, I really goofed up the whole business and lost a whole course of brick. This wasn’t easy to do but if one doesn’t use a story pole to check the corners, you can lose a course. Archie didn’t have to tell me anything. I knew he was pretty mad. 

We were amused at the many gables in Archie’s architectural plan. It was quaint. But there were interesting clinker bricks here and there in the walls. Kelly Wong would find interesting brick and odd terra cotta cornices in the brickyard. He’d hand them to me now and then to make the wall more interesting. Jessie Wilber also made some wonderful tiles one of which was a kick wheel, and I made a crude terra cotta of Archie’s drawing of kilns, which he fired and had me place in the gable in the front of the pottery building. 

While Pete got the old chicken house for quarters after the first summer was over and is still being used after several remodelings, Archie had a windmill in mind for me. It would’ve had an apartment upstairs for Lela and me. I could imagine a milkmaid running around in the pasture too, for that matter. Lela and I found a house for not much money, which we enjoyed having and investing in with our small paycheck from the brickyard. This was on Cannon Avenue in Helena during the second summer after we’d returned from Pullman. It was just as well we never got around to building the windmill. I could just see my wife putting up with that. 

On a less sentimental side, Archie was interested in enlarging the pottery to include a space for printmaking, no doubt suggested by Branson Stevenson, who was quite a good lithographer in addition to having a technical interest in Ceramic glazes. The Foundation might even have included a music conservatory, but these were far off dreams. First we’d make the pottery work and give it some semblance of respectability. 

Pete and I had to interrupt our first summer of work to return to school. Before this happened, however, we had begun to experiment with making pots and sculptures which we fired in the brick kilns by stacking them on top of the bricks during a salt firing. This went on for a time before we were able to construct our kilns but since we were off to finish school, Archie hired Lillian Boschen for a while to manage the pottery shop in our absence. 

Lillian was the first professional potter to work at Brays. Regrettably, Archie and she didn’t get along all that well, so Lillian left shortly after we returned the following year. Nevertheless, she went about her job professionally, setting up a slip casting operation and throwing pots. In a way she developed a first plan of operation and provided the expertise for that. Lill loved to have her drink now and then, and for years after we’d find whiskey bottles deep in the feldspar bins or elsewhere. This made the nights bearable when we had late firings. 

The beehive kilns that we used initially, with fire ports all around its circumference, were lit and allowed to heat to a bright whitish heat, then salted by shoveling rock salt into the kiln. We used a wheelbarrow filled with salt and worked our way around the kiln. I would slide the firebox cover open, and Pete would shovel the salt in and I would quickly shut it again. Large yellow and white acrid clouds of smoke would rise and burn our eyes as the salt sputtered and popped. We’d cough our way through the smoke. We also charged about three of the burner ports with zinc metal pellets, which would vaporize and settle on the bricks and pots resulting in green and yellow colors. Whenever we had pots in the kiln, salting was heavier than normal. This didn’t make the workmen happy since the bricks would stick together with salt and [were] hard to break apart when unstacking the hot kilns. You could sympathize with them since the kilns would be about 180 to 200 degrees F. inside when they had to start unloading the bricks. 

As far as the firing was concerned Archie judged the temperature mainly by looking at the color of the kiln as he peeped through the spyhole. We used temperature devices such as pyrometers but also placed pyrometric cones inside. Archie’s main method to judge the maturity of the fired brick was to measure the shrinkage of the mass inside the kiln by making a chalk mark on a metal rod. This was one of my jobs. When I walked on top of the hot kiln to measure I poked a rod through a porthole on the very top of the dome. When the mass of 70,000 bricks had shrunk about 9 inches, it was ready to be salted, then shut down to cool. The firing lasted about ten days. 

We worked through that first summer, sometimes firing, at other times shoveling raw clay onto moving belts which in turn was crushed and fed into the pugmill. At peak working hours when the bricks were coming out of the extruder we’d sometimes spell off the regular “nippers” who were some of the toughest men I ever knew. Many of them were Indian boys from the Rocky Boy tribes, lean like cats from lifting the heavy wet brick and loading them onto the cars. This work nearly did me in, soft as I was physically from my days as a student. The brickyard meant hard physical work, yet it was varied and interesting to see brick made in all its phases. 

During the evenings then we could turn to our work as artists, and Pete would make magnificent pots on the wheel. I would try to throw occasionally, but more often than not I’d stop to watch him, completely mesmerized watching his ideas unfold and his increasing skill. My own work led me to sculpture by coiling shapes together, and I made a large bust of Archie which was salt glazed and now sits in the Harrison Rotunda on the Foundation grounds. I did some other sculptures but as a rule we never talked about art. It may seem strange now that we never did. Our work was amazingly interesting and that seemed to be enough. Our conversations were usually based on how to make the wheels work better or how we could build machines or kilns that would make things easier. Kelly was with us too, and we shared a shack listening to the radio at night, too tired to lift our arms. We would listen to Kelly’s favorite jazz programs, like Billy Holiday out of San Francisco. 

One of the high points of our time at the Brays was when Hamada, Bernard Leach, and Soetsu Ynagi came by to do a workshop in the fall of 1952. Branson made an effort to contact them through the newly organized American Crafts Council and through Aileen Webb, the benefactor of that organization. We offered to pay their railroad tickets and put them up for a two weeks session. They agreed, and were greeted with great enthusiasm by everyone even though their reputation was unknown to many, including myself at the time. 

The workshop turned out to be a fabulous learning period for me, and I think, to Pete as well. Bernard Leach was an articulate spokesman for the group who explained and demonstrated together with Hamada for several days. He explained their philosophy of the humble potter whose roots were in the earth and who found great satisfaction in the repeated making of a pottery objects. Leach certainly had philosophical support from Soetsu Ynagi, whose background in the Zen philosophy and as a visiting lecturer at Harvard was a new experience for us. I confess I had some problems with Bernard Leach being anything but a humble potter but the concept together with Ynagi’s lectures on Zen and the unassuming “thusness” yet beautiful works of the Korean wood-turners he describes in his book was a liberating idea. 

Leach’s main criticism of American potters was that we had no “tap root” which was a true observation. From my perspective now I think this was a good thing. Pete’s big influences in ceramics at the time seemed to be from the magazines. When he’d look at pictures of Stig Lindberg’s pots they had a monumentality about them in the photographs. In fact, they were actually very small, like 8 to 10 inches in height. Since he imagined them to be about two and a half feet high or so, that’s the way he made them and learned to handle clay very well. 

Teaching himself to throw clay through hours of practice, Pete learned to raise cylinders and give them a very graceful silhouette, which wasn’t easy once a large height and round volume was achieved. He still had to stretch the clay and form a narrow neck, and mastered the classic rice bottle form of the Orientals. 

He would then turn to a variety of decorating techniques. Wax resist decorating such as incised line filled through wax, brush decorating and then partially waxing, then incising and filling of the line again--and many combinations of these basic techniques. Our friend Branson Stevenson had introduced us to the use of a wax emulsion called Ceramul A, which was a liquid wax emulsion that worked very well for wax resist decoration. Pete became very versatile with wax resist techniques. He’d also picked up some of this from Tony Prieto, I think. It became very popular with the potters at Brays. Jim and Nan McKinnell, who worked at Brays for several years, developed wax resist decorating techniques to a high degree of sophistication, and continue to use it today. My use of wax resist decoration on a tile wall mural for the C.M. Russell art gallery in Great Falls enabled me to make a large repeat design based on Indian petroglyphs that was interesting to do at the time. I used it on the few pots I used to make at the time and Pete Meloy used it extensively in his designing beautiful horses on plates with its many combinations. 

One of my early projects was to design and construct a large circular medallion in ceramics for the University of Montana, which was eventually installed in the South face of the Liberal Arts building. Gus Link was the architect, a friend of Archie’s, and Archie had me design and make it according to old terra cotta techniques. Preceding all of this of course was to make several designs, one of which was chosen by Carl McFarland, then president of the University of Montana. He asked me to design a relief depicting do, in the manner of Picasso and Archie’s “ribs, guts, and belly buttons.” It was a terrible design but I went ahead and did it. I was learning a lot about clay. I didn’t have much choice. I’m not sure what I would’ve done then had I had a carte blanche to do anything I wanted. 

The project was first made of plaster, which I cast in an appropriate size of some nine and a half feet in diameter, allowing for shrinkage to the finished size of eight feet. I began to learn about ceramics and shrinkage in specific ways. The plaque was sectioned into some 24 sections or so, and I proceeded to cast the piece, making negative molds of each section. This project took me an enormous amount of time, and I began to learn how to press molds like the old terra cotta craftsmen, pounding clay into the mold. When suitably dry, I’d invert them upside down to drop onto a plywood bat or surface. Then I’d touch up each section and smooth it with trowels. I had much cracking and checking with the very poor brickyard clay but finally I managed to get the piece done after many mishaps and trials. Once, when they were drying by the kiln, one of our helpers walked into the first one, and dropped them like a row of dominoes. Many of the pieces cracked, and there was nothing to do but to make them over. Months of work were wasted. 

Finally it came to glazing, and for the first time Voulkos seemed very upset about having to help me develop colors and glazes for the piece. I had little knowledge of glazing on such an important project so he did the lab work and came up with a trial glaze called 1 38 glaze developed by Carleton Ball. It seemed to work. We glazed the piece and everything went smoothly after that. The piece still sits in place at the University Campus--while not one of the best ones I ever made--it was an interesting technical exercise and I learned a lot. 

I made several pieces for buildings around that time. Most were small plaques for a kindergarten room, a fireplace somewhere in the Northeastern part of the state. These plaques were based on fairy tales and nursery rhymes, and eventually were put in place, although I’ve never seen them installed. Another piece became the plaque for the C.M. Russell Gallery in Great Falls. This was a difficult piece, designed by Branson Stevenson, and incorporated Charlie Russell’s signature and a bison skull. The brick clay was terrible and the mold by Branson was atrocious. My lack of skill at this point was matched only by a stubborn bull-headedness to make impossible things work, and I finally got one made. I began to resent Branson after that, since he was always bringing projects down for me to make, like glaze trees, and other stupid designs that took up most of my time. It took quite a while for me to learn basic terra cotta techniques, so in some ways I learned to press molds and discover the limitations of clay, but Branson wasn’t my favorite person at the time. 

I also did the Stations of the Cross, a series of reliefs portraying Christ’s painful journey to the crucifixion. This was for a Catholic Church designed by Lou Bordeleau for Chinook, Montana. These were done of stoneware, and really looked very good. I also did the corpus of Christ, which was placed on the cross in front of the altar. 

The most interesting pieces that grew out of the manufacturing methods of the brickyard was the use of carved brick. Somewhere I’d seen carved relief on brick and I thought why don’t we make it from scratch, using soft brick instead? We then had the thought that we could remove some of the cutting wires off the brick cutting machine, make large blocks instead of individual bricks, and so that idea was born and it worked very well. 

About this time, Cal Hoiland together with Gus Lund, young architects with whom I’d started to school at Bozeman, designed the First Methodist Church in Great Falls, and asked me to work out a relief for the back wall of the church. I did several designs, but the one that worked the best was a design that was based on the “Sermon on the Mount” showing Christ preaching to the multitudes. I decided to show the back of Christ, in full scale, and the multitudes in the background. I put all my friends in the relief as I worked the soft clay blocks, now piled several feet high on easels that leaned just enough to help keep them in place. The figures were carved in such a way as to repeat the blockiness of the brick texture, with a linear feeling that carried a swinging movement across the 30 feet of wall it covered. The blocks were stained with iron oxide and had a skin of Borax to seal the iron stain slightly, and this seemed to work quite well. 

The firing went off without a hitch and the installation, along with news coverage, went well. The Great Falls Tribune took a picture of me on the scaffold under the newly installed relief, and the words were, “I’m here to catch the blocks if they drop them,” in reference to the bricklayers who put it up. The relief was an immediate success, but unfortunately there were few architects and fewer projects around to sustain me for long. I think I got paid $1500, and other projects followed that didn’t pay much more. I did manage to make a couple of similar projects in carved brick for a church in Anaconda, and later in 1956, a large one for the Gold Hill Lutheran church in Butte. Neither of the later projects had the impact and quality of the first one in Great Falls. The Great Falls project went easily and still looks good to me. The Gold Hill relief in retrospect is overworked--and the Anaconda project has some interesting Picasso like figures in it but it should have been more decorative. 

As a follow-up to this, I should mention that once very late in Great Falls on other business--and many years later--1 walked by the Great Falls relief. It was probably around 2:00 am. after the Rainbow Hotel bar had closed. I found the church, crawled under the foliage and trees which had grown over the relief. Almost totally obscured by now, I saw and felt my old friends under all that vegetation. It’s still there and I still like the work. 

Someone has trimmed the trees now, but I discovered a sad truth of much public art work. It becomes invisible. People pass it every day and no longer see it. Possibly I’m wrong. I only know there are many sculptors, like the late Jan Zach, whose works are truly important but they become part of the landscape intimately and as people pass by them day after day they acquire a curious kind of invisibility. 

There were a couple of other architectural projects I worked on that were interesting from the standpoint of learning how to handle clay. One was the Glacier County Library project, a series of low reliefs depicting animals that symbolized the development of the west, namely the bison, horse and cow. I don’t know why I felt I had to justify the theme of the art work since they were pretty much acceptable to the librarian and architects, in this case, Page and Werner of Great Falls, but I was always fearful that if there wasn’t some justification for the imagery, the people wouldn’t want it. At any event, after figuring the shrinkage of the clay, I made some low rectangles of 1 x 3.5’s to contain pressed clay, shaped to conform to the curves in the animal figures and handbuilt them directly. This was a technique I began to use for all the rest of the wall murals and reliefs I made later. 

Another project was for the new Anaconda High School. Bishop Gilmore of Helena asked me to come to his office one day since he wanted to know if I could make some reliefs of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I went to the rectory and couldn’t believe my eyes! What a splendid office! Unbelievably elegant! I’d never dreamed the Bishop lived in such sumptuous style. At any event, I began to discover the limits of creative work working for the Catholic Church. 

Bishop Gilmore handed me a crucifix and told me to copy the small images of the four evangelists. Since it was another paying project I went ahead and did it. It’s possible he was testing me to see if I had anything better, but I was too young and hungry to criticize his plan, so I copied the figures on the Bishop’s crucifix and rendered them in low relief. As it happened, it turned out to be an interesting project after all, and I felt I finally had mastery over the medium. The project went well, even though the art was pretty terrible. The firing was ok, and the glazes all worked and for the first time I made a little money for the Brays with ease. 

It was before I’d made these early projects that Archie became critically ill as a result of an injury in the brickyard. He’d stumbled across something in his path, got a nasty bruise on his shin, and simply didn’t take care of himself. It became inflamed and caused a blood clot. When he was taken to the hospital, his decline was rapid. Archie developed pneumonia among other complications and died before we knew it. 

I went to see him one day at St. Peter’s hospital. He looked terrible. He told me that this was it and he was going to die. Not believing him for a minute I thought Archie was fishing for sympathy. I said, “Hell, Archie, you’ll be back in no time. Just take care of yourself and don’t worry about the pottery.” This time Archie was right. Two weeks later he was dead, and Archie Jr. poked his head into the drying shed that day where I was pressing clay, and choked when he simply said, “The old man is gone.” 

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it. Archie Jr., whom we all felt was against all this foolishness in the brickyard, pottery, bohemians, artists, and everything else we stood for--said he wanted to carry on the work his dad had started, and told me he wanted me and Pete to stay as long as we wanted--to carry on the work of the Archie Bray Foundation. It seemed that we’d just gotten things going. Things looked pretty gloomy. 

As I look back on that day, it’s possible that if Archie hadn’t died, things may not have continued. I think it was only a question of time before Pete would be moving on, some friction was beginning to develop, and Pete’s work was getting widely recognized. There was growing demand for his time. We were making a lot of pottery, such gift store items as planters, nut dishes, dumb stuff--but Pete was also making beautiful thrown work just to sell. Actually this was museum quality work that was going out of the door every day. 

I recall once Mr. Ford of the Montana Bank of Great Falls came to the Pottery and bought almost every major piece out of the kiln that Pete had just fired. With a couple of other things to fill out the purchase, Mr. Ford acquired the core of a priceless collection which was exhibited for many years at the Bank. It is now housed, I believe, in the permanent collection of the C.M. Russell Gallery in Great Falls. Those were halcyon days--but, even so, I think there were problems developing between Archie and Pete, and certainly there was no love lost between the office staff and us. Unfortunately, there was outright and constant embezzlement going on at the time. The bookkeeper was fired for stealing and making the losses look like they were created by the pottery. In fact, we were on a break-even point when Pete left, even though we had some bad debts with our commercial trade. Some of the wealthiest people just never paid us. We were selling supplies by now, and starting to build kilns, pottery sales were up, clay, kick wheels, and wax emulsion sales, as well as teaching classes. 

Lela, my wife, and Peggy Voulkos were making enamels, teaching classes. By this time our daughter Lisa was about a year old, we had a little house on Cannon Street. Little Arne was learning to ride his bike around the neighborhood. There were a lot of things that were starting to happen, almost too much for us to manage. There was never enough money and I don’t know how Lela made do on my small salary. She even did some wonderful paintings in an attic studio of our little house, of parties and people, of Pete Meloy and the DeWeeses playing guitars. I did remodeling in our little house by tearing apart brick palettes for lumber and scrounging used nails. We bought a used washer from a laundromat which I installed. I had to dig tunnels all over our little property for drainage. Our old car gave up the ghost. A tire blew out just as I was about to sell it to someone for 50 dollars. 

On the educational side, there were a couple of other workshops that were important. The first of these was a visit by Rex Mason, a potter from San Francisco, who’d also visited us when we were students at Montana State College. He was charming, helpful, and made beautiful tiles. Another was a visit by Marguerite Wildenhain. Marguerite was arrogant and full of self-importance. She was overbearing and had a tough intellectual capacity but she made some fine pitchers. We bought one for our collection. A very important workshop which was a lot of fun for everyone was with Tony Prieto, who was the energetic friend of Pete’s from his California days as a student at California Arts and Crafts. Tony taught at Mills, was full of hell, and taught me a lot of things about firing and glaze application as well as surface decoration. He communicated ideas about his contact with Artigas, the Spanish potter and Miro, who was starting to work with clay. Tony would periodically visit them in Spain. Carleton Ball came to work on a Ford Foundation grant and stayed for several weeks. He was a great teacher, and I learned from him, especially high temperature glazes. Carl was open and friendly--and generous with his time and ideas. Years later we had another fine workshop with Katy Horsman of Scotland, whose honest and direct approach was an inspiration to many working there. Katy came to the Brays through contact with the McKinnells, who were resident artists by this time, making and selling their pots under the auspices of the Bray Foundation. 

There were other residents that came and studied for a while, and left their varied contributions in time and effort or pieces for our growing collection. 

An early resident was Bob Sperry, who arrived the summer following the Hamada-Leach workshop. Sperry had studied at the University of Chicago, and came to the Brays with his young family, Edith and Van. I think he learned much working with Voulkos. He was energetic and bright and learned very quickly. Sperry became an outstanding thrower, but also was an excellent artist. He succeeded Boniface at the University of Washington and influenced a whole generation of northwest potters by his teaching and example. 

Sperry volunteered for the thankless job of firing the Hamada Leach pots, which were lying all over the pottery floors. I seem to recall that somehow a batch of iron-saturated glaze got mixed wrong, and so a huge number of these pots ran all over the glaze shelves with few survivors. Sperry felt terrible but it wasn’t his fault. We kept the best pots, and those that came through the firing looked wonderful. Many of these pieces have vanished over the years, since we didn’t place that much value on them at the time. Nearly everyone helped themselves to the best Hamada or Leach they could lay their hands on. I even fed the dog out of the Leach I took home, and we used the Hamadas and other pots in an equally worldly manner. We assumed of course this was the way pots should be used.

Jim and Nan McKinnell worked at the pottery for many years, leaving shortly after 1957. They produced many fine pieces and set up a pottery, which was the first portable setup I ever heard of. Jim, a ceramics engineer, was knowledgeable about testing clays and researching materials, and did this on a contract basis for Archie when he wasn’t making pottery. Nan had studied with Boniface of the University of Washington, and had completed her graduate work there as well, as I remember. Both were skilled potters and they contributed much to the effort of the Bray pottery during these difficult early years when we were getting started. In fact, they taught classes and held up our image as a pottery center after Pete had left for California. 

There were many fine young people who came to the Brays in those years. I’m hard pressed to remember them all, but I recall George McCullough, a painter who worked in the old horse barn in the back of the property during the first summer. He was a graduate of Iowa, and a good friend of the DeWeeses, our painter friends from Bozeman. Today, George is teaching and painting at a school in the Midwest, as I’ve heard. George married one of our pottery students, Sue Tragitt, a therapist at Shodair hospital. Archie had a grudge against George for some unfathomable reason, and while he kept him on the brickyard payroll, he wouldn’t talk with him head on. I became the messenger of all the bad news for George, like “Archie wants you to nip bricks this afternoon after you get through cleaning up here.” I think George began to think I was a harbinger of doom. George made large and colorful paintings while there, and, as I recall, they were principally landscape themes of various kinds. 

Another brief visitor was Manuel Neri, who has become an important sculptor and who teaches at Davis, California, at the present. Manuel was one of Pete’s friends from California, and he did some fine work in small terra cotta sculpture at the time. I recall a small figure he made that was really nicely articulated, but Manuel also threw pottery as well. Other artists such as Maurice Grossman, who became a well-known ceramist and teacher at the University of Arizona at Tucson, and Muriel Guest, who worked for us for a time, Her contribution was generous and dedicated. Muriel made some fine pottery, as did Paul Volckening, who came from Mills College to work there for a while. 

Doris Strachan and Margaret Gregg both worked as free lance potters while they were graduate students at Montana State, and we put them on a small payroll or paid them a commission. During this time, Lyndon Pomeroy, the Billings sculptor, also finished his graduate work--partly at Brays in a residence program we set up between the College at Bozeman and the Brays. Volunteers and other potters kept the pottery shelves stocked with jars, teapots, bowls and plates, and assorted art pottery during the brief time they worked there. Pottery was something I couldn’t keep up with on my own. Nor did I have a commitment to it. So with all the other things I had to do, I depended on the McKinnells and the visitors to keep a semblance of a pottery operation after Pete left. Lillian Miracle, Bernice Boone, fine ladies who were always helpful but ungenerous to the Bray in their wills, and Maxine Blackmer, a high school art teacher in the Helena Schools at the time, were part time students and supporters. They came to work at the Brays during my years as the resident director. 

Also in company were the ladies of the legislature--who found it a popular place to chatter and gossip while the men were “legislating” at the state capitol. They ostensibly took classes from Pete and the McKinnells and whoever else was teaching. Few of them became proficient potters, but they provided a support group for our existence. Sue Bovey, for example, was a much loved trustee of the Bray Foundation Board and although I was fond of her personally, her contribution remains exclusively a concrete footing for the Gazebo from the ruins of the Broadwater Hotel plus money for a ladies toilet. 

As a result, our potters and supporters were a mixed group, some professional and some not. The non-potters were supportive but in some cases a terrible drain on our time since they demanded a lot of attention, but in the long run I suppose they made our presence known, and the local and regional viability of the place became gradually established. 

When Pete left for California it was a sad day for all of us. Pete left the pottery driveway in his huge black Chrysler loaded with all his possessions, wife Peggy and little Pier. Doris Strachan, one of our pottery residents, traveled with them as well. I know he agonized over the decision, but he’d received an offer from the Otis Art Institute from the then director, Millard Sheets, to come there to set up a ceramics department. He asked me as he tried to make up his mind whether or not he ought to go, but I too realized that the world was too small in Montana for his monumental talents, so I urged him to do it, much as I felt it would be the beginning of the end for the Bray Foundation. How could I do it alone? And as far as Pete was concerned, who could turn down an offer of 7500 dollars a year? 

Millard Sheets was the southern California boy prodigy who ensconced himself at the Otis Art Institute to establish his own school with himself as head. Now a mature man, with an outstanding reputation and record, he had the support of the Chandlers among other civic leaders in Los Angeles to set up a new school. It was to be called the Los Angeles County Art Institute, From this base he became a do-it-all designer hiring his own architects, draftsmen, mural makers, mosaic-artists, sculptors, potters, you name it--to execute his own fashionably designed banks and institutions. 

It was for this kind of situation Pete Voulkos was hired away. Compared to what he earned at the Brays it seemed like an unbelievable salary to us then. As it happened the Otis situation didn’t last for long. Pete was much too independent an artist to be able to make ready-mades for anyone. A few of Pete’s students, Paul Soldner among them, worked for Millard Sheets doing some specifically designed ceramic works and so did Malcolm MacClain for a brief time. But most of the artists who began working for Sheets went their own way eventually. I even made an effort to go to work for Sheets, but even though he was mildly interested in my carved brick work, I didn’t have the kind of talent he was looking for. The biggest benefit of Pete’s going down there was the amassing of young talent that seemed to gravitate toward him as its center, and which culminated in what was to be called the “clay revolution” with Pete and his California students, Mason, Takemoto, Price, Soldner, Frimkess, McClain, Rothmann, and others who were part of that electrifying time in clay. 

While critics have claimed the advent of the clay revolution as having happened in California at Otis, it may be that that’s where it gained momentum and got the national attention, but it had its start many years before in Montana. 

My own work was always in clay sculpture, since it was so overwhelming to try to work at the wheel. Pete’s outstanding ability in throwing was unmatchable. I was clearly intimidated by his skill, even though I would throw small pots to contribute to the trade. So did Doris Strachan and Margaret Gregg, who were both excellent potters. I think that what came through in our thinking was that quality was the object and that’s what we worked for irrespective of technique. I remember we had a great exchange of ideas even though we rarely talked about art. We’d support each other in many ways. Through body language, yahoos or approving grunts--or if we didn’t like something a joke was friendlier. Pete’s remarks to me once when I was going to make a large ceramic sign of clay were, “Rudy, you’d make a ceramic hamburger if there was money in it,” Such was his comment on my eagerness to get paying commissions. That was the extent of esthetic criticism. 

Pete’s classical pots of the early fifties were excellent examples of the very best that was done in that direction at the time. In the middle fifties, shortly after he’d gone to do a workshop at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, his work began to change significantly and it had an impact on all of us. This was the first time his pots began to be torn up, flattened, and dramatically shaped. It’s also true my own sculpture had taken a totally abstract turn long before his Black Mountain trip, and it was a mix of figurative--abstract ever since my graduate days at Pullman. But I think we always picked up on each other. It was something we never thought about very much at the time. I liked Noguchi, Moore, Marini especially, and Pete had gotten me interested in the pre Columbian work of Tarascan figures as well. My mural and relief work was influenced by the great Diego Rivera. When you think of it, who else had done murals up to that point, after all? Thomas Hart Benton was not that well known or admired out west--at least not in our circles of interest then--but it was also true that local artists had left fine work in our post offices and public buildings by that time as a result of the WPA art program of the depression years. I had learned the fundamentals of art from those artists and the depression programs. 

Pete’s invitation to Black Mountain College brought him into contact with the front runners in mainstream painting and abstract expressionism. This was about in 1954. He met Karen Karnes who was doing ceramics there. Other artists were Tworkov the painter, Cunningham the dancer and Cage, the composer. A painter with whom Pete seemed to get along well was Esteban Vincente, who traded art with him. He also brought along a small Tworkov painting, which we borrowed for a month or two and Lela decided to make a copy of it. We tested the copy on Pete, who stared at it incredulously and said “That’s not my painting!” So we returned him the original. We gave it away. Maybe we were overly casual or called too much attention to returning the painting--but he caught us up. It was a good copy. It’s just possible he might have seen something special in the painting we missed. The joke backfired. Like Zen or the emperor’s clothes--or as Louis Armstrong once said about music, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know!” 

That’s what abstract expressionism was. I think even today Pete became its most proficient master--surpassing even its inventors Kline and Pollock--which is probably a point less observation. Pete just did it better in clay. He admired DeKooning and got to know him well and the painting gesture. The action was much more fluid and expressive in the clay medium and never faltered in Pete’s hands. He had a sure touch. I also think DeKooning opened up some doors for Pete--even though Kandinsky had been there before--in another way. Kandinsky explored in an intellectual way nonobjective issues in painting decades earlier and so had the Zen monks in another culture.

Archie Bray -- unknown photographer

Bust of Archie Bray in clay by Rudy, at Archie Bray Foundation

(photo credit Lisa Autio)

Circular Mural on UM Liberal Arts Building approximately 9 feet in circumference

Sermon on the Mount mural, 39 feet long at First Methodist Church, Great Falls Montana

Rudy packs clay on a tilted surface in preparation for carving the mural design. He used a simple grid method to scale up a drawing to fit the mural dimensions, also taking shrinkage of the clay into account.

Stone Lithograph. Drawing by Rudy of Peter Voulkos at work, 13 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches, hand printed.

Colonel Charles Broadwater built the Hotel and Natatorium in Helena in 1889, the year Montana achieved statehood. The indoor pool at 30,000 square feet was the world’s largest at the time. Rudy painted this in 1954 and it was acquired by Bernice Boone, a frequent visitor at the Archie Bray Foundation. Eventually the painting came back into Rudy and Lela’s possession. The Broadwater buildings are now long gone.

This is an excerpt from It Comes Around Again: A Memoir, by Rudy Autio, available by request in print and PDF format. Please contact us, or copies are available for purchase at the Archie Bray Foundation.