Publisher's New Hobby Is Finding Broken Glass Shards

I have a new hobby.

Unfortunately, it is not one I will be able to pursue very often.
We were in West Virginia for the “gathering” of the West Virginia Museum of Glass and had an opportunity to visit the sites of many now defunct glass factories.

Our host, Dean Six, who works for Replacements Ltd. when he isn’t supervising four business enterprises or remodeling his mammoth bachelor pad, handed us each a baggy as we arrived at our first site.

“Here,” he said, “You’ll need this.”

He was right. And I now have 24 pounds of glass shards from at least a dozen former glass factories and several still working glass plants.

Most of them came from cullet piles, which is broken glass put aside at one time to be added to new batches of glass.

Actually, I had started collecting souvenirs of our trip on our first day in West Virginia.
We were touring the recently closed down glass factory Glass-works, which had been owned by Princess House and was originally the Louie Glass Company.

As part of the tour we were allowed to crawl into a 90-ton continuous melt glass furnace. (It was NOT still hot.) The floor of the pot was a 12-inch thick layer of clear glass.

There were chunks of glass left when they chopped up the floor to get at monitoring devices which could be sold. Even though I didn’t have a baggy, I started my new hobby with three pieces of glass floor.

We picked up pieces of mostly colored glass from sites such as the West Virginia Glass Company, the Fostoria Glass Company, the Paden City Glass Company, the Hobbs-Brockunier/Northwood Glass Companies, the Seneca and New Martinsville/Viking Glass Companies and several former and current plants making marbles.

Perhaps my best find was a complete marble at the Akro Agate site, where they say that they used to find marbles worth as much as $500 each to collectors.

Only one of the sites used up more than one baggy, and that was at the Hobbs-Northwood site in Wheeling. I struck such a big pocket of shards that they practically had to drag me away.
I was probably the only one who wished he had a shovel and a lot bigger baggy.

If you ask me what I plan to do with all those shards, you won’t be the first to ask. I haven’t a clue, but I’m surely going to figure out something.

After all, what good is a new hobby if it isn’t something with which you can indulge yourself.

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Household Calendar Full Of ‘Good’ Ideas

I bought a Household Calendar for 1921 at an antique shop recently. It’s full of helpful hints - some of which have been passed on through the last 80+ years and are still in use, and some of which sound rather peculiar today.

Do you have an earache? It is suggested that you roast a raisin and bind it as hot as can be borne on the ear. I don’t know. Maybe thinking about the raisin on your ear will at least make you forget about the earache.

On the other hand, perhaps the following might be handy to know, especially if you’re camping: “The white of an egg applied to a burn or scald is most soothing and will cause the wound to heal quickly.” I assume the egg has not been hard-boiled.

For chapped or rough hands, “the following wash will prove of great benefit, and will remedy the trouble if used long enough. Lemon juice, 3 oz.; white wine vinegar, 3 oz.; white brandy, half pint.” Is the brandy used externally or internally?

In the household department, we are told that beetles can be exterminated from any room if the place they infest is sprinkled with ground borax mixed with common brown sugar. It might work - but you could end up with ants instead.

Need a quick snack to feed some drop-in company? Try this. “A delicacy to serve instead of sandwiches is a round cracker spread with cottage cheese and with a maraschino cherry placed in the center.” I think that should go a long way toward preventing that company from dropping in again.

Actually, my calendar has quite a few perfectly reasonable suggestions, such as the following. “It is often convenient to use a tall vase when flower stems are short, but they go down too deep. To prevent this, fill the vase with a paper twisted in a loose roll. It will hold the

And I’ll also try the following suggestion for brass stains: “Rub with spirits of wine, and then the stains will readily come out if washed with soap and water.” I wonder if the cheap wine that comes in a box will work.

Donna Miller

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