1995…Dan: “Got any plans for the next ten Thanksgivings?”
Dante: “Hmmm. Where’s this going?”

The decade of the Dante Circles (1995-2004) is fast becoming history. But like lots of history, it only seems to get grander in its passing.

So it is that this weekend I am again fondly remembering all those years that Dante, Janusz and Paul came down to Portland for the three days following Thanksgiving to blow “cups” while we drank champagne and brunched on the bleachers. It was our celebration of glass. Humored by Dante & Friends we got to sit in front of the furnaces watching them work.

Today – Sunday – would have been The Last Day of the blow. We – the diehard fanatical Watchers – would still be glued to the bleachers, swilling the dregs of the flat bubbly, and begging Dante to “make another Queen Marguerite…puleeeez….”… “No, no, something with more squigglies….”

It all seems so long ago now. And – hard to believe – since it happened in the decade before YouTube, we didn’t save all those great chops on video. We DID eventually turn it into a little catalog called Ten Circles.

Or, if you’d rather just watch a brilliant glassmaker – working out on this Thanksgiving weekend, here goes. (I’m off in search of flat champagne.)

Rolling glass circa 1978. The height of fashion on the casting floor? Velvet bellbottoms?

Not today. But who notices apparel in 2008? You can’t see the pants for the tattoos.

Well, back to working out the timelines for the real tours that are coming through next week. If you want to know more about these and other activities that Bullseye has planned for the GAS conference, check out the SEE BE info that Mary Kay’s group put together.

Like everything else they do, it’s just brilliant.

The humble factory drinking fountain. One little revolutionary idea.

Which is how the filtered water fountains happened.

For years we’d had filtered water trucked in to the factory in 5-gallon polycarbonate bottles so that there’d be fresh clean water throughout the factory and offices. But every day Dan – whose grumbling over energy wasted by lights left on and furnace dampers not properly adjusted is legendary – bristled at the sight of the hundreds of discarded paper cups and the huge diesel truck pulling up 2-3 times a week after its 10-mile drive in from Clackamas to deliver the hundreds of water containers.

OK, so it wasn’t rocket science. But simply installing seven filtered drinking water stations around the factory, warehouse and offices is keeping thousands of paper cups out of the waste stream and two or three big diesel trucks off our block every week.

We’re not going to get another BEST award for our drinking fountains, but Bullseye is still, after 30 years, about a way of thinking as well as a way of making. Its success is about what Woody Allen calls “just showing up”. And trying to do the right thing.

And I’ve failed miserably at that – I mean, at writing this blog regularly. So, at the end of Memory Lane, I’m inviting some Guest Editors onto my little soapbox.

In the coming weeks I’m twisting arms from around the factory, resource center and gallery to post their own reports about what it’s like BEing at BE.

A bevy of BEs. Just something to round off the grungy drinking fountain. Bullseye’s Brilliant Babes at BECon. Now let’s see if they (& others) can BLOG! Susan, show us your hummingbird babies!

What’s water got to do with it?

Water usage isn’t the first thing that comes to mind in glassmaking. But it plays a big part. In addition to the fire (fueled by natural gas or electricity), sand, soda, metal oxides and other ingredients of the colored glass batch, water – a lot of it – is critical to the glassmaker’s process.

The forming equipment that includes the rolling-mill – also called the casting table – and the ladles used to bring the molten glass from furnace to table are made of metal. Molten glass sticks to hot metal. Water is used to chill the metal surfaces.

Chilling the ladle

In 2003 Bullseye’s facilities director Daren Marshall, with input from Dan and company comptroller Eric Durrin, designed a system of pipes, pumps, filters and storage tanks to recirculate the factory’s cooling water and reduce water usage by 60%, keeping 6 million gallons of water out of the city sewer system each year.

Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development recognized the factory’s achievement in water conservation with a BEST award in 2004.

Not to be outdone by Daren, Dan had another bright Water Idea. NEXT…

Once upon an Earth Day. (OK, Gary, you asked: that’s our sales manager Jim Jones – not long out of college – on the far left. On the far right is Mary Kay’s oldest, now long past college – and thumb-sucking)

When I arrived at Bullseye in 1983 Dan & Company had been struggling to make colored art glass from recycled bottles for almost a decade.

One day we got a padded envelope in the mail. Inside was a 3 x 3 inch piece of dark purple (1128-00) transparent Bullseye sent to us by an amused customer. Inside the glass was a paper clip. I sent it down to the Accountant’s office (he’d been complaining about our wasting them.)

The handwriting had been on the wall (or in the glass) for some time. A railroad spike had landed on the rolling table some months earlier, having gotten by all the screens, metal detectors, and eyeballing that had been set up to catch that kind of stuff.

It was pretty clear: making art glass out of the post-consumer waste stream was beyond the abilities of this little factory. I felt really bad.

Now what? Simple. While Chemist Bob figured out how to reformulate all the glass recipes, we could PLANT TREES.

And that’s Sam, our ever-over-amped production manager, shoveling while we all watch.

(OK, even I – in all my naïve warm ecological fuzziness – recognized this for the GESTURE that it was)

But Earth Day was approaching. We had a little strip of neglected dirt on SE 21st. Envisioning a row of happy trees gobbling carbon dioxide next to the factory chimneys, I got Dan to hit up our landlord for some saplings. By law (yes, Portland has Tree Police) we were restricted to a particular species on our block. An ornamental pear. Landlord Howard complied.

As with most “improvements” Howard was quick to find a bargain. The saplings didn’t exactly meet code. And eventually our “ornamentals” dropped FRUIT. Lots of it. All over the sidewalk.

In the years since, stepping around the splatted pears, I’ve been gratified to reflect that better Bullseye minds than mine were working on issues of conservation and civic-minded manufacturing.

Next: What the Better Brains came up with.

ADDENDUM: in reply to Toni’s question below. Here they are all grown up. Clearly any Beauty Hormones floating around back then went to Marjie and not to these gnarly guys.