The Pottery was my first factory experience after I graduated from high school in 1964. It was a summer job for me as a laborer before going off to the U of M in Minneapolis, and in the summer of 1965 between freshman and sophomore years. As a disclaimer to the accuracy of some of my recollections, I must say that it’s getting to be a long time ago - the times and facts may be blending in with mere impressions since I’m writing only from memory. I

On the ground floor of the main factory was the great plate dryer. This was a huge machine - maybe 30 or 40 feet long and about 9 feet wide and high. It was essentially an enclosed conveyer belt running the length of the machine with heaters and blowers inside intended to dry whatever was placed on the belt. This belt was about as wide as the machine and exposed out of the enclosure for a couple feet at each end to permit manual loading and unloading. The great dryer was used, here, to dry the putty-like clay after it had been stamped into a dinner plate or a saucer shape by the manually operated press at the oven’s entrance. Each plate pattern used hundreds of the convex or "male" moulds to form the inside of a plate, but only a few of the concave or "female" moulds to form the plate’s bottom.. The concave part was mounted in the moveable arm of a press and was used to form the bottom of every plate. The clay was pressed onto the convex mould half and this half would then be put on the dryer belt with its freshly pressed "ware".

My job that first summer was to strip the "greenware" off of the moulds as they came out of the dryer. As you can imagine this was quite a mind-mumbing experience! The moulds weighed about 5 lbs and came off the great dryer belt about six or eight wide (depending on what size of plate we happened to be running that day). The procedure was to remove the greenware from the mould, place it on a two-shelved moving rack just above my head (hanging from a track-and-chain mechanism), and place the empty mould on a small transverse conveyer belt (which returned the mould to the press-end of the dryer for reuse). I was always suprised at how rigid and substantial the clay had become by simply drying it a little. The "ware" went via the moving shelves to, I think, the kiln loading area for firing.

Of course, none of this seemingly simple procedure went smoothly all of the time. Sometimes the greenware came out of the dryer with cracks, sometimes it was floppy and mis-shapen, and sometimes the two pressmen putting the wetware on the belt would apparently get a little carried away with their speed. The latter was a scene right out of Lucille Ball at the Pie Factory! I just couldn’t keep up, there was no one around to help, and the pressmen were too far away to talk to! The moulds would get away from me and land on the floor before I could pull the emergency rope to stop the belt. Toward the end of the summer I got pretty good at it, though, and rarely had any accidents anymore. Of course, the part that never got any better was the ambient temperature - even with the windows open, the street-level heat in August coupled with the dryer’s heat did not exactly make a worker-friendly environment. They had many salt pill dispensers

Quite a few tourists took the factory tour that summer. I enjoyed the relief from the monotony as Sue Gillmer’s tour group would gather ‘round the end of the dryer and she would explain to them just what I was doing. Even so, in the mid-to-late afternoon I always looked forward to finally seeing that last row of plates come out of the dryer for the day.

I only had a few occasions to see what was going on in the rest of that building that first summer. The belt would stop for mould changes, though, so I’d go with one of the pressmen to store the old moulds and retrieve new ones. The moulds were stored on pallets on second floor and, if I remember correctly, took up most of that floor. I remember that we needed to not put too many pallets of moulds in one place because there was some worry about the maximum load on the wooden floors.

The third floor housed, I believe, the "casting room" which was a huge area of nothing but long, narrow tables with hundreds of 2-piece moulds sitting on them. These moulds were seemingly of the same porous ceramic material as the plate press moulds except that each mould was complete with both halves and they closed tightly on each other with a vertical split line and a hole at the top. I was curious, so the lady who worked there (I think only one or two women worked this entire room) explained. All of the moulds would be filled with "slip" each morning.....which would usually take half the morning. Slip was a thin mixture of clay and water which was, here, fed through pipes from the slip tank mounted high on the wall. Then, in the afternoon she would pour out the "slip" into a trough and it would go back into the slip tank. What remained in the moulds, of course, was the "ware" - the thin shell of clay that had somewhat solidified against the porous inside surface of the mould and wouldn’t pour out of the mould. I think that the moulds were left closed overnight so the clay shell could dry somewhat. The next morning the moulds were opened, the ware removed, and the moulds refilled with slip for the next batch. Of course, this procedure was alot slower than that of the plate press, but some very complex shapes could be made with thin walls and narrow necks at the top.

I didn’t get to third floor very much, but it was kind of interesting. Soon the summer ended and it was back to school. I wish that I could remember the name of the great lady in the casting room who took the time to explain stuff to me. A number of years after the pottery factory closed, I happened to visit the new tourist salesroom - in about 1978 - and there she was in a large wall photo made up to look like it was taken around the turn of the century! Of course the photo was doctored......but did I feel old!

The next summer found me back at the pottery, but not stripping plates from the dryer. I actually had a couple of jobs there that summer. Neither of them was particularly glamorous, but I did get to see a little more of the factory. 

On my first day back, my new boss, Ray, introduced me to a portable electric grinder.

I was supposed to use this heavy, hand-held thing to grind the rust off cast iron plates. The plates were curious-looking disk-shaped things about 2 feet in diameter and about 2 inches thick at the rim. Inside of the rim the metal was less than an inch thick and each side had wavy grooves or corrugations. These things weighed in at about 50lbs.......and there were lots of them! I had no clue as to their use, but I could see that they were literally rotten with rust. I worked on those things for weeks and weeks. It was such a noisy, dirty job that I worked outside (with another guy - Lynn was his first name) between some outbuildings near the main factory. Even then, I’d be a sweaty mess covered with orange grime at the end of every day.

Only later did I learn what those plates were for and why they needed de-rusting. These things were plates used in the clay presses. Each press was a horizontal stack of at least fifty iron plates all hanging on a rack similar to clothes hangers on a horizontal pole. It seems to me that the plates had some kind of a feature on the rim so that they’d fit and slide the rack, plus a hole in the middle. Canvas bags or liners between each plate and the next completed the stack. Clay "slip" was pumped into the liners, big hand-operated hydraulic rams would press the water out, and the clay would fall out in big flat rounds onto a cart when the stack was opened up. That’s where the clay came from for the press at the mouth of the dryer belt. The plates that I had been grinding were from the scrap pile and the attempt was being made to get enough of the rust off so that they could be put back in service. I don’t think that there was enough money to buy new ones....and I don’t think that the de-rusting effort worked very well either. I suppose that there were still rust particles in the clay.

One day my boss discovered that I had a chauffer’s license for driving so I suddenly became everlasting trash man and truck driver. It sure was better than grinding those damn plates! I would go around the factory with a push-cart and collect big cardboard barrels filled with broken pottery and leave empty ones. Each work station generated alot of scrap, so I would do this at least a couple of times a day. I dumped each barrel into an ancient dumptruck parked at the dock......and when I got the truck fairly full I would drive it across and down the street toward the river to the pottery’s own private little dumping grounds. Actually, it wasn’t so little. I was appalled at the shear volume of broken and reject pottery that was produced every day. The dumping area was like a plateau made of pottery, partway down the hill to the river. I’d back the dump truck up to the edge and simply raise the bed (the hydraulics actually worked on the truck) until everything slid off. One day I learned that a big pile of broken pottery is not particularly stable! Yup - there goes the truck (and my underwear)!......well, at least partway down the pile. My boss said - "Oh yeah, we should have told you about that. We’ll pull it back up - don’t worry about it." I thought for sure that I’d be back grinding iron plates after that one....but apparently it had happened before. Maybe that’s why the truck was so beat up.

For a day or so I worked around the kiln and got a primer on the operation from one of the permanent guys. The kiln was a brick tunnel that would accept a number of open-shelved carts that ran on tracks in the floor and connected together like a train. The shelves and cart frames were proteced from the intense heat of the kiln by ceramic plates and firebrick. Greenware was loaded onto the cart shelves by hand. Each piece was placed on ceramic "points", which were small tripod frames that somewhat resembled a kid’s jack for playing ball-and-jacks but somewhat larger and with only three points. The most amazing part was the errie view through one of the viewing ports on the side of the kiln. All of the carts were visible, being bathed in orange/yellow light from the glowing brick of the kiln. I knew that they were loaded with ware.........but all that was visible were the cart frames, shelves and the ceramic tripod points! All of the ware was invisible! I’m still not sure of the physical reason for their invisibility at that temperature.

The permanent guy mentioned that small explosions weren’t too uncommon in the kiln. Sometimes the ware would have a tad too much water in the clay so as to explode from the excess steam. A single piece would explode and destroy not only itself but its neighbors on the shelf. No wonder the amount of scrap seemed excessive.

About the only other task that I remember from that summer was a couple of days spent packing a bunch of theme ashtrays in individual boxes for (I think) a world series baseball game. They were going to be sold at the Met Stadium, if I remember correctly. Oh, and once in awhile I had to mow Mr. Gillmer’s lawn at his house.

In retrospect, the handwriting was on the wall for Red Wing Pottery that summer.

There seemed to be little or no money for plant improvements, automation, improved working conditions, etc. The equipment was worn out, yields of finished goods were low, and market competition was eating them alive - the rock and the hard spot. The killer, of course, was the labour strike the next year. It reminds me of Don McClean’s tune - "American Pie".