The Old Glass Factory

[mallorys_camera]

Around 3, Craig, the reformed crackhead who lives next door, knocked on my front door to ask whether I wanted to hike over to the remains of the old glass factory.

Sure, I said. As faithful readers know, I’m ever more fascinated by what once was than what is.

Craig didn’t actually know where the old glass factory was, just its general direction. “It shut down like in 1900,” he told me. “The building’s all falling down. But there’s a big pile of glass and shit, stained glass, and you can find these antique glass bottles –“

I was pretty sure that after 111 years, there’s be very little in the way of antique glass bottles. I was also fairly sure that Craig was asking me on a hike to see if I was jumpable. Craig’s lived a hard life. It’s not that he’s stupid or anything but I can’t even muster the empathetic twinge that serves me so often in place of lust: What if I were someone who’s interested in him… He was rescued by Janice, the woman he lives with, from very bad circumstances which he told me all about in great detail and which I promptly forgot. They’re a couple of years younger than me, look decades older. Hard drinkers, both of them. Smokers too. Craig has four kids, all of whom – except for the youngest – are in prison or in rehab and his conversation is constantly peppered with references to pals who are enjoying long vacations on the state in the Big House: “… and him and me played music together but then he got sent up for robbing this bank…”

A companionable enough hiking companion though.

I hadn’t been on this path in months and the first thing I noticed was this beehive. I got a leetle too enthusiastic clicking pix and in consequence, got stung twice. Didn’t hurt yesterday but today my arm is swollen to about twice its normal girth.

Damn! It’s beautiful in those woods:



No glass factory to be found though.

“My buddy said it was out this way,” Craig said. “He grew up here. You know where that old laundromat used to be?”

“Yeah…”

“His parents owned a grocery store there. Twenty, thirty years ago. Maybe I’ll make him come out here, show us the way –“

“Oh, please do!” I said eagerly. Because by now,of course, finding the remains of the old glass factory had become my life’s sole mission.

###

About the old glass factory, the pamphlet An Historical Sketch of the Village of Freeville, Tompkins County written in 1943 by one Albert Benjamin Genung -- who was born in 1890-- has this to say:

Eventually they made contact with a Belgian glass manufacturer, Cleon F. Tondeur, who had a factory at Canastota and others near Oneida and in Ohio. He came and looked over the incomplete stove plant and finally agreed to buy it. The property was sold by Ogden and Willey to Mr. Tondeur in November 1886. That winter and the following spring he completed the main building and moved to it the necessary equipment for manufacturing what was called cathedral window glass. A mammoth barbecue was held when the large furnace was set, the last of 1886. About a dozen skilled glass workers were imported from Ohio, the arrival of their families adding to the town's already serious housing problem. Incidentally, the E. C. & K. Railroad extended its tracks to Sylvan Beach so as to haul from there the fine white sand which was used in the Tondeur glass factories. Mr. Tondeur manufactured colored glass in this factory for a few years until the lapse of his patents about 1890 led to his financial failure and to the end of this industry in Freeville. Considerable glass, much of it a beautiful product, was made here in the short time that the plant operated.

There's an Alice Munroe-type story lurking there, begging to be written, no?

###

“Jeeze, that was some hike,” Craig said when we got back to the cement bungalow. It wasn’t though. I think we maybe hiked three miles total. But Craig looked exhausted. “You wanna come in for a drink or something?”

“Oh, no thanks,” I said.

“What are you? In AA?”

“Oh, no, no. Nothing like that. It’s just too early for me to drink. I’d just want to lay down and go to sleep.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Craig leered. He had a very predatory leer. “By the way, I wasn’t going to tell you but your son?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ve met him once or twice.”

“He’s coming around here asking if I can score him some pot.”

Why, that little shit, I thought. He’d been scoring angel points by telling me he was staying away from pot even to the point of not hanging out with pals who smoked. I’d believed him too. What kind of an idiot am I anyway?

“Please don’t sell him any drugs,” I said.

“Oh, I won’t. I won’t. I didn’t know whether I should tell you or not but I figured you should know.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I should know.”

I should also be able to control the kid better. Sigh. He’s riding for a very hard fall that one, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. Absolutely the worst feeling in the world for a parent.