By Harriet Howard Heithaus
Arts/entertainment editor

That wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows Kahle, a mid-40s match of passion for the untired and dogged determination. It isn’t hard to imagine Kahle bristling at the instructors who told him "Don’t ever do that" and figuring out ways to incorporate the impossible into glass sculpture.

Kahle’s works encase brass, bronze and even the brittle frame of his beloved Einstein, a cat immortalized with bone chips inside a sculpture after its death. His innovation has won him, in just six years of glass work, at least two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council; his work is in 70 galleries, from Seagate Gallery in Toledo and Artspace Lime to galleries in Pittsburgh and Budapest, Hungary.

The brass-in-glass achievement was a challenge laid on him by an art instructor at the Toledo Museum of Art who insisted the two materials would never wed.

"The first one I succeeded with, I took up and laid it on his desk in front of him," Kahle recalls, with just the right amount of glee.

To watch Kahle in his studio is to see how pop culture can serve the classical arts. Kahle’s rhythm comes not from watching a cadence from a guildsman but from music that works with the mood of his task.

"I start out with Gregorian chant about 9 a.m. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour to get warmed up and get to the shop ready," he explains. "While I’m heating the piece I play a lot of blues, maybe some Enya. But when it gets close to finishing, it’s got to be rock ‘n’ roll."

This particular day Eric Clapton is providing the tempo as Kahle swings deftly among an assortment of blowing and heating rods, thrusting his work into one of three gas ovens that blast out heat as high as 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit. He sheds protective layers in his unheated studio down to a tank top and today’s color variant of a bandanna, getting relief from a refrigerator stocked with Gatorade.

His is a confidence built on a mountain of shattered glass and a scientific study of technique.

"I have a few rules. When I break my third piece in one day, I go home," says Kahle, who only has to walk about five feet to his back door at 301 N. Broadway.

Another? "Never pick up anything you drop," he adds wryly.

Customers can come to his 10-12 foot gallery to see works that range from $25 to $445 and more under Kahle’s artistic name of James Michael. But some collectors prefer to see his videotape, and Kahle creates a new one each year. His European trade via shows and a Web page (http://www.glassbyjm.com) are nearly a third of the business. Kahle says Europeans appreciate the real work behind glass blowing, which is not necessarily the impressive show of swinging molten glass to lengthen a depression or twirling a 9- to 12- pound rodful into plasticity over a 2,500-degree furnace.

"Americans ask me, ‘How long did it take you to make that?’ Like I get paid by the hour," Kahle quips. "In Europe they ask you. ‘How many years have you been studying to be able to do that?’"

Still, Kahle’s American glassmaking roots are what have distinguished him. The son of Dominic Labino, the late glass genius of Toledo, sells Kahle the colored glass known as cullet that’s used for his vases, bowls and sculpture, and Kahle buys it in 3-ton lots to assure that the lot and the quality of the glass is constant. Kahle’s crystal is even based on the elder Labino’s formula.

His steam pad, with which he hand-forms pieces, is wetted mats of Wall Street Journal exclusively, because of its smudge-free vegetable ink and high quality stock. Some things don’t require fuss: The Journal gets spritzed alternately by water from old Hershey syrup bottles and Joy detergent containers.

The techniques Kahle has developed to work glass around heavier metals are still secret, although he has taken on apprentices from Hungary and Isreal. His fame has spread enough the one-man show in Budapest that he will be given a house and studio from which to work while he’s teaching a class in Budapest this year.

It is no small gift to be the fuel supplier for Kahle.

"I don’t tell people how much my gas bills are. But I tell anyone, ‘I’ll trade you my gas bill for your mortgage bill, sight unseen, for eight months,’" he said. Other glass artists may follow the inspiration of nature to the mountains and New Hampshire, but Kahle finds that Spencerville offers it’s own kind of charm when the bills for land, materials and gas come each month.

It also keeps Kahle, who looks like he’d be more at home on his motorcycle than at a gallery opening, is close to the hometown where he learned to blow glass. And if the one-time social services specialist needs to get away, his Harley-Davidson awaits.

It was waiting the time Kahle created a perfect smoky vase, and realized he needed another artistic cliff to scale.

"It was the last symmetrical piece I ever did. Got on my Harley and took off for three weeks, and that was that," he says. "I can build a machine to do that kind of work."