THE GLASS MAN

By Bart Mills

The Lima News

The longish white hair swept back beneath a pink bandana and single yin/yang earring hint at a man not completely resigned to the conservative Midwest. A former school bus sits behind his shop, painted in the sort of eccentric chic the Partridge Family would have passed on as too flashy.

And then, of course, there’s the shop with it’s constantly humming furnaces running all hours of the day and night.

Nobody seems too curious about what goes on around the old Kahle place in Spencerville. The neighbors have never thought much about it. They never do in stories like this. "He seemed like a nice fellow" they say, or something equally clinched.

So it will likely come as quite a shock when they discover that, for all these years this nice, odd fellow who lived next door was . . . an artisit.

Kahle’s not just any sort of artist. He’s of the glass-blowing variety. And for the past four years he has been working out of the shop he built behind his house on an otherwise unspectacular Spencerville street. Neighbors have apparently gotten used to the goings-on at the Kahle shop.

"I have an open house every year and I’ve had people come from Detroit and Houston and all over. But I couldn’t get a local person to walk across the street to see what I do," Kahle said with a laugh.

For Kahle, living and working in Spencerville is a matter of economic necessity. A similar property on the East Coast would cost him three to four times of what he pays now. And the massive amount of natural gas he uses to power his furnaces would cost him thousands more in other areas.

"When I’m working, it doesn’t matter where I am," he said. "And now it’s to the point where, to run the business, I can’t afford to move."

The road to Spencerville was a long and twisting one for Kahle. The short version has him coming to the area after leaving a job as a manager for ice cream moguls Ben and Jerry. He moved to the area to help a friend and just sort of stayed.

In 1992, he built the studio behind his Broadway Street home where he colors, blows, grinds and generally creates a variety of art glass. On top of the hours he spends in his shop, he also spends about 150 days a year on the road selling his works and trying to make a living doing what he loves.

His works vary in price from about $25 for a small paperweight into the thousands of dollars for elaborate works. His customers include private collectors, corporations and folks who buy his works at galleries and art fairs.

At first glance, Kahle’s works may appear pricey. A seemingly simple vase, for instance, my go for about $750. But beyond the aesthetic value of the work, the buyer also has to appreciate the years of learning and labor that went into the process.

"People look at the price and say, ‘How long did it take you to make this?’ as though I’m working for an hourly wage," Kahle said. "I always tell them, the question is, ‘How long would it take you to make it? How long do you think it took me to get to the point where I could make it?’ Usually they say they could never make something like that. I say, ‘Exactly.’"

Less than 1 percent of Kahle’s works are actually sold in this area. That’s not because people around here don’t like art, Kahle said. It’s because they think art is only if it comes from someplace else.

He tells the story of a time he was at an art show in New York and a couple bought one of his works, all the time complaining about having to go to the "big city" to find art. When he took their check, he noticed they lived in Wapakoneta, just 12 miles from his studio.

"What’s an expert? Someone from out of town who charges a lot," Kahle jokes. "Nobody seems to think anything is going on around them.