Oral History Interview with Glen Kaufman, 2008 January 22-February 23

Oral history interview with Glen Kaufman, 2008 January 22-February 23 Funding for this interview was provided by the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Glen Kaufman on January 22 and February 23, 2008. The interview took place in Athens, Georgia, and was conducted by Josephine Shea for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. Glen Kaufman has reviewed the transcript and has made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview JOSEPHINE SHEA: This is Josephine Shea. I'm sitting here with Glen Kaufman at his home in Athens, Georgia, on January 22 [2008], the day after Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, in Athens, Georgia, which is about an hour and a half from Atlanta, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and this is disc one of we don't know how many discs. [END CD 1 TR 1.] Traditionally, we begin these by talking about — asking the question, when and where were you born? GLEN KAUFMAN: I was born in southern Wisconsin in a small town named Fort Atkinson, about 35 miles south of — [END CD 1 TR 2.] —and west of Madison, the capital, named after General Atkinson, who was a famous general in the Blackhawk— [END CD 1 TR 3.] —Indian Wars. And there was a fort actually built in this town; thus the name. MS. SHEA: And did I get the date? MR. KAUFMAN: The date of birth? [They laugh.] Oh, confession time. Honesty must rule — 1932. MS. SHEA: Nineteen thirty-two. Tell me about your family, whether you were a first child, an only child? MR. KAUFMAN: My mother grew up in Chicago. She was an honest-to-God flapper who — MS. SHEA: Oh, really? MR. KAUFMAN: — did the Charleston, who taught dancing at various ballrooms in Chicago. My father grew up, basically, in Wisconsin. For many years he — at the time they met, he was certainly a carpenter, cabinet maker, commercial fisherman, a variety of combination of activities. They met when my mother's family was vacationing someplace near Fort Atkinson in the early '30s. And he built this fabulous new house for her. In a kind of — I don't know exactly how to describe it; it had certain Tudor aspects. It had a huge, gallery-type living room with 20-foot ceilings, little balconies at each end, and really quite a grand place. So that's sort of the background. My father had not finished very much elementary school before he was needed for working on a farm. He had an older brother a few years older than he, and the older brother had purchased a farm, at some time prior to this house being built, on the outskirts of Fort Atkinson. So I really grew up very much on the outskirts of town, and across the street was a working farm. The farm that my uncle purchased [had] quite a bit of land, and he had planted an orchard. So we had orchards and, sort of, an outdoors aspect. And I was born in '32. I have a sister six years younger than I am, and grew up in this sort of rural, partly rural town of about, at that time, maybe four to 5,000. It's grown a little bit bigger since then. But that's sort of the milieu in which I grew up. MS. SHEA: And was your mother's family from Chicago, or were they originally from Wisconsin or — MR. KAUFMAN: They — MS. SHEA: And what did they think about their big-city daughter moving to — MR. KAUFMAN: That's a very good question. That whole family was Bohemian. And I have recently been tracing my Bohemian roots in Czech Republic this last summer. So I grew up in a very ethnically oriented family, in terms of the Chicago relatives. So I'm sure they were a bit surprised that she would move away from the city, because all of her siblings stayed there in Chicago. She had an older sister who was more like a grandmother to me, because there was a great difference in age in these seven siblings. And then there were two girls and five boys in between, so I had lots of aunts and uncles. Well, I had one aunt and many uncles in Chicago. And I think the fact that I spent a good bit of childhood time in Chicago may have had some influence on my later involvement with art, because my aunt and my mother — I had a cousin just a year or so older than I was, so Bruce and I were always together. And they took us everywhere; you know, the Art Institute [of Chicago], the [John G. Shedd] Aquarium, the Field Museum, the Brookfield Zoo, Marshall Fields. So I had this kind of other experience which was so different from Wisconsin and the small town I grew up in. So I think that had — as I look back on it, I think that had really a strong impact on my thinking about what the world was and what existed out there. Then at home, there was also a very tight family. My uncle's family, I had two cousins older than I, six or seven years older. And I still keep — only one is living now, and I keep close touch with her. So that was also a tight family situation. The two brothers, sisters-in-law, and the cousins always had holidays together. And there was a kind of pilgrimage up to my aunt's house every Sunday. She'd be baking cookies or something. So there was a very strong family feeling in both places, one where I was living and the other where I visited Christmas, and usually sometime in the summertime we would visit Chicago for a week or so. And then when I was older and able to go on my own, I got on a Greyhound bus and went down to Chicago myself. MS. SHEA: Because I was going to ask, did you go by train or — MR. KAUFMAN: We always drove — MS. SHEA: You drove. MR. KAUFMAN: — in a 1938 Chevrolet. MS. SHEA: My goodness. Okay. MR. KAUFMAN: But there was a bus. An uncle and some cousins would come up from Chicago occasionally in the summer by Greyhound bus. But mostly we drove when the family went down. Sometimes my mother drove just the two kids, my sister and I. My father came separately when he was involved in other things. But the whole family drove. We went down at Christmas, for example. We would go together in the old Chevrolet, filled with car smoke, but somehow we survived. MS. SHEA: So did your father stay kind of in this multiconstruction — MR. KAUFMAN: Yeah. The commercial fishing was interesting because there's a rather large, shallow lake called Lake Koshkonong, which comes from some Indian word, Blackhawk Indian word, which had a lot of carp. And there was a market for carp, especially among the Jewish population in Chicago. So that was one of his activities. And I think it may have been seasonal. You know, I wasn't really old enough to remember that, except going to the lake and hearing tales about it. But at that time he was, I think, much more involved in construction, carpentry, cabinet making. And eventually he developed his own construction company and built many houses around Fort Atkinson. And as a high school guy and as a university student over the summer, I had a lot of experience in construction, too. MS. SHEA: I was going to ask, did you help him out — MR. KAUFMAN: Yes, yes. MS. SHEA: — willingly or — [laughs]. MR. KAUFMAN: Well, the idea was that this was a ready-made job for me. Well, there's another aspect of family business, too. But it was a ready-made job for me, and I could save money for school. So it all made sense. In addition to that, my uncle also was an entrepreneur of sorts. He was first a rural mail carrier, which he did on a daily basis. Then the two brothers came up with this idea of a chicken hatchery; so farmers would bring their eggs in, and they would have the chickens hatched. And then — interesting, this, because of my Japanese connection later — Japanese couples - or I'm not sure, because my memory is not that clear - would come around to sex the chickens. So the females went in this box, and the males went in this box, so that if you were raising laying hens, you wanted the females. If you were raising broilers, you wanted the males. So that was an activity that mostly my uncle was in charge of, but I think my dad helped out, as well. And then they decided that it would be a good idea for them to raise some chickens themselves, for the family. And then I think, between my aunt and my mother, they decided during the Depression — probably, I don't know, '33, '35 — they needed to do something to raise some extra money, so they sold baked chicken out of their kitchen window, eventually built a small shack on the lawn to sell chicken dinners for 35 cents, and then they built a restaurant, a small restaurant, that was called Kaufman's.

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