CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- At 88, Bob Deahl believes he probably is the oldest glass cutter who worked at the old Libbey-Owens-Ford glass factory in Kanawha City. The plant closed in 1980.
He grew up poor in Pennsylvania, the son of a disabled glass cutter. From boyhood, he yearned to learn the father-son glass cutting trade. He started his apprenticeship as a teenager.
Then World War II got in the way. An air gunner in the Navy, he patrolled the Atlantic coast from his base in Maine. He loved flying, loved it almost as much as cutting glass. To this day, he flies and cuts glass in his dreams.
In 1948, he arrived in Charleston to work at the booming Libbey-Owens-Ford plant, the largest window glass factory in the world.
Diamonds and other intricate glass cutting tools passed down from his father remain treasured souvenirs of an intricate craft forever lost to machinery.
"I've had a good life but a poor life. We lived very poor in Pennsylvania. There were seven of us kids. We lived on a farm. All we had was a small garden.
"For as long as I can remember, my dad was crippled. He was a glass cutter. He was a young man, and the factory was closed to repair the tanks, and he was trying to make a living on the road. While he talking to some lady, he passed out. He had polio and never got any better. He could hardly walk.
"The Depression was rough. We starved to death almost. Dad couldn't get out of bed. There was nothing to eat. I was hungry lots of times. I don't know how we made it. I can remember seven of us would get a can of peaches and put a little flour with it and mix it up, and that was your dinner. We ate dandelion greens, tons of it. It was very bad.
"I always knew I was going to be a glass cutter. That was a father-son job. It had to be handed down. My dad went to Kane, Pa., and got a job in the glass company when he was just a kid. They took some outsiders in to be apprentices.
"His father died when he was just a baby. His mother died not long after and remarried. He grew up more or less by himself. He was around 16 when they took him in as an apprentice. That's how it ended up that us boys became glass cutters, me and my brother, John.
"The glass trade was over 100 years old, and they did away with it. There are no more glass cutters, no hand cutters. They do it by machine. We were the last.
"I worked for a time in a mushroom mine. I made 38 cents an hour. That mine is still running, an old limestone mine. The rooms were big enough to put that house over there inside. You could drive trucks in there for two miles. It opened into what looked like a city with everybody packing mushrooms. Every once in a while, you will see them around here, Moonlight Mushrooms from Cabot, Pa. I lived close, in Saxonburg.
"Arch Splain took me in to be a glass cutter apprentice. He was my master workman. He worked in Arnold, Pa., for America Window Glass Co.
"He showed me how to use the diamonds and how to use fractions to cut glass. You had to cut pieces of broken glass just to learn. They would pay us about 30 cents a box of about 100 lights, or pieces. It was the best job I ever had. I always liked glass.
"I joined the Navy after the war started. I had a good life in the Navy. I flew all the time. I was in aviation ordnance, an air gunner.
