Mary Lynn Rago

We are saddened to report that David Rago's daughter, Mary Lynn Rago has passed away. 

Bucks County Courier Times

Mary Lynn Julia Rago of Lambertville, N.J., died Thursday, June 24, 2010, of a pulmonary embolism. She was 34. A graduate of Hunterdon High School, she had a degree in cosmetology from the Jeanne Madeline School in Philadelphia.

Preceded in death by her beloved grandparents, Bernice and Charles Small, she is survived by her parents, Elaine Piechota and David Rago; sister Denise Rago; step-parents Charles Piechota and Suzanne Perrault; grandparents Domenic and Mary Rago; brother-in-law Todd Wallace; and niece Emma Wallace.

Her survival of a life threatening illness nine years ago has been a testament of her tremendous will to live and her love of life. She will be remembered with love and tenderness.

In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Bucks County Animal Shelter, P.O. Box 277, Lahaska, PA, 18931.

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Introduction to Honey Chatham Obituary:

Honey is on the right in this picture. The picture was taken during a tour of her home during the 2004 convention.

We are saddened to learn of the passing of a cherished colleague in the pottery world. Honey Chatham had a big heart and generous spirit.

American Art Pottery Association members were so fortunate to get to know Honey back in 2004 when we visited the Gulf States for our convention. Our field trip to Biloxi and its environs was a glorious and awesome trip into a time and place that enchanted us all. One of the highlights of our day trip was a visit to the Chatham home. Honey greeted us all individually and welcomed us to see the stunning collection of George Ohr pottery she and her husband Guy had collected over the years. It was unusually cold that morning and Honey thoughtfully offered us hot tea and coffee to warm up as well as home made goodies. Her gracious hospitality and warm, engaging personality made us all feel right at home and wish we could stay and linger for a long while. We will always be grateful to her for creating a very special day. The Gulf has changed over the past six years in dramatic ways. Forever in our memory will be a magical time spent with a delightful and precious woman.

Honey T. Chatham
Published on www.legacy.com

Jessie (Honey) Toney Chatham died Wednesday, June 11, 2010 in Hattiesburg.

She was born in 1942 in Albemarle, North Carolina to the late Jacob E. Toney of Shubuta, Mississippi and Ree Ree Toney of Quitman. She graduated from Quitman High School in 1959 and The University of Southern Mississippi in 1964.

Mrs. Chatham worked for the Clerk's office of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Biloxi for over twenty years and retired in 2004. She was an active member of Trinity United Methodist Church in Gulfport.

Mrs. Chatham is preceded in death by her husband Robert Guy Chatham.

She is survived by her two sons, John Jacob Smith of Gulfport and Hobart Ernest Smith of Long Beach; two daughters, Trapp Smith Tischner of Marietta, GA and Jessie Amory Smith of Sumrall; and three grandchildren, Sarah Smith of Sumrall, Sam Tischner and Lily Tischner both of Marietta.

A memorial service will be held June 19 at 11:00 a.m. at Trinity United Methodist Church, 5007 Lawson Avenue, Gulfport 39507.

The family prefers memorials to the Palmer's Home for Children, P.O. Box 746, Columbus, MS 39703-9983.

 

 

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Nancy Sweezy, Savior of Jugtown Pottery, Dies at 88
By DOUGLAS MARTIN – Published: February 25, 2010 in the New York Times

In the rolling Piedmont hills of North Carolina, potters were turning out fine work before the American Revolution. But by the 20th century, the tradition had faltered. Two passionate women, a half-century apart, saved it.

Nancy Sweezy, who died on Feb 6. at 88 in Cambridge, Mass., was the second.

Riding a surge of interest in folk arts in the 1960s and 1970s, Ms. Sweezy revived Jugtown, the famous pottery that the first of the two women, Juliana Royster Busbee, started in 1917.

Ms. Sweezy begged and borrowed $22,500 to buy the financially staggering Jugtown in 1968. She came up with new glazes to replace ones that used lead, and gave them names like Blueridge Blue and Dogwood White.

She recruited talented apprentices; leaned on influential acquaintances, including Rockefellers, for support; developed marketing strategies; and got Jugtown pottery into upscale Northern stores before selling the establishment in 1980. In 2006 the National Endowment for the Arts designated Ms. Sweezy “a national treasure,” saying that her efforts had “helped inspire a revival of the traditional pottery community.” The number of potteries in the area around Seagrove, N.C., rose from 7 in 1968 to more than 100.

Mary Farrell, an expert Seagrove potter who apprenticed at Jugtown, said that “there wouldn’t even be a pottery area here” had Ms. Sweezy not come.

Ms. Sweezy became involved in Jugtown while shopping for traditional crafts in North Carolina to stock a shop she owned in Cambridge.

By contrast, Ms. Busbee fell in love with a striking orange plate she saw at a county fair in North Carolina. She and her husband, Jacques, a mural painter, scouted the area around Seagrove to find descendants of potters from Staffordshire, England, who arrived as early as 1740.

They found a few potters dabbling in the old traditions by making plates and pickle jars to satisfy local demand. The Busbees moved into a log cabin in a settlement they named Jugtown, the generic name for rural potteries that supplied earthen vessels to moonshiners.

In their rustic new home, the Busbees nurtured the resurrection of old ways, sometimes in new styles. They opened a tearoom in Greenwich Village, and later a store on the Upper East Side, to sell Jugtown products.

Eleanor Roosevelt pointed out Jugtown pottery by name as she passed a store window in North Carolina in 1934, according to a report in The New York Times. Tiffany carried the brand.

When Ms. Sweezy and her daughter Lybess came shopping in March 1968, they learned that Jugtown was in danger of closing.

“Mother and I looked at the log cabin house and the kilns, which were falling apart,” Lybess Sweezy told The Times in 1969. “And we made up our minds to buy it in an hour.”

Nancy Sweezy was born Nancy Thompson on Oct. 14, 1921, in Flushing, Queens. After her parents divorced, she was adopted and became Nancy Adams. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and later worked in the research branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the spy agency.

She was assigned to Berlin and would later relate an experience she had there: a diplomat interested in courting took her inside Hitler’s bunker.

In the 1960s, she was president of the board of Club 47, later known as Club Passim, a coffeehouse that was at the epicenter of the folk music craze in Cambridge. Through folk music and crafts, she met Ralph Rinzler, who did fieldwork for the Newport Folk Festival. He helped Ms. Sweezy get started at Jugtown before leaving to start the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

It was an adjustment. The arrivals had to carry water in buckets until a new well was drilled.

But Mr. Rinzler said in a 1996 oral history that Ms. Sweezy’s “very gentle way of making suggestions” helped local people not see her “as some Yankee coming in and running the show.”

Ms. Sweezy later helped Asian refugees develop traditional crafts for the American market; wrote and edited books; and organized museum exhibitions devoted to Southern pottery, Armenian crafts and other topics.

Ms. Sweezy’s marriage to Paul Sweezy, the influential leftist economist, ended in divorce, as did a brief earlier marriage to Bill House. She is survived by her son, Sam; her daughters, Lybess and Martha; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. She died of congestive heart failure, Lybess Sweezy said.

In 1978, in his syndicated column, James Kilpatrick marveled that eight years earlier Ms. Sweezy had repaid a $2,500 state grant, which she had used to buy new kilns, even though paying back the money had meant putting off buying a truck.

“There are others,” he quoted her as saying, “who need help more than we do.”

 

 

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Otto Heino, Prolific Potter, Dies at 94
By Bruce Weber, New York Times

Otto Heino, a prolific ceramicist whose simple, elegantly shaped pots and opulent glazes earned him not just a fortune but also a reputation, which he shared with his wife, Vivika, as the personification of sturdy American artisanship, died July 16 in Ventura. He was 94 and lived in Ojai.

The cause of death was renal failure, said his niece Lillian Heino Long.

Heino (pronounced HIGH-no), a driven craftsman who was said to produce up to 10,000 pieces a year, was known as a purist in his work with clay. He often worked with massive amounts, throwing 50 pounds or more at once to produce his huge signature platters. His pieces were texturally natural, with finger ridges left in them, and he mixed wood ash into the glazes he developed and used, which gave the finished work a velvety depth rather than a perfect luster.

One glaze in particular stood out: He and his wife, who died in 1995, created a rich yellow, said to have been a re-creation of an ancient Asian formula. It was so widely admired that pieces finished with it routinely sold for as much as $25,000.

Heino's work has been shown at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and myriad other public and private galleries. He summed up his career in an interview with The Los Angeles Times last year. "I am the oldest, richest potter in the world," he said.

While many of his contemporaries ventured into sculptural techniques, Heino adhered Advertisement to the household-container model, producing variations on "a vessel format," in the words of Christy Johnson, director of the five-year-old American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, which owns several of Heino's pieces. His shapes included long pods with narrow mouths and tall, neckless vases with horizontally stretched mouths marked at the sides with bits of clay that Heino referred to as birds.

The decorative touches on the work were also simple, influenced by Japanese calligraphy.

"He didn't punch holes in his work or beat it with a stick," Johnson said, comparing Heino with others who experimented with avant-garde shapes. His pots, she added, "may not have held cookies, but they were containers you could use decoratively in a home."

Aho Heino was born in East Hampton, Conn., on April 20, 1915, one of 12 children of Finnish parents who had first settled in Boston. His father was a farmer and later, after the family moved to New Hampshire, ran a milk business, providing fresh milk to a creamery.

Heino took up his potter's craft after returning from World War II, during which he served in Europe. (He changed his name to Otto during the war and claimed later that this, along with his blond hair and blue eyes, saved his life after he was shot down over Germany.)

He studied pottery-making on the GI Bill in Concord, N.H., at the League of New Hampshire Arts and Crafts. His teacher, Vivika Timeriasieff (nee Place), would become his wife. They moved to California in 1950 and began teaching and making pottery. In 1973, they established their workshop and gallery, known as the Pottery, in Ojai, often signing their work "Vivika and Otto," no matter who had made it. They had no children.

Heino is survived by a sister, Olga Rogowski, of Canoga Park.

"Lots of potters idolized him, not just for how he made his work," said Johnson, who has been a potter for nearly 40 years. "For how he operated a studio. For how he lived the lifestyle."

 

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Robert "Bob" Sindelar, 75

Robert (Bob) L. Sindelar (75), Marysville, WA, was called home to our Father on April 24, 2009 after a protracted bout with prostate cancer.
    Born in 1933 in Parma, Ohio, Bob graduated from high school in Bradenton FL. Enlisting in the Navy after high school, he was selected for the NROTC program, and attended the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a degree in psychology, and a commission as 2nd Lt. In the Marine Corps.
    He was posted to the Philippines and later Okinawa, as a platoon leader with 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines; he served his last duty in Parris Island, SC.
    After the Marine Corps, Bob moved to New York City where he worked for major advertising agencies: Benton & Bowles, William Esty & Co., and Jack Tinker & Partners, and met his soul mate, Sheila Joan O’Brien. Bob and Sheila were married in 1965 and, in 1968, moved to Miami, FL, and Bob joined Hume-Smith-Mickelberry Advertising. While rising to presidency of Hume-Sindelar & Associates, Bob earned an MBA at the University of Miami.
    Retiring in 1994, Bob and his wife moved to Mt. Dora, FL where they ran an antiques business, before moving to Marysville, WA in 2004
    Bob was active in the American Marketing Association, American Art Pottery Association; in churches in Miami and Marysville; as a docent for The Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala, Fl; and in the Pilchuck Audubon Society.
    He is survived by his beloved wife Sheila and his two sons John and Robert, their wives Kristi and Patricia and grandchildren Benjamin and Sophia.
    A memorial service was be held at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Marysville, on May 4, 2009. In lieu of flowers, the family asks donations be made to the American Cancer Society. 
 
Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel – Lake County edition

 

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Samuel C. Schott, 85
Of Coventry Township passed peacefully November 10, 2008.

Sam was born in Morristown, Tenn. on December 3, 1922. He was a graduate of Tri-State College in 1944 with a degree in engineering and was named to the Who's Who among students in American Universities and Colleges. He was employed with Firestone T & R as an Engineer inventing the rubber backing for carpet. With his father, Elmer he started Schott Metal Products and later Design Wheel and Hub. He was a member of the Tadmor Shrine and the Sons of Herman.

Preceded in death by his parents, Elmer and Coza; son, David A. Schott Sr. and brother Jim. He is survived by his loving wife of 55 years, Faydelle; grandchildren, David (Tracy) Schott Jr. and Lynn (Woody) Hoff; great-granddaughter, Alyssa Schott; sister, Adelaide (Ralph) Darling; nieces and nephew.

Calling hours will be on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Schermesser Funeral Home, 600 E. Turkeyfoot Lake Road (Route 619). Private family Entombment at Greenlawn Memorial Park. Memorial contributions may be made to Acute Palliative Care Unit, 525 E. Market St., Attn: 3E Akron, Ohio 44309.

 

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Ralph M. Kovel, antiques expert,
died August 28 in Cleveland.

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IN MEMORY OF

Stephen E. Sanford
         
On June 21st 2008, the bay area lost a cherished member of its community. Steve Sanford, owner of Steve Sanford Inc., Len Conrad Photography and founder of Pro Image Studios, died in his home at the age of 65 after a two year bout with brain cancer. His passing was gentle, peaceful and without pain. Steve was known for his keen wit and boundless kindness. He had business savvy, and an unrivaled work ethic. He was a man who knew how to live life to its absolute fullest. Steve was born on September 5th, 1942 in Zanesville, Ohio. He was the second son of Denzil and Vivian Sanford and younger brother to David. He grew up in Roseville where he attended Roseville High School and graduated with the class of 1960. Steve had a big spirit and big plans, and the borders of the quaint rural town could not hold him. Upon graduating from Ohio University with a degree in photography, he accepted a job and came to California where he established himself as a leading figure in the business of school photography. Steve's passions were his wife and family, his pottery and coin collection. He and his wife Martha authored eight books on pottery collecting, the production of which took him back to his roots in Ohio. Steve is survived by his beloved wife Martha, his two daughters Kathryn and Vikki, his two sons Paul and Chris and his two grandchildren Jacob and Savannah. In his final days Steve dreamt he was a knight in a band of golden horsemen in a full charge with sword drawn. He did not know where he was going but he knew he had a purpose. "Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" -Horatio on Hamlet's death—William Shakespeare. Services were held Thursday, June 26th at Willow Glen Methodist Church at Woodhaven, San Jose, CA.

Published in the San Jose Mercury News on 6/25/2008.