Alan – I just learned that Amy Blake passed away. Her obituary is in The Corning Leader. (click below). She was one of the early founding members of The Friends of Carder which morphed into our present club. Bobby Rockwell

Tiffin Comment

Thank you, Michael Krumme!

Tiffin did so much!

I wish their books were better!

Lynda Randolph

A Story of Perseverance

This is not a story of a Steuben purchase but more a story of perseverance.

I’m now 65 but when I was a teenager I went with my parents to some friends of the family’s home and saw an English (Stevens + Williams)cameo flask along with a number of other spectacular pieces of cameo glass that they had in their collection. When I was in my early 20s I tried to buy this piece but the wife would not sell it. She and her husband passed away and the flask went to her daughter.I chased down the daughters son many years later and he told me it was with another piece of cameo glass in his mothers attic and went looking for it for me. As it turned out they were both missing.

A few years later I got a call from one of the auction houses in Toronto asking me to give my opinion on value for the auction of the flask but not the other piece. As it turns out the other piece showed up in the son’s sisters home so it appears she helped herself to both pieces and decided to sell one. I went to the auction to buy it and it sold for four times the high estimate value to a woman sitting in the front row.

I followed the woman out and gave her my card and I told her I knew the provenance of this piece since it had left England in the 1940s. Seven years later I get a call from this woman and she said it is time for me to have this piece. She thought it was the most beautiful piece of glass she had ever seen and she was going to commit suicide with this in her lap. She had gone through a terrible divorce and was deeply depressed. Obviously she made it through her troubled times and she sold it to me for half of what she paid for it.

It only took me 47 years from the first time I saw it to finally having it in my possession. I’m still trying to get the other piece that is in the woman’s home. Unfortunately she doesn’t need the money and she has no idea what this piece is or what it’s value is.

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The moral of the story is never give up if you want something badly enough.

Norman Skolnick