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PW: You're teaching at Sierra High School. Did you have... and I think I read in the newspaper article that you had a second child by then?

RO: Yeah.

PW: And painting out of the garage, right?

RO: Right.

PW: Okay. I'm going to change gears, but I want you to tell the story of how you get to this gear. But growing up, I knew you as a ceramicist. I saw you at the Fresno Bazaar...

RO: Okay, that comes next, that comes right next.

PW: You were always selling pots. So what happened? I thought you were ceramics and then you went to painting.

[Interruption]

RO: So anyway, then I got this teaching job at this high school in the foothills, and the previous instructor had really expanded what art was. He was the only instructor there, but he had an area where he had a kick wheel, potter's wheels and a little kiln. He had easels and various things. And then as I was hired, I said, well, then I was given a job also to be able to teach ceramics. The last ceramics class I had was in college, from Adolf Odorfer in 1950 or early '50s. So I would spend hours after class learning how to do this and finding things about clay and so on, and eventually what happened, I found myself getting better at this. And I then was not doing much painting at that time, and my head was now moving toward clay because for me, it was a very, very exciting to do this. And so over that period of time, we had, I made connections with the university, and we got to a point where the department was growing to such a rate that we even built a new building that was basically in our building. Because we were basically in a World War II barracks, and so we had this wonderful facility, which was designed by the other art teacher and I, and so we would design this thing. So that expanded the way we thought about art. So over, then after we got the building, we said, gee, because there's so much interest in ceramics that's happening in other Fresno schools. And I had also been interested enough to go to conferences where people were then giving, you were introduced to what people were doing in art in the United States at the high school level. And I found what people were doing. There was one place in, I guess it was in Colorado, I don't remember where he was from, or maybe it was in Southern California. He was saying, well, we have this program that we'd call, and we'd call this thing Clay Day, where we'd invite all these schools to come and have this activity and competitions. What a great idea.

So I came back to Fresno, and I'm talking to the other art teachers saying, "Why don't we have this thing called Clay Day? We can have it here, and here on a weekend, one Saturday afternoon, we can invite all the schools in Fresno, whether they be in the county or city schools and so on, and bring a handful of kids up. And we would have this thing where they would have a lecture usually by a well-known clay person. We had Stan Bitters come up and talk to the kids, then we had lunch, and then we had these competitions, who could throw the tallest pot, who could throw the widest pot or hand build this or that, and we would give out art books as prizes for these kids. And we would provide lunch for them, and so we had thing and everybody loved doing it, and people would say, "Yeah, that's terrific. So we eventually contacted the art department at Fresno State. I said, "We've been doing this thing at Clay Day," and they had heard about it. Because then some of the kids that graduated from Sierra High School in clay, were now taking classes at the college. And they were doing very well, and in fact, the ceramics instructor says, "Wow, your students are really doing wonderful things." So they were open to the idea of then having Clay Day. And so they said, "Yeah, we can do this," and we can sit out there on the patio and each team brings their own wheels and we'll provide them benches and so on and we'll provide the clay and whatever, and then the judges. So we would have the busloads of kids come, from Hanford and every place, Kingsburg and Reedley and so on, then we'd come and we'd have hundreds of kids out there, and these kids having fun, just with clay, messing with clay, and hand building and messing, and it was just a wonderful opportunity to have developed, to emphasize the importance of clay as a process, and then learning about what happens when you work with the process of class.

PW: What year was this, about?

RO: This happened from... so must have been '68, '69, ran for I don't know how many years, ran for about five or six years. That first year we had it at the high school, Sierra High School, and then the following year, I think we had it at...

PW: Fresno State.

RO: Yeah. But it was just well received, well received by people.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.