Local church places windows in hands of Texas artisans

By GLENDA H. CAUDLE
Special Features Editor
    They live life in the fragile lane.
    And there, one wrong move can shatter the dream.
    Scott Eaton, owner of Freebird Glass Inc. in Cypress, Texas, seldom has to clean up his own messes, but his life's work involves picking up the pieces and putting them back together - or preventing them from falling apart - for people who cherish stories told by glassy-eyed craftsman from years gone by.
    Eaton and his team were in Union City this week to head off problems that could have stained the heart of the congregation at Union City First United Methodist Church. The church's eastward-fixed trio of brilliantly-colored and exquisitely crafted stained-glass windows catches the light of the sun as it rises each morning and holds it fast as a gleaming testimony to the truths proclaimed in the sanctuary week after week.
    One shows Jesus as the Good Shepherd, tenderly caring for His flock. Another depicts the heavenly messenger displaying the promise kept and the eternity proclaimed by an empty tomb. The third enforces the timeless lesson of true love that is the essence of the Christian faith and the grand design for living a life pleasing to god, told through the tender care of one unlikely "neighbor" for another in need.
    Each window in the church at 420 East Main St. is made up of five panels filled with 200-500 pieces of richly-colored glass bound by lead strips. The windows were provided by families within the church and were originally installed around 1913, when the present sanctuary was built. While the territory enclosed within the brick walls has undergone significant renovation -- including a transforming structural change in 1948-49 -- the windows have remained a focal point both for those who enter the sanctuary to listen to a sermon; to rejoice in the music of the piano, organ and choir; to partake of Holy Communion at the curving altar rail; or to bow in quiet and contemplative prayer. Their silent testimony has been a constant through years that have seen countless changes in the delivery methods used to share the Word of God throughout the community.
    For more than a century, the beautiful portals of light have instructed, soothed, refreshed, reminded and encouraged.
    On Tuesday, Eaton's crew finished up the work of removing them form their almost-century-old home and loading them up for cleaning and repair at the Freebird Glass Co. studio in Texas.
        What happens now?
    Although the church will be without the quiet strength and glowing beauty of the arched panels for six to eight weeks, Eaton says the congregation is blessed. Their precious windows are really only going into his "clinic" for preventative care. Sometimes, churches must summon him to literally put their broken treasures back together again from scratch. Storm damage, neglect, natural disasters and assault by unkind human hands have all been listed as the culprits in the sad stories he has heard through the years. The windows at Union City First Methodist Church were carefully lifted from their secure settings and tenderly stored in Eaton's special enclosed trailer for the trip to Texas this week, but sometimes he literally picks up the pieces from shoe boxes where the bits of colored glass have been collected by hopeful church clients.
    When his team removes the lead strips binding the glass in place for Union City's windows, he will know precisely how they should be reassembled. But sometimes there is no clear pattern for recreating past beauty.
    Wedding photos, Eaton says, are usually the source his team relies on to rebuild windows that have been so damaged it is impossible to tell exactly how the multiple colored elements were originally joined together.
    Once the local church's windows are in Eaton's studio in Texas, two sets of rubbings will be done on them. These will provide the instructional chart for reassembling the windows over the next few weeks. Once the rubbings are completed, the Freebird Glass team of artisans will begin cutting the "fatigued" lead strips that hold the pieces together. The first rubbing will be positioned flat on a work surface and will receive each piece of "freed" glass as the mosaic is disassembled but kept in careful original alignment. Each glass piece will be tenderly cleaned with simple cleaning agents and lots of elbow grease -- no solvents allowed. The second rubbing will likewise be laid out on a horizontal plane and each carefully cleaned "old" piece of glass and each new replacement piece -- and there will be some, although the windows are in comparatively good condition -- will be put back in the appropriate places atop the pattern. The replacement pieces will be hard to identify once the windows are returned to Union City, however, because they will be coming from a special supplier in Kokomo, Ind. -- the very company that originally made the windows. Wherever possible, the same color lines will be employed and, Eaton says, if they are no longer firing a particular color, the Kokomo artists will reproduce it so closely none of those who have been feasting on the windows' beauty for years will realize the recipe even changed.
    Once all the glass is in place, the Texas team will begin binding the irregularly shaped pieces into their unique story-telling pattern again with new leading.
    Then the windows will make a return trip to Union City, once again carefully stored in the enclosed trailer, and will be replaced to grace the church once more. First, however, new protective safety glass will be installed on the exterior of the building and the woodwork surrounding the windows will be "spiffed up" and stained again.
    This will not be the first time the windows have undergone some "adjustment," Eaton said. The first such activity probably took place when the windows were originally delivered. Evidence the Freebird team uncovered as they went about their task this week showed the original metal banding that enclosed each panel was removed before the windows were originally placed within the wooden framework cut out to receive them. Eaton has seen such removal before and says the window measurements and the space allotted for them most likely were at odds with each other and the extra width from the banding had to be removed to make the windows fit. It is unlikely anyone except the workmen who installed them originally would have been aware of the absence of support the banding was designed to provide; but that original equipment problem has -- through the years -- contributed to the increasing "weakness" of the windows and possibly to some of the bowing. Still, the windows are in much better shape than most he has worked on.
        Through rose-colored glasses
    Eaton has been looking at the world through glass of many different colors and delighting in virtually every moment of his commitment since he was 6 years old. The son of artist and craftsman Michael Eaton, who taught him the trade from start to finish, the Freebird Glass Co. founder started his own enterprise at the tender age of 17. At that point, his "starving artist" father had bowed to the cheaper stained-glass imports coming into the country from countries such as China and decided to turn his talents in other directions. But Scott Eaton refused to call it quits. Instead, he canvassed his father's competitors in the Houston area and offered to do installation and repair work for the artisans. Freebird took wing from that beginning.
    Today Eaton's wife, Reneé, and their sons, who are 10 and 14, are also a part of the business.
    Accompanying Eaton to Union City were some more valued members of the team -- Joe Vigil, Brian Akers, Johnny Pena, Nick Lopez and Armando Lopez.
    They came to Freebird with something in common -- a willingness to learn and a strong work ethic.
    "I really prefer to hire employees with no previous training in this line of work," Eaton said. "My best employees are those that are dedicated workers. It's easy to spot talent and a good work ethic. This is an arts and crafts field but laborers are vital, so people who work for me have to be willing to put in long hours. Since October of 2008, we've been on the road a majority of the time -- probably 60-75 percent."
    Freebird's carefully outfitted trucks are equipped so that Eaton and his team can do some repair work on site.
    "To walk into a new church and be challenged is great," he said. In addition to work for churches, he and his team have also completed projects for businesses and homeowners. Even within the sacred community, there has been a wide variety of tasks to be completed, with some faith groups fairly easily distinguished by their pleasure in the depiction of the three crosses on Golgotha's hill. Others favor saints. Some prefer symbols such as the Hebrew menorah. And some eschew pictures of any kind and want simple shaded colors to catch the sun's glimmer and glow.
    The most unusual job he has ever done, he says, may have been the task of clothing some "ladies" that had originally been the "window dressing" of a haunt for gentlemen bent on naked pleasure. When the structure was purchased by a businessman who wanted to prepare delectable food instead, he entrusted Eaton with the job of making the ladies presentable.
    Eaton prefers working with glass produced in America and refuses to deal in the half-priced pieces provided to many current markets from China. He says the product is inferior and is not acceptable for the work he puts his company name on. To put it bluntly, he believes the Chinese are destroying the industry, so he wages his own personal battle to protect a superior American product with a far longer shelf life.
    The windows he removed this week are not the largest structures he has dealt with and they may not be the most dramatic, but he says they rank toward the upper end of his experience in intricacy and beauty. Their "old-school" design particularly appeals to him.
    He describes the border pieces in each windows -- the surrounding florals and decorative pieces and the topmost arched pieces -- as composed entirely of traditional stained glass. The inner sections that tell the story in color boast hand-painted pieces. In the original work on the window, each piece was carefully colored with glass frit paint (colored ground glass that will melt when heat is applied). Each painted piece was then placed atop another solid-colored piece of glass and transferred to a kiln, where it was fired until it melted and adhered to the second piece of glass.
    Although there is no identifying craftsman's name or company logo on the windows, Eaton knows the Kokomo glass works made the original windows because he recognizes their colors and textures in the finished product.
    His experience with stained-glass windows covers Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky, with each job a new challenge and a new thrill.
    "We ask for a vision and then we try to produce it," Eaton said, "from high-budget to low-budget dreams, from Tiffany projects to Van Gogh concepts -- our goal is to figure out what the client wants and make it happen."
    That's life in the stained glass fast lane.
Mrs. Caudle may be contacted at glendacaudle@ucmessenger.com.

**(Freebird Glass edit - There are a couple of mentions of the leaded glass panels being created and built by Kokomo, also known as Kokomo Opalescent Glass. The glass was originally manufactured by Kokomo, which is based in Kokomo, Indiana, but the panels were not built by Kokomo. We can tell by the colors and textures that the original glass used was Kokomo glass, as opposed to some other glass manufacturer. There were no identifying marks on the leaded panels as to who originally designed and built the leaded glass panels.)**