The green, green glass of home

"My mom had these glasses when I was growing up in Bed-Stuy," Aaron said, his eyes lighting up as he held up one of my Grecian shot glasses. "We lived in right down the street from the factory on Pacific Street where they made them. We had the juice glasses. She used to buy them one at a time."

Aaron was one of the two movers who came to pack us up on Monday. He was jovial, despite having to spend 4 hours packing up our kitchen. He spent about 2 of those hours packing up just my Russel Wright china collection. "Wow!" he remarked to Luis, "I've never seen so many collections!"

"Don't get me started," said Luis.

In 1988 I moved into a house in Arlington, VA, with an ex-boyfriend and a roommate. The previous occupants had left a dishwasher, a clock, and three Grecian glass tumblers. I knew nothing about the glasses, but I thought they were campy and unusual. The gold-rimmed glasses were colored a matte Wedgwood green and depicted various "Grecian-inspired" scenes, like a woman holding her toga together with one arm akimbo while a man pointed his big staff at her. "Look at my big staff," he seemed to be saying, while the woman was thinking, "You call that a big staff?"



The glasses collected dust in the cupboard until I moved to my next apartment, in 1990. On a trip to New York I was startled to see a tumbler like the ones I had at an antiques store, tucked away in a corner, with a price tag of a dollar. I had never seen these odd glasses anywhere else, and I thought for sure I had found the long-lost fourth tumbler of the only set in the world. I bought the glass, which was in excellent shape, and brought it home to be with its vitreous brethren.

I forgot about the glasses until I spotted an ice bucket with the same pattern at an antiques mall in Pennsylvania. It cost $5. That same day, a few miles down the road, I found a set of six shot glasses in a wire holder for $8. Over the next 2 years I bought rocks glasses in Ohio, juice glasses in California, a pristine 20-piece set of barware in Illinois. I never saw the same pieces twice. I had a theory that the glass factory that made the pieces had put them all up for adoption at the same time and they had all gone to different foster homes. I was the social worker who was on a quest to bring them all together in one great big happy home.

I started seeing similar patterns and pieces in Wedgwood blue and started collecting them too. The blue pieces soon outnumbered the green ones.

By the late 1990s I had amassed a collection of almost 100 pieces of the glassware, and I still didn't know much about them. I'd heard or read that they were made by Anchor Hocking or Libbey, two of the most popular U.S. glassware makers, but I could never verify the information. I kept buying pieces for fun, and I never paid more than $10 for a single item. Then, while looking on eBay a few years ago, I found out that all of the glasses were made by Jeannette Glass, of Jeannette, PA, which made glassware from 1888 to 1983. The blue and green Grecian glasses were made in the 1950s and 1960s. At last the mystery was solved!

Unfortunately, I had already sold a lot of the glassware on eBay and had done pretty well. A lot of the pieces for which I paid under $10 now sell for $15 to $20 and up. I still have a few pieces left, including the shot glasses.

I didn't have the heart to tell Aaron that I'd bought those shot glasses for next to nothing, or that they weren't really made on Pacific Street in Brooklyn. He seemed to cherish the memory too much to rewrite it.