Ancient Places

by Jack Nisbet

  The company mined clays of different colors and textures from open pits all around the area, then stored them to dry under roofed sheds. Workers mixed that raw material in exact ratios and pounded it into forms that were air-dried again before moving to one of the four production kilns that had sprouted around the original yard. All these ovens were fired by mountains of pine and tamarack bolts fed into a mammoth boiler.

  The first of the kilns was a simple open-air affair used to bake common brick; the second, a beehive dome with forced air circulation that could muster the two thousand degrees of heat necessary to melt a glassy salt glaze onto a style of rough bricks popular at that time. The third kiln took the shape of a long rectangle with an arched roof, like a train tunnel. This tunnel kiln boasted the tallest vent stack on the complex, at 110 feet, and could be loaded from both ends for runs of high-glaze brick or collared sewer pipe. Battista Prestini, the older of Luigi’s two sons, used to say that when this kiln reached its maximum heat, flames would lick from the top of the giant chimney.

  Separated from these more standard products, the terra-cotta operation occupied a four-story building and kiln that attracted the most skilled artisans at the plant. Here the mix of raw clay, including a generous portion from the A. B. Pit, had to be carefully dried and powdered. Finely ground prefired clay, called “grog,” was added to control shrinkage in the finished product. The blend was then hidden in a dark, cool basement to cure.

  Meanwhile, on the top floor of the terra-cotta building, special craftsmen called “modelers” studied scaled drawings of architectural details before making their own interpretation of an assigned figure in clay. After adjustments to meet the manufacturing parameters, each piece would be covered with white plaster to create a mold. Fancy trim pieces, bound for commercial projects that included hospitals, banks, and university campuses, were run on a long form like a lumber-molding mill and held together with strap iron. Some large buildings of the period featured a handsome geometric or floral pattern of terra-cotta above every window. Decorative frieze work marked each story, and each cornice called for special elaboration. Certain adventurous architects ordered sculpted artwork, such as gargoyles or animal heads, to enhance a building’s distinctive character.

  Completed plaster molds would be sent by elevator down to the third floor, where the next crew packed them full of the aged clay mix from the basement—first, by pounding it in tight with their fists, then by swinging wetted cloth sacks full of clay down on the molds, over and over, to be sure that every nook and cranny was crammed tight. After the plaster drew almost all the moisture away from the clay, finishers on the second floor would turn out each mold and chisel the pieces clean. Finally, they cut handholds into the back so the piece could be manipulated through the baking process, the uncertainties of transportation, and during its ticklish installation on a building’s facade.

  The first floor contained a drying kiln to complete the desiccation process. As individual pieces hardened, they turned almost clear white. That was the signal to load them onto a cart and move forward to the spray room, where glazes would bring out particular colors and sheens. In this condition, the raw terra-cottas were ready to fire, but they were also brittle and very easy to chip. The next crew wheeled them, with extreme care, into the company’s special Kiln Number Four.

  This huge oven was constructed in the round, with a domed roof and fireboxes around the outside. In the center of the floor sat a separate, smaller domed kiln topped with a circular chimney pipe that ran through the ceiling of the mother kiln—glazed terra-cotta could not, under any circumstances, come into contact with open fire. Because of the odd space created by this doubled configuration, and the equally odd shapes of the pieces to be fired within it, there was always extra room on the kiln floor. Modelers who liked to experiment might add one or two of their own creations to a firing; these might range from a simple flowerpot to more ambitious artistic statements.

  Last of all, the operator slid in a flat piece of clay that supported four heat cones. These were calibrated to bend at intervals as the temperature approached two thousand degrees and were placed where they could be viewed when a certain outside brick was removed. It took four or five days of intense heat to make the cones waver, and whoever pulled out the viewing brick had to guard against getting scorched. When the third cone bent down, it was time to extinguish the fire. The crew then allowed the kiln to cool for another four days before gingerly opening the door one small crack at a time. Workers gathered up any damaged pieces to grind into grout and grog, then meticulously measured the whole ones to see if they met the prescribed specifications before they could be finished and packed in straw for shipment. Luigi Prestini, father of Battista and Leno, spent most of his time with the finishing crew during his tenure at the Clayton plant.

  Leno’s World

  For half a dozen years, Luigi hammered at terra-cotta molds with a chisel or an air hammer while Caterina washed clothes for Clayton’s lone schoolteacher to supplement the family income. Battista, known around town as Bee, and his younger brother, Leno, helped to raise rabbits and garden vegetables, and bucksawed endless lengths of lodgepole pine for firewood. Bee recalled that his mother was not happy with their house beside the old East Clayton sawmill, but the boys managed to have their fun. They played ball in the sawdust pile, walked to Loon Lake to fish for perch, swam in the flume beside the railroad tracks, and generally pried into whatever mischief they could find. One evening their father brought some clay home from the plant and encouraged the boys to try making a model of their metal piggy bank, which was shaped like a lion. It was Leno who demonstrated an immediate feel for the material, molding his lump into the image of a living predatory cat.

  In 1919, Luigi went into the hospital for a stomach operation, then contracted a fatal pneumonia. Times were hard for Caterina after her husband’s demise, and she couldn’t seem to shake her grief. She took in a couple of boarders to make ends meet. Bee dropped out of school to work as a water boy at the brick plant for a dollar and fifty cents a day. Leno stuck with the books for another year and a half to graduate from the eighth grade but then never returned to school. Instead of settling into work at the factory, he drifted off to explore the world outside the company town. According to Battista, his brother had always been rail-thin and intense, but he became more aggressive after he returned home. At one point, Leno had a “bad nervous spell” and attempted suicide by sitting in a running car in the family garage.

  Bee had worked his way up to the terra-cotta plant by then, pressing tiles as piecework, and he arranged for Leno to come and join him in 1925 as an apprentice in the craft. Within a year, Leno had laid the cornerstone on a new high school in the Palouse and had been assigned the task of mounting a full terra-cotta moose head above the entrance to the Clayton Moose Lodge. That head, which captured the wacky awkwardness of a real bull, stared down at Moose Club revelers until the building was destroyed by fire many decades later.

  Battista, for his part, left the company in the late 1920s to work at another brick plant in Tacoma, then moved on to Douglas Aircraft near Los Angeles. The Clayton experience hung in his mind, however, and in his later years he wrote meticulous descriptions of the brick and terra-cotta processes he had learned there. Leno, perhaps to his brother’s surprise, stuck with the baked earth, soon rising to the position of chief modeler. Two of his older cohorts at Washington Brick and Lime, Frank Frey and Cecil Sater, served as Leno’s mentors, and over the course of the next decade, the three men executed dozens of intricate designs that still draw raves from art deco enthusiasts. Much of the terra-cotta work that appeared as delicate, colorful trim on public buildings is impossible to assign specifically to Frey, Sater, or Prestini, but when the Air National Guard squadron stationed at Spokane’s Felts Field built a huge hangar, it was Leno who created a pair of outsized tiles featuring the squad’s emblem, an ace of spades pierced by a black dagger. And it was Leno who molded a large terra-cotta American eagle
for the parapet of a Spokane armory—a dramatic representation that later was put on prominent display at the city’s commercial airport, then eventually returned to Clayton to live again as an advertisement along the highway.

  At Washington Brick and Lime, all three modelers dabbled in clay figures on the side, slipping their own glazed pieces into the terra-cotta kiln along with everyday orders of sunbursts and floral patterns. Leno’s first efforts tended toward simple knickknacks, like a bulldog with bulging eyes or a frog on a lily pad, but they displayed a certain style, and he continued to hone his craft. During a lean stretch for the business in the Depression year of 1937, Leno baked a terra-cotta rowboat, glazed in beige and ocean blue. The boat is occupied by two fisherman outfitted in foul-weather gear; while one rows hard, the other turns to blow his signal horn.

  When owner A. B. Fosseen saw some of Prestini’s work, he commissioned Leno to model Christmas tiles that the Fosseen family distributed as holiday cards through the 1930s. In one of them, a curve in a country road frames a small house, with blue-black leafless trees and a rail fence raised in relief from a background of earth-colored natural clays. Blue-gray smoke rises from the house’s chimney to bisect a perfect full moon, and a “Let me live in a house / By the side of the road” ditty in block letters neatly fills the open frame. Another tile features a star of Bethlehem scene with sheep huddled beneath the blue-louvered windows of a stark brown building; behind them, starlight bounces off dry hills. “Merry Christmas” rings out in fancy script, “from the family of A. B. Fosseen.”

  It was during these years that Prestini emerged as a unique figure in local lore, proving himself time and again to be a gifted design artist crossed with a clever engineer, a broad conversationalist, and a mad adventurer. He seemed to breathe in the essence of northeastern Washington—including the Clayton brick plant and its machine shop; the region’s sawmill and mining culture; its mountains, coniferous forests, and glacier-carved lakes; tribal culture and extended trail-horse rides; the taverns, churches, and country music—and spit them back out in ways that were entirely personal.

  When Leno decided he wanted to go boating on nearby Loon Lake, he fashioned a craft with cement-sack sails and an iron rudder oriented like the tail of an airplane. The keel was a coffin cover held in place with a length of company strap iron, and Bee recalled how the thin steel would begin to hum as they picked up speed. Any change in their heading would make that strap play a different tune.

  After seeing a round diving helmet made by a Spokane machinist, Leno and his friend Burton Stewart used an acetylene torch to shape their own helmet out of a hot water heater, decorated it with a sculpted octopus, and installed double glass to prevent the faceplate from fogging. Adapting a garden hose for an air supply line, they put their odd headdress to work, diving after lost property for the summer lake crowd. Stewart’s son recalled that when their original two-cylinder hand pump couldn’t force enough air through the garden hose, they switched to a small Briggs & Stratton compressor. Soon the dive team started descending beyond available sunlight, so they cobbled up an underwater flashlight from a six-cell battery enclosed in an aluminum cylinder, with a fuse head to hold the glass and a Model T radiator cap to seal the end. As their dives in Loon Lake approached ninety feet, they ordered balloon cloth from the Goodyear company to sew into a suit that could handle the cold temperatures.

  Stewart and Prestini’s eccentric operations were just getting warmed up. They salvaged a stainless-steel cream can and fabricated an improved helmet. A beer-barrel pressure pump regulated the air supply flowing though their garden hose. One dockside photograph shows Burton and another pal, in dark shirts, bending over the compressor in the background while Leno, fully tricked out in the white Goodyear diving suit, weighted yoke, and leaden shoes, stares at the camera like Captain Nemo himself. They thought enough of their efforts to exhibit the suit at the Spokane Interstate Fair that fall and to answer a call from the Colville Police Department to help locate the body of a drowned man in a lake north of town. The inventive pair also filed a mineral claim on ground beneath the bed of the lower Pend Oreille River, near the Canadian border. Along a stretch of treacherous rapids known as Z Canyon, the fun-loving friends almost drowned themselves diving for gold.

  Leno’s hands and mind, working together, seemed to spawn an endless stream of new schemes. He and his brother framed the hull of a speedboat, but in those Depression years, they couldn’t afford a motor to power it. He and Burton Stewart climbed mountain peaks all around the region. When the terra-cotta plant shut down for a brief period, they customized a 10-foot ladder and used it to scale the kiln’s 110-foot brick smokestack, taking panoramic photographs from the top to prove it. After reading about land-speed records being set at Daytona Beach, Leno fabricated a custom sports car with an airfoil rudder. And at every opportunity, he added his own strange creations to the terra-cotta kiln.

  Perhaps owing to his mother, a bit of the reptilian growl from Besano’s black lagoon often lurked around the edges of Leno’s work. He molded a diver dodging dangerous sharks, and an elf lamp that carried an unsettlingly dark aura. A two-headed mountain climber seemed to teeter toward an abyss, and when Bee asked him about the double heads, Leno replied, “Every time I get to the top of the mountain, my problems are still with me.”

  Cecil Sater, one of the Clayton modelers who mentored Leno, also dabbled in painting, and Leno began to try his hand with a brush as well. In an interview conducted in the late 1950s, he laid out the progression of his career from modeling for Washington Brick and Lime to painting his personal canvases. “At the plant in Clayton I learned to work with my hands,” he explained. “An architect would make a rough sketch of an ornament for a building—an angel in flight, perhaps. But the detail would be up to me. Each man worked that way, and so each developed his specialty in shaping the clay into figures.

  “But building codes changed, until cornices and decorations could project only two inches over the sidewalk. The other men started drifting away. I did some drifting myself. And then I started painting.”

  While drifting, Leno took a job on a sheep train going to Chicago; went on the bum to San Francisco; wandered in Mexico for a while; and worked as a mess boy on board an oil tanker to Hawaii. When he returned to Clayton in 1936, he began slapping house paint on a six-foot piece of plasterboard. Soon he had produced an expressionistic battle scene depicting a caveman staving off a robot with a head that looked suspiciously like his cream-can diving helmet. Leno called the painting Civilization—Page 1936, and it vibrated with an unmistakable sense of conflict. He pressed forward with paint and time, naming new large pieces after succeeding years.

  By the time Leno completed the five large panels of Page 1939, local curiosity encouraged him to mount an exhibit in the Clayton Cafe. Each panel was a ferociously barbed cartoon satirizing key players with symbolic images of an impending catastrophic war. From Neville Chamberlain popping an umbrella to Benito Mussolini pulling a rabbit out of a hat, the images forecast a dire future for humanity, and many local viewers were put off by the display.

  When he finished Page 1940 the following year, Leno carted all of his Pages of History to Spokane, where they were displayed in the show windows of J. W. Graham’s stationery store downtown. Within two days, complaints from passersby induced the store manager to move the artwork to the basement. Undaunted, Leno packed up the panels again and drove them to Los Angeles, where Battista had some contacts through his position at Douglas Aircraft. Soon a photograph of Leno standing in front of his Civilization—Page 1936 graced the arts section of the Sunday Los Angeles Times, accompanied by a lengthy article that explained his artistic statement. In the photo, much to the shock of his Clayton cronies, Leno wore a dark suit complete with a perfectly folded pocket handkerchief. He pointed to the robot’s bulging helmet with a confident forefinger. “I’m no artist,” he told the reporter, “but I can’t help thinking.”

  LA critics begged to differ with the
artist’s self-assessment, and Life magazine photographed his Pages of History for an ambitious double spread. But according to Leno, the editors at Life were wary of offending European leaders at a time when the United States was still trying to remain neutral in the brewing conflict. The Pages of History never ran in the magazine, and Leno was so discouraged that he quit painting for a while. He returned to Clayton, where he confined himself to sketching unruly political caricatures.

  When World War II finally spread to America, Leno enlisted. Since he weighed only 105 pounds, he was assigned to limited service at Fort Logan near Denver. During his stay, he completed a book of military cartoons in the style of the time. Eventually, he was shipped to England with a group of P-47 fighters, then transferred to a bomber squadron. Although Leno never talked about it, Battista later surmised that his brother’s duties there must have had something to do with designing safety posters and painting battle emblems on the flying fortresses.

  After V-E Day, Leno returned home to find Clayton on the skids, and the terra-cotta factory closed for good in 1947. He took up bricklaying and stonemasonry to support himself, and in the 1950s and early ’60s he completed a series of fireplaces for cabins around area resort lakes. He never married, but he did have at least two serious girlfriends. He also cultivated an interest in horses, taking long trail rides with local ranchers and cowboys. In order to signal friends he met on the highway, Leno rigged flashing amber light bulbs inside the eye sockets of a horse skull and mounted it on his stock trailer.