THE GLASS MAN COMETH The Inside Story of a Downtown Brentwood Business
	OCTOBER 2005

by David Rose, with George Rose
Photos by Russell Byrne

My dad, George, has been working with glass for 39 years and started our family glass business at our Brentwood site 25 years ago. We were here in our downtown location when Chestnut Street, running by the front of our shop, was like a small street in a rural village.

Dad started teaching me to cut glass when I was a child and he began giving me a paycheck when I was 15 years old. I worked part-time all the way through high school and college, and fulltime since graduation, which was 15 years ago already. Dad treated my brother, Eddie, and me to a complete apprenticeship in the glass trade. As has always been true with apprenticeships, we started out on the bottom rung, and I didn’t do anything except practice cutting glass and sweeping up the shop floor for what seems like a long time.

Creating a Life; Learning a Livelihood
When I got a little older I began to deliver completed projects to people’s houses, which was a task calling for its own set of skills. At first I would get really lost sometimes because the country around Brentwood, which was totally rural in those days of course, had no addresses. I would be given directions such as, “Go down the lane, count four telephone poles, turn west, go until you see a big maple tree on the south side of the road, and then look for the picket fence with the dilapidated pickup in the yard.”

I took a break from the family business when Pacific Bell Yellow Pages inadvertently left us out of their book for a year and production slowed to the point we couldn’t all make an income. I got a job at the local Valley Glass and then ran my own shop in Oakley for four years. My dad, knowing he wanted to retire, suggested that I give up my shop, go to work for the union, learn the commercial glass side of the industry, and then come back to the family business bringing my new set of skills with me. The plan worked to perfection. Since I now knew commercial glazing, I was able to expand our range of services and dad and I ended up doing a lot of the Brentwood downtown store windows.

I took over Rose Glass a few years ago from my dad, when he turned 62. He didn’t sell me anything, but just handed everything over to me. He wanted to take time off whenever he wished. He still works with me, but if he wakes up in the morning with an inclination to do something else, he can just go do it. As a matter of fact, he’s often in here fulltime, since his usual inclination in the morning is to come to work.

The worn sign outside our shop announces in huge letters that we do auto glass, but we actually haven’t done that for years. We specialize in new windows and glass repair. We do a lot of business repairing windows for fogging effect — thermo-glass that has begun to develop condensation between the double panes.

After I took over the business I made a purchase, over my dad’s objections, of the only large-format polishing machine in the area, which we can use to polish the edges of any large glass surface, from a tabletop to a picture window. My dad griped during all the five years that we continued to write monthly checks to pay for that thing, but he has finally admitted that it was a good idea.

Old-Fashioned Business Style
I’m running my business with what might be one of the most laid-back business styles you could imagine. We’re all down to earth and unpretentious — just “plain folks,” as they say. None of us are competing with each other; we just enjoy taking care of our customers. For all of the changes that have taken place in the past 25 years, the small town feel of the place is alive and well.

I still take customer’s orders for broken windows, make the piece they want, and, if they can’t get by during operating hours, I’ll just leave the piece by the side door for them to pick up when they get by. They often just slide their payment through the mail slot. If we make a delivery and the customer isn’t home, we’ll just leave their order on the porch for them and send them a bill. I know they’ll pay; we still don’t require contracts and lawyers in order to conduct all of our business.

I guess people behave like you expect them to. Only once in the past four years have I had a customer take an order and not pay their bill. It was certainly nothing worth redesigning business practices over. We’re not becoming millionaires but we are simply continuing to do what we do and doing it as well as we can.

Not long ago an engineer came into our shop trying to get a piece of glass to replace the broken cover over a clock face. He brought a set of precision tools with him to ensure that the cut was made to the correct tolerances. He kept pestering me with his calipers and measurements until dad finally said to him, “Are you going to let the guy work? It will cost more if you don’t quit bothering him.”

As an engineer the man was convinced that I couldn’t fabricate the piece of glass to the right tolerances with nothing but a tape measure. However, as he kept fluttering about me, I just eyeballed the measurements and cut it. “By gosh!” the man exclaimed, “I can’t believe it worked!” We really had fun with that guy, and to his credit he took the good-natured ribbing without a trace of irritation or anger. And it was flattering, of course, to see how impressed he was with the results of our seemingly off-hand style of work.

Of course, if that engineer, himself, had tried to cut a piece of glass to fit perfectly into his clock face without using sophisticated measuring tools, he probably would have botched the job a hundred times in a row. However, if he continued doing that kind of work eight hours a day for a decade or so, he too would get to the place of where he could just eyeball and cut, as well. It might seem like magic, but it is simply the result of practice.

We make it a point of making people smile. We don’t allow ourselves to get uptight or stressed out about anything. We’re serious about the work itself, however. We’ve learned the lesson repeatedly that we can’t get too casual about the glass. We were recently unloading a 6-foot by 11-foot sheet of glass. It was a rainy day, our gloves were slick, and the immense sheet ended up in a big pile of about a million pieces of shards, splinters, and jagged little bits. I remember a piece of glass once falling on Eddie’s stomach that nearly disemboweled him.

These kinds of events keep reminding us of the need for vigilance and caution, but cuts and scrapes are just part of the cost of doing business in this trade — like a few bee stings for a person with a honey operation, I imagine. Dad was always good for a band-aid but never encouraged us to cry or even to whimper over a little blood. “If you don’t get cut once in a while in this business,” he always said, “then you haven’t been working hard enough.” And then he would add, “Don’t bleed on anything!”

A lot of our marketing is word of mouth and informal networking. Some of the kids Eddie and I grew up with, for example, are now homeowners coming to us for glass projects. We’ve always supported the local schools. Students in the Liberty High shop classes bring us a lot of wood projects that have mirrors — vanities, for example, or various knick-knacks — and we do the glass part for them just to help them out. We cut the piece for them, help them install it, or even glue it in for them ourselves.

Personal Notes
Following college I spent a number of years as a happy bachelor, followed by a couple years as a happily married man, several years as an unhappily married man, until attaining my current state as a happily divorced man, with two wonderful children.

I’m a tradesman who seems to be surrounded by artists. Joanne Williams, with her “A Pane Full of Glass” business, has been creating superb stained-glass windows for a number of years. Now she’s moved in with us and is doing this out of our shop. My friend, Annette Day, creates wonderful mosaic furniture and wall hangings.

I don’t want the good things about life here in Brentwood to change. I grew up in an environment that I want my kids to live in, if they choose to. I want them to know their neighbors and to have a sense of being in a place where they really belong.

We created a little safety zone right here in the shop for my two kids, ages three and five, and for Annette’s little girl. Annette also has a 9-year-old boy, Quinn, who is taking his first lessons in cutting glass.

We’re not making any plans for the future, but we know that changes are coming. The downtown redevelopment project means that our picturesque old shop will probably follow the Chestnut Street gravel road into oblivion. But that’s all right; we will just go along with the changes as they happen. For the most part, however, I’m planning to just keep on doing what we’re doing. There’s no point in messing with something that works, and it seems to me that life really works when you live it like we’re living it.

Annette, with the soul of an artist and the imagination of a poet, has had a lot of chaos to deal with. One day she told me that her life has become like one of her mosaics. She started with a box of broken pieces and a few tools. Gradually, one step at a time, she has assembled the pieces of her life into a coherent picture. My life is more like one of my window projects. There are only a couple pieces because I’m a plain person without any fancy tools or ideas. I’m just eyeballing the project as I go along, but as far as I can tell, the pieces of my life are going together just fine.

Rose Glass is located downtown Brentwood at 230 Chestnut Street. You can contact David at 925-634-5609.