Blenko Family

The founder was born in London in 1854 and apprenticed to a glass craftsman at thirteen, later studying under the physicist John Tyndall. He crossed to America in 1893 to make antique sheet glass for stained glass windows in Kokomo, Indiana, one of the country's first natural gas fueled glass operations, where he struck up an unlikely lifelong friendship with the labor leader Eugene V. Debs. The venture failed, as did later attempts at Point Marion, Pennsylvania and Clarksburg, West Virginia. He kept starting over.

In 1921, at sixty-eight, an age when most men had finished, he came to Milton on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad's promise of dependable labor and cheap natural gas, and built his furnaces in a hillside barn. In 1926 the federal government granted him a patent for his method of making art glass. He worked until his death in 1933, at seventy-eight, having finally built the company that carries his name.

Sources: Heart of Glass archive³ · Wilson 1987¹ · Blenko Project⁴ · e-WV² · U.S. Patent 1,583,441⁶

The founder's son moved to Milton in 1923, learned the batch formulas at his father's side, and became president on his father's death. It was his judgment that saved the company: when the Crash of 1929 froze the stained glass trade, he pitched the Boston importer Carbone on American-made decorative ware before he had the workers to make it, then recruited Swedish craftsmen to train the Milton crews. Under his four decades the company won the Colonial Williamsburg reproductions commission, entered the Museum of Modern Art's exhibitions, and became the name in American hand-blown color.

His wife Marion, daughter of Henry Hunt of Pittsburgh's Hunt Stained Glass Studios, worked seven days a week from 1923 until her death in 1989, sixty-six years as treasurer, secretary, and retail sales manager. The glass garden and pond beside the factory were her vision, with panels designed at her request by Joel Philip Myers, and the factory cats answered, by standing order, to her.

Sources: Wilson 1987¹ · Heart of Glass archive³ · e-WV²

Born in 1921 and introduced to the trade as a boy, "Mr. Bill," known to family and friends as "Dude," was valedictorian of Milton High School in 1938, took an engineering degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1942, and served as an Army Air Corps first lieutenant in England with the 8th Air Force, where he met Jeanne Margaret Deakin, then serving in the Royal Air Force. They married in Pittsburgh in 1946, the year he came home to the factory. He became president on his father's death in 1969 and presided over the design decades that made the company's reputation; he was one of only twelve lifetime members of the Glass Art Society, and in 2007 both Milton and the State of West Virginia proclaimed a Bill Blenko Day in his honor.

He remained with the company just short of seventy years, as president and then chairman, signing glass for visitors into his nineties, and died at home in Milton on February 5, 2016, at ninety-four. Jeanne, an honors graduate of Marshall University, chose every furnishing of the 1966 Visitor Center; her brother Jim Deakin served as the company's plant engineer for four decades and built its spin machines from scrap metal. She died in 1984.

Sources: Heart of Glass archive³

Richard Blenko, son of Bill and Jeanne, gave thirty-three years to the family business and served as its fourth president from 1996 until his retirement in 2008. He became the company's most visible ambassador: across more than 2,800 public television broadcasts in hundreds of American cities, he told the Blenko story on air and helped raise over twenty-eight million dollars for PBS stations, introducing a generation of collectors to West Virginia glass. A survey by the Blenko Project later found that most collectors first discovered the company through those broadcasts.

Sources: Heart of Glass archive³

Born in Pittsburgh on June 15, 1926, a grandson of the founder, Walter Blenko enlisted in the Army during his senior year at Shadyside Academy and joined the 95th Infantry Division in the European Theater, serving as an automatic rifleman through VE Day under the Third and Ninth Armies. He was awarded the Combat Infantryman Badge and the Bronze Star, and served on the executive board of the 95th Infantry Division Association for the rest of his life. After the war he took a mechanical engineering degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and a law degree from the University of Pittsburgh, then spent his career in patent, trademark, and copyright law at Eckert Seamans in Pittsburgh, as partner and later counsel to the firm, a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court.

Following his retirement from the law he turned his attention to the family company, became president in 2008, and was instrumental in revitalizing it, carrying it through its hardest modern years and personally investing alongside his cousins to keep the furnaces lit. He founded the Festival of Glass at the factory, hired designers, and signed every West Virginia Day piece of his tenure, often sitting for eight-hour sessions. He married Joy Kinneman in 1949; in sixty-three years of marriage they raised two sons, John, a physician, and Andrew, an engineer and municipal planner. After Joy's death in 2012 he married Patricia "Patti" Matty, and together they restored the Blenko Glass Museum at the Visitor Center. Walter died at his home on August 11, 2019, at ninety-three; he was, in the company's words, a friend, mentor, and leader. Patricia Blenko survives him and remains an active part owner of the company today.

Sources: Post-Gazette obituary (LOC)⁷ · Heart of Glass archive³ · company records⁹

The company's sixth president spent his first career in medicine. John Blenko, son of Walter and Joy, practiced as a trauma anesthesiologist in Baltimore, visiting the factory across the decades since attending the Visitor Center's opening as a boy in the late 1960s, camera in hand; photography remains his hobby, and the workers his favorite subject. His brother Andrew, an engineer and municipal planner, served the company as vice president through the 2010s.

Following his retirement from medicine and his father's death in 2019, John Blenko took the presidency, the fourth generation of the family to lead the company. He and his wife Cheryl continue the family's presence at the factory's signings and celebrations, and he still photographs the crews at work. One hundred and thirty years after a London apprentice crossed the Atlantic with a formula for colored glass, the name on the building is still the name at the furnace.

Sources: Blue Ridge Country⁸ · Heart of Glass archive³ · Post-Gazette obituary (LOC)⁷

Read the full company history Meet the designers