The Matriarch of Depression Glass Collecting - Hazel Weatherman
Hi,
Hazel Marie Weatherman began what soon became an anomaly among collectors.
Normally, when one visits historical shops, galleries, museums, and shows, or reads about collectible items in magazines or books, they are appreciating items expensively, painstakingly hand-crafted, such as antique paintings, furniture, and musical or medical instruments. But Hazel Weatherman started an interest in something mass-produced, cheaply made, and low in quality to begin with. She wrote a book in 1969 on Depression Glass titled “Guidebook to Colored Glassware of the 1920s and 1930s” that began a passion for collecting the glassware that has yet to let up, even now, well into the new millennium.
Hailing from Springfield, Missouri, Hazel Weatherman broke new ground in the area of glassware collecting by documenting the manufacturers, designs, and party-like colors of glass provided to the common people immediately preceding and just after the Great Depression. Ms. Weatherman brought to light something that, in part, may have helped people to overcome the misery of those terrible times – Depression Glass.
Ms. Weatherman personally traveled to the glass factories that actually produced the wares, spent endless hours pouring through their records and archives, and even met and interviewed workers from the factories who still retained informative memories of making Depression Glass. Hazel Weatherman’s perseverance paid off. She uncovered the companies’ recorded names of many of what we now consider our best-loved patterns, where they were made, and even when they were produced. She even utilized the old and dusty sales catalogs of Depression glass companies to piece together information to help complete listings.
People became aware that the old dishes from their childhoods they’d kept stored in the attic meant something more than reminders of a grim and desperate time. Through the efforts of Hazel Weatherman, they began to look upon these gaily colored pieces as what they were intended to be – a relief of sorts to a nation whose underpinnings very nearly failed to support them, a distraction to help them weather the times, a bright spot in a dreary life of poverty. And when these people’s children discovered them, the children of the first generation who knew nothing of the Great Depression other than what they’d read, these multihued dishes in their array of lovely designs and different pieces appealed to them, as well. Thus began the then-new and still-going-strong-today collecting craze that may not ever lose pace.
Hazel Weatherman went on to publish three more books: “Colored Glassware of the Depression Era” in 1970; “Colored Glassware of the Depression Era,” Book 2, in 1974; and “Price Trends” in 1973, 1976, 1983. These books continue to be the backbone of many Depression-era glassware enthusiasts, along with the relative newcomer, Gene Florence, who has used Ms. Weatherman’s beginnings to further, with his own writings on Depression glass values and so on, the available knowledge on Depression Glass.
It’s not often that a writer and researcher actually lights the fuse to a new industry, which collecting Depression glass has become. But Ms. Hazel Marie Weatherman, who passed away in 1997, did. And lovers of this wonderful Depression-era glassware owe her a great deal.
So thank you, Ms. Weatherman. Thank you very much.
Have Fun and Keep Collecting
Murray
|
|||||||
