About the Designer

A longer version of this story about Jay King, the owner of Arkansas Glassworks, appeared in a Little Rock publication in November 2005

Jay King, owner of Arkansas Glassworks in Little Rock, has been building and repairing stained glass windows for over 30 years, or almost two-thirds of his life.

“I graduated from high school in June of 1972 and started working for my uncle the day after the 4th of July,” Mr. King said.

It was an inauspicious beginning.

“He said, ‘This is a glass cutter. This is how it cuts glass. This is a pile of windows. Get to work.’”

That daunting start for a teenager who’d grown up in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, and the Jersey Shore grew into a love and knowledge of the art that’s left King’s mark on churches in Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas.

In 1972 the place was Chicago, and his uncle, John Yaskot, owned Hawk and Handsaw, which specialized in gleaning stained glass and other antique architectural elements from the city’s old Victorian buildings just before the wrecking ball hit.

“Hawk and Handsaw is from Shakespeare when Hamlet says, ‘When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw,” a proverb that means I know one thing from another. As for stained glass repair work my uncle John didn’t know a hawk from a handsaw. But my older brother, Bill, worked there too. And we all kind of learned together. And my uncle knew the value of stained glass. Chicago had a lot of it. The city was built up after the great fire in 1871.”

Jay said the massive rebuilding came at a time when Victorian architecture was popular. Stained glass was in vogue too, and many European-trained stained glass artists opened studios in Chicago. Starting in the 1950s, many of the Victorian homes and arts-and-crafts bungalows with this beautiful old stained glass were being razed. Later this dovetailed nicely with a demand for stained glass in San Francisco.

“Some of my uncle’s customers came from San Francisco. I remember one who would pull up in front of the shop with a semi truck and buy just about everything in the shop. It would all go straight to San Francisco. My uncle got into it when buildings were wrecked in the ‘50s. He’d slip them $20 to let him take out the glass before they wrecked it. First he just took the glass, but after a few years he saved mantles, moldings, and other architectural elements, anything they could get before the wrecking ball hit. Later he was edged out by antique dealers who made deals with property owners long before the wrecking crews got on the scene.”

After a year and a half in Chicago, Jay moved to Austin, Texas, where for his first eight years, he worked at Renaissance Glass.

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