ࡱ> ,.+@ jbjb $l>>>>> J >&bbbbbbbb, # Jbbbbbbbbb:bb&bV >j m m  My Life and Work By Jacob J. Kass My father, William, went in the business of carriage and wagon painting in 1907. His paint shop was on Alabama Avenue in East New York, one block from the house that I was born in. It was a former horse stable that measured 20 x 100 with large wooden doors and a pot-bellied stove for heat. It seems like going into business for yourself was easier in those days; my father had worked in a paint factory grinding pigment so he knew something about it, and he felt that all he had to do was buy a few buckets and paint brushes and he could be in the carriage painting business. He had two partners, one named Moneypenny who was a letterer and another named Biers who owned the property the paint shop was on. We lived down the street, so the whole operation was very simple. My brothers, Bill and Charlie, and I all worked there part-time whenever we could as soon as we were old enough; twelve-year old kids worked in those days. Milk wagons, laundry wagons, bakery wagons, coal trucks, ice wagons all required striping and lettering. There was a lot of gold leaf lettering done in those days because gold was cheap and looked much nicer that painted letters. Every proud business owner wanted to show off his delivery wagon as a form of advertising. As a boy of 9 years of age my job was to bring the lunch pail to the shop at noontime, At 10 or 11 years old I worked during summer vacations and on week-ends cleaning and painting wheels, painting the undersides of carriages, cleaning brushes, etc.. I followed one of the letterers around, Bill Mansey, and learned all of the basics of lettering from him until I could do it myself. The difference between a letterer who worked on trucks and wagons in a paint shop and a general sign painter was that a truck letterer had to be more precise. /The tradition in carriage lettering was to shadow and elaborately trim all of the letters so the wagons would look flashy on the street. The artwork on a wagon or truck stood closer inspection than on a sign. Such wagons were often their owners sole advertising and painting them elaborately was relatively expensive. A general sign painter could afford to be sloppier as his work usually hung up high where it could not be seen closely. A truck letterer would not allow himself to be called a sign painter and a truck painting shop would not hire a general sign painter except in an emergency. Truck letterers generally worked in just one or two shops and they made the best money of anyone. I had no art training, but my father asked me to design layouts for prospective clients. If a customer wanted a picture of anything on the truck, I was always asked to do it and would reproduced it as accurately as possible (and if they already had a design - sometimes I improved it !). A lot of smaller businesses were becoming sophisticated about advertising, and realized that their wagons and trucks would be see all over New York City and and the five Boroughs. Often an owner would provide just a few suggestions about what he wanted on his truck. In such a case I would make drawings for him, proposing a design that would feature his product (zippers, beer cans, suits, dairy products, farm and city scenes, etc.) as part of getting the truck painted. For the World Fairs, or certain specialty jobs we often worked up very original designs as part of a days work. Some of the best looking trucks were local moving vans in Brooklyn that we often painted with large striped and shadowed gold leaf letters on brilliant backgrounds that were decorated with stripes. The owners wanted them to be as fancy as possible so that people seeing them working in the neighborhoods would want that particular company to move them when the time came. There was a lot of dirty work involved in truck paintingit was hard and trickybut I always enjoyed looking at the finished product when it rolled out of our shop onto the street. When I retired at age 63, I didnt want to look at a paint brush again in my life. I figured that I owed myself some pleasure and relaxation, and started spending winters in Florida and summers at my trailer in Vermont. My wife Juliette and I went to a lot of auctions in New England and I would buy old furniture and stuff that I would fix up to resell out of the little barn on my property. In 1976 my youngest son, Ray, encouraged me to paint and I made a landscape for him on an old hand saw of the meadow in front of our place in Vermont. I enjoyed that, and started to paint on a dozen or so old saws that I had on hand. First, I painted the things I saw around me in Vermont and then scenes from my memories of NYC and also areas in Florida where Juliette and I rented an apartment for the winter months in 1972 . People liked my paintings on saws and neighbors and friends would ask me to paint one for them. I was very surprised at the popular response to my paintings when I first showed them in exhibitions with my son, Ray Kass, at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York City in the 1970s. Now in my retiring years I am fulfilling my lifelong ambition, namely to paint what I want to paint, for the pleasure of it and not because I have to. 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