We became more familiar with [Bernard Leach], and with this familiarity came, I wouldn't say contempt, but certainly an awareness that everything that he said was not necessarily what we were thinking. That doesn't mean it was wrong, but Leach was a person out of a different generation.

Bernard [Leach] was making pots which were duplicates of his drawing, and that was a difference of approach, which I think is quite critical to these two men [Leach and Shoji Hamada].

We thought [with Alix MacKenzie], if those are the kinds of pots from every culture that interest us, why would we think that it should be any different in mid-North America 20th century? And we decided then that our work would center around that sort of utilitarian pottery, and that's what I've done ever since.

We moved up here [to St.Paul with my wife] and started to teach, we very quickly found out we were not equipped either to teach or to run our own pottery, and so we decided that we had to have further training.

We stayed on at the Institute [Chicago called the School of Design] because that was - I don't know, you start at one place and you stay there, I guess. Inertia takes over.

The interesting thing was we never talked about pottery. Bernard [Leach] talked about social issues; he talked about the world political situation, he talked about the economy, he talked about all kinds of things.

In the Leach Pottery we did most of our work on the wheel. [Bernard] Leach did a little work in the studio, which was press-molded forms, plastic clay pressed into plaster forms to make small rectangular boxes and some vase forms, which he liked to make. These were molds which had been made to an original that he had modeled in solid clay, and during our work there, sometimes I would be pressing these forms as a means of production.