THE FOUNDING OF THE NEXUS MACHINE SHOP AND GALLERY
or
CHEAPNESS IS GREAT.

SLICKNESS IS GREATER. BUT THE GREATEST IS JAZZ.

My entanglement with Beverly and Wanda Lou occurred when they blew into town October 1954, tired of the no-good nicks at Jimmy's Bar in Chicago and hot to experience a genuine New England winter. But they couldn't find work.
Their landlord (a Harvard man, class of '01) and a sometime potter guaranteed them there was 'all-kindza' moneymaking tile top tables. This guy said he'd show them how. He had the equipment. The girls could make the tiles. I could weld up the iron bases;
and with my pretty good job as an electrical engineer I could also bankroll the operation.
Well, why not?

Barely out of school (the University of Florida in '51) myself, I was beginning to think that I'd fallen into the wrong end of the engineering trades.
Those M.I.T. cats that I often worked with were so super cool with the pure mathematics of electronics. I just never got the knack of it.
But they were such kluges at designing physical, practical things: things that actually could be made and actually worked. Where as I - with five summers of work assisting an old master in Arts and Crafts metal work was chockfull of brilliant mechanical design concepts and with father, mother, grandfather and sister all successful fine artists had irreproachable visual taste. This might be my chance for a change.
After a successful summer selling tile top tables from my folks' backyard in Rockport, the girlies and I moved to 82 Charles Street (Boston) to what amounted to a near fatal financial decision. I had to go back to work. Not as an electrical engineer this time, but as a visual and mechanical designer.

Then in the Fall of '55 friends Joan, Fred and Frank helped me push the tables aside, round up a stable of promising local artists, hang their work on the walls and change the name from "Versi-Tile Designs" to Nexus Gallery. With regular hours and a regular schedule of shows, the gallery was the perfect front for my metalwork shop way in back. Damn few galleries come close to breaking even; It was the shop that kept the business alive - just barely!

In Oct. '66 a highly successful developer of store fronts caused everybody's rent on Charles Street to be jacked way up. So I gave up the gallery, moved in with a bunch of a rtists to a loft at 27 Stanhope Street and again changed the operation's name - this time to Nexus Machine and Gallery. That's where you'll still find me in the yellow pages. No, not under "Machine Shops" - under "Art Galleries and Dealers."
As it was on the fashionable, antique lined Charles Street, the shop was still a very social institution - the cocktail hour at 6 pm, continued to draw a fine collection of friends, artists and hangers-on.

A camera and a strobe that could be strapped to a porpoise to look for the Loch Ness Monster and a 6 foot diameter heliochronometer type sundial that now sits at Columbus Avenue and Chandler Street were typical of the many things that I got involved with.

Then in the '70s, with distressed vegetables and dented cans, I began cooking for whomever was in the shop: Coquelles St. Jacques, baked bluefish, roast chicken, spinach lasagna, Peter's-sometimes-tuna-sometimes-real-meatloaf - stuff that was nutritionally fashionable at the moment. Never evil roast beef, pork or lamb; and I didn't do soups, pies or cakes. As the "decider," the shop's daily specials were strong on cooked (maybe even overcooked) vegetables. When you could lift the lid on the cooking pot and look in and clearly determine that the very last vitamin had packed its bags and left, it was ready for serving.

These days the boozing and the trenchermanding have slacked off a bit from where they were at the height of the proceedings in the '90s. The shop doesn't grind out prototypes for other inventors like it used to: exercising wheelchairs, pin registering cameras, micro-switches, etc. Though with Graham Butler and William and sometimes Mary and George Bossarte, it's just as busy. I've been spending too much time recently trying to devise incredibly insidious sculptures. Unfortunately, I have this terrible weakness that I've never been able to control: I just can't resist making designs that are oh so cute a nd oh so titillating.

However these are purely personal artistic/sculptural indiscretions. In no way do they reflect on the engineering and metalworking of my associate and myself in which we are adamant in maintaining "the highest professional standards:" We never miss the opportunity to cheapen a design or to make it slicker or to punch up its visual ambience so that it's jazzier. For this is what we believe in: Cheapness, slickness and jazz.