Don Reitz

Legendary and charismatic, Don lived with a larger-than-life intensity.

I went to Amherst College in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and took ceramics classes at the University of Massachusetts with Susan Parks, Paul Berube and Jim Wozniak. In 1969, they sponsored a workshop with Don Reitz. He could throw faster, thinner and higher than anyone I had ever met, and pulled incredibly fluid handles. I was amazed! He was enthusiastically in the early stages of his pioneering salt firing work.

Later, I studied with Don at the University of Wisconsin, Madison as a graduate student from 1974 -1977. I had applied to the program, but since it was in the middle of the school year, I didn’t get in. I moved to Madison anyway, took a class with Don, and told him I was going to be working there and taking up a lot of space in his classroom until he let me into graduate school.

After a few weeks, he relented: “OK, I talked to my fellow teacher Bruce and you’re in starting next semester.” Then, in a quiet, conspiratorial voice, he proceeded to show me how to bypass $30,000 worth of Honeywell safety monitoring equipment by inserting a matchbook cover into the contacts, and asked me to finish firing the kiln while he went home to finish packing for a show and workshop.

Don was at the height of his epic, high-energy “Mr. Salt” days at that time, doing an enormous number of workshops and shows. “Yeah, man, I threw a kiln load in a few days, put jugs of water in it so I could fire it green and then unloaded the salt firing on Tuesday, drove to Maryland on Wednesday, did a workshop Thursday, set up a show on Friday, partied all night at the show opening on Saturday, drove home Sunday night and got here for my Monday class.” We all thought he had amphetamines for blood but it was really just how Don lived life, and a symptom of his high energy love of clay.

I helped Don build salt kilns at his farm, and rebuild the kilns at UW Madison. He’s the only person I know who would build a fire under his propane tank when it was 20 below to keep the propane from totally liquifying. It was terrifying but it worked!

I helped Don change a tire up the hill at his farm, and watched him lose control of it while telling a story. We watched as it rolled down the hill, took a bee line for his house, and wiped out his favorite large pot on his front porch (on its way to taking out his front door). Those are things you can laugh about for years.

Occaisionally, when alcohol was involved, Don could get lit up like a cowboy’s first night in town after a summer on the range. I remember Don standing on a table at a restaurant showing people his new cowboy boots and telling really funny off-color jokes he learned in the Navy. For Don, things were always this intensely lived.

But it aways came back to clay and people. He had an incredible intuitive feel for the material, and loved people who loved clay. Don spoke often of how to let clay express its “clayness” and create pots that refer to “vesseldom” but are new. He often pondered who was learning from who — whether he was talking to the clay or if the talking and learning was vice versa. His sense of being present with, and aware of, clay as a material was what made me admire and love him. His legendary energy and work attracted a great group of graduate students who made my experience in Madison an incredibly special time.

After he died I talked to his former wife, Paula Rice, who said: “The most amazing man I ever met, he had one hand in clay and one on a lightening bolt!”  Those of us who knew him well agree.