Return to Frances Riecken Memorial Gathering Web site
 

In our earliest years, Frannie practiced speech pathology in the Minneapolis Public Schools, and had a private practice working with stutterers and teaching speech and lip-reading to hearing-impaired students.  That had its downside for us as kids: if she could see us, our mother always knew what we were saying just by looking our way.  She never lost her speech and hearing skills.  In 1968, when Mayor Daley cut the microphone cable of newscasters at the Democratic convention in Chicago, she knew what he continued to say – even if she refused to repeat those expletives to us.

None of us can think of Frannie without also thinking of her ceramics.  In 1958 we moved to Washington, DC, and a year or so later Frannie took an adult education class in ceramics that changed her life.  She followed that with classes at the Corcoran.  Later she taught, both formally in Montgomery County and various workshops, and informally to assistants in her studio.  We would tell people that our mother went to pot in the early 1960s, and everyone came out the better for it.

It was at the Corcoran that she learned one of the ancillary joys of making ceramics: you can smash the pots you don’t like, and it’s a great way to let off steam!  If she didn’t like the shape of a pot or how a glaze had turned out, she’s save it, and when the spirit moved her, have a smashing good time.  Occasionally she let her kids join in the fun.  But mostly she saved that pleasure for herself.

In 1971, Frannie moved with our father and Annie to California for a year, and then to Philadelphia, where they lived into the mid-1980s.  At first, she worked in Lambertville New Jersey with Byron Temple, driving an hour each way to his studio.  In exchange for making his pots – pots good enough that he stamped them with his name – she got to do her own work.  She often said she felt sorry for him because when she got tired of doing his work, she could do her own; but when he got tired of doing his work he didn’t have anyone else’s work he could do.  An added benefit of that arrangement was that Byron never wore jeans that showed any sign of fading, so Frannie acquired a trove of his blue jeans that lasted her through the last third of her life.  And I could stop worrying when I put jeans in the wash that I might next see them as her potting clothes – “Oh, those were yours?  I thought they were mine, but had just gotten a bit long.  So I cut them off…”  Capri pants aren’t my style now, and weren’t then, either.

A few years after they moved to Philadelphia, Frannie leased a thousand square feet for her ceramics studio within the Willet Stained Glass Studio ten minutes from home in Philadelphia.  There she worked amidst scores of Italian glass artists, trading ideas with them on art and craft.  And she also learned how to pack her ceramics for shipping so well that the local UPS office even asked her to lead packing seminars.
When she was 65, the World Bank sent its consultant, Ruth Dayan (ex-wife of Moshe Dayan, the Israeli defense minister), to ask Frannie to help a struggling ceramics cooperative in the Dominican Republic. Frannie mastered enough Spanish to go there and live for 3 months in a trailer out in the country.  While there, she not only re-organized the coop into a profitable artisan studio, but also found indigenous sources for clay that gave the cooperative a lucrative raw material sideline to export along with their finished pots – competing with their former clay suppliers in Spain.  It was quite an honor for her to be asked, and quite an accomplishment and validation of her as both a serious potter and business woman.

But the part of the story I have always liked best concerns the job interview.  Mrs. Dayan came to meet Frannie in Philadelphia.  Frannie had her come to their house.  Mrs. Dayan arrived at lunch time, so Frannie—fresh from the studio in her clay-spattered jeans—invited her into the kitchen where they rummaged in the frig to put together a lunch—and worked out the details of an international consulting agreement over sandwiches made from leftovers.

We never saw our mother happier than when she got her studio in Maine.  In 1975, our family built a two-level house in the Maine woods.  Most of the lower level was her studio, complete with a guest bedroom that she took over as the studio office and shipping department.  It had a nice bed: just right for wrapping and boxing.  And that closet?  Just big enough to store the boxes, shipping supplies and bubble wrap.  A few years later, she built a kiln shed and added large gas kiln.  She would leave DC and go north each March or April—depending on when the snow melted and the ice went out of the lake—and stay until the snow started again late-October or November.  At her peak, she was in the studio before breakfast for an hour or two, and all day after breakfast, often only breaking to go skinny-dipping in the lake or, if corn was in season, to get a dozen fresh ears.

Politically, Frannie always was a solid liberal.  She recalled sitting with Hubert Humphrey and friends at a Minneapolis diner booth in 1945 and helping him write his mayoral acceptance speech.   During the early George W. Bush years, she despaired that she might have to finish her days with him as president.  Even when her memory dimmed so that she no longer distinguished among individual politicians, she retained the sense that political discourse involved the good people and “those awful people” who did not care about others.

Only once did she vote for a Republican.  In 1966, the Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland was a Baltimore paving contractor whose entire campaign rested on opposition to integration—those were the days when southern Democrats often resembled the unreconstructed George Wallace.  So Frannie voted for the seemingly moderate Spiro Agnew, her one and only Republican vote.  She always said that learned her lesson from that.

Frannie expressed two wishes regarding her remains.  Sometimes she said that she wanted to be made into a glaze.  Other times, she said she wanted to have her ashes scattered in the lake in Maine.  Her friend, Diane Levinson, recently re-fired a dozen of Frannie’s last pots with some of her Frannie’s own ashes.  One of those pots will go to Maine, where we will paddle out into the middle of the lake and lower it in, fulfilling both her wishes.

All her life she surrounded herself with fellow artists, fresh younger spirits, and people with whose own vision would expand hers.  Always interested in people, Frannie did not hesitate to remind us if she sensed we were being closed-minded or judgmental of others.  Susan remembers in particular how Susan’s own friends confided in Frannie and sought her advice in matters that they couldn’t discuss with their own parents.  Assistants half Frannie’s age, or even younger, became her friends and part of her extended family from Maine to California.  Once when I couldn’t escape Texas for Maine one summer, my partner, Emily, was quite happy to go alone for a week with Frannie.

But I knew one place where she cut no one any slack: good grammar and precise language.  Perhaps it was her speech training from undergraduate days at the University of Minnesota theater department.  She would interrupt any of her children to correct their grammar or usage.  In recent years, even after she stopped talking much, I could always get a playful scowl out of her by asking whether she agreed that something was: only slightly unique; somewhat unique; or, perhaps, very unique?

At the risk of being redundantly repetitive, Mother, you were uniquely unique.