by Louana M. Lackey - Ceramic Arts Daily

At the Archie Bray
on their ranch, so Archie had been letting them fire their pots on top
of the bricks in his brick kiln. The first phase of the projected art
center would be a pottery. The projected center would begin with
ceramics. Painting, sculpture, weaving, and possibly, a music
conservatory could be added later.
A high-school friend of Rudy’s, Kelly Wong, who had also
studied art at Bozeman, joined Rudy and Pete in the brickyard. The
three worked from early morning until late at night. They shoveled
raw clay onto conveyer belts to be crushed and fed into the pugmill;
they sometimes would relieve the regular “nippers” to pick up brick
as it came from the extruder; at other times, they were assigned to
help with the firing. When they weren’t working in the brickyard,
they laid brick for the new pottery. They did not labor alone at this;
Pete Meloy and many other volunteers helped to build the pottery.
Frances Senska (1982:35) reports that “So many eager amateurs laid
brick for those walls, it’s a wonder they remain standing. But the
experts managed to compensate for the wavering rows, and the roof
plate landed on a level course.” By all working together, they man-
aged to construct a building with a showroom, a workroom, and
rooms for clay mixing, glazing, and kilns. When the pottery was fin-
ished, Archie and Peter Voulkos built a large downdraft kiln for high-
fire reduction wares, the first gas-fired kiln in the state. Under
Archie’s guidance, Rudy built the twenty-five-foot chimney stack.
While they were building the pottery, Rudy, Pete, and Kelly did their
own work at night in a corner of the tile-drying shed. Pete made
pots on the wheel while Rudy made hand-built sculptures by coiling
shapes together. Until the new kilns were built, they fired their work
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