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cope wim a world peopled by art collectors, entrepreneurs, and others
who sought to lionize him as the embodiment of a disappearing art.
The great frustration Lanier has felt at times can be sensed in this
comment the year following his fadier's death: "I wanted to make a
barn out of it [the shop] one time, but I got talked out of it no sooner
than I mentioned it. I never did mention it again." Most of his adult
life, in fact, Lanier has worked away from the pottery.
Born in 1917, the second of four boys, Quillian Lanier Meaders
entered into a somewhat abbreviated apprenticeship in the family
business. As a small child, his older brother had spun him around on
the wheelhead while his father was busy with other chores. As he
matured, he was expected to help out around the shop doing "just
about anything diat anybody else didn't want to do." Meanwhile,
assembling those skills necessary to turn ware, Lanier and his
brothers occupied spare moments creating scaled-down versions of
their father's vessels, which they burned, suitably, in a miniature kiln.
Learning continued until age seventeen, when all of these newly
gained skills were brought to culmination with the firing of Lanier^
first kiln load of churns.
The times were difficult, however, and production was down. War
followed on the heels of the Great Depression, and in a short time
Lanier had to set pottery-making aside to enter the service. Upon
returning to the homeplace in the mid-1940s, he found the pottery in
a moribund state, even though his father was still filling orders.
Deciding that turning ware was just "too much of a job," Lanier
shifted to farming for a time. He then went to work outfitting house
trailers in a Gainesville sheet-metal factory, though he continued to
live at home.
When Cheever renovated his ware shop in 1952, Lanier offered his
assistance and, in fact, stayed on through the winter to help fill a
backlog of orders. By February of the next year, with the ware shelves
in the new shop lined to capacity, Lanier again determined to let his
father carry on alone. This time he found work in a textile mill,
though the demands of the job affected him physically to the point
where he had to retire for six months of needed rest. Eventually, he
moved back to the sheet-metal shop where he remained for five more
years.
On the day the Smithsonian crew came to film the Meaderses in
May 1967, Lanier was tending his cousin's chicken farm, though still