Several years after his entry into the glass industry workforce,

young Walt was very fortunate to begin an acquaintance with Reuben Haley, then the Chief Designer for a consortium of glass factories known as United States Glass. Haley would go on to become one of the most renowned and influential glass designers in the United States, with pieces he designed now housed in the collections of many prominent museums. At this point in his career, however, Reuben was spending his days at United States Glass, heading a creative studio tasked with bringing innovative ideas and modern, eye catching glass designs to the marketplace. 

For Walter, things were a bit different.  After spending his long workdays as a laborer in the factory, young Walt would wander into Haley’s design studio, where he would tend to make a pest of himself.  One day, out of frustration and in desperation, Reuben gave Walt a stack of paper and drawing pencils and told him to “show me what you can do”.  Several days later, when Walt returned with his first “designs”, Haley offered him a job as an apprentice in his studio.   

From that day in 1915, Reuben took Walter under his wing and encouraged him to develop and hone his artistic skills, including taking drawing classes at what was then Carnegie Tech; Reuben even helped Walt to pay for the courses. Walt would continue under Reuben’s tutelage for many years, with the pair’s working partnership and deep friendship continuing until Haley’s death in 1933.  Even following Reuben’s passing, Walt maintained his loyalty, ties and association with the Haley family, regularly collaborating with Reuben’s son, Kenneth, on an assortment of glass design projects for a further 20 years.  

In July 1933, Walt moved his family from Monaca and started his own design and pattern shop, working as an independent designer in the basement of a newly purchased house at 1810 Westmont Avenue in the Carrick neighborhood in the south hills of Pittsburgh. For the next 40 years, Walt worked with a number of prominent glass companies, including (but not limited to):
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For a 20-year stretch, Consolidated Glass was Walt’s best and most consistent customer, with projects including new designs as well as additions, modifications and extensions to older, more established product lines. Fostoria and Westmoreland were also very good, longstanding customers. Walt’s specialty was designing intricate patterns and moulds with complicated curved surfaces and complex parting lines. He also worked with customers to redesign moulds for pieces that were proving troublesome to produce.

The method and approach customers took in working with Walt varied greatly, with some supplying detailed sketches for him to work from, while others would simply describe their ideas to him over the phone, leaving Walt to bring their concepts to three-dimensional reality.  At times, projects from four or five different competing companies would be in Walt’s shop simultaneously. Although the different companies were intense competitors, they trusted Walt with their ideas and designs in the strictest confidence and secrecy. When customers would visit his studio in Carrick, he would have one of his sons cover competing designs with a bed sheet to ensure confidentiality.

During the difficult years during the Great Depression, Walt’s studio served as a source of employment and stability for many relatives and friends, as his work stayed largely stable and consistent during the period. As he worked on designs, he would enlist his own children (now pestering him in his design studio) to go out and find samples of flowers, leaves and insects to use in his design and pattern work. Committed to life as an independent designer, Walt was proud to work with so many respected companies; in his own words, “I didn’t work for people, I worked with them.” Working from dawn to dusk over the many years of his career, it is estimated that Walt finished mold patterns for approximately 2,000 pieces of glass and ceramics in his Westmont Avenue shop.

With the onset of World War II, Walt transitioned to defense industry work like many of his customers, including prominent Pittsburg firms such as Mine Safety Appliances and Westinghouse Electric. His sons recalled watching proudly when car loads of uniformed military officers would come to the house in Carrick for meetings with Walt, inspecting progress on various projects in the basement shop. Walt’s focus during this period included the development of production models, molds, and head sizing models for an array of military safety equipment such as protective breathing masks, gas masks,helmets and helmet liners. According to family lore, in late 1945 following the war, The Smithsonian Institution prepared an exhibit with a fully outfitted model of a “modern” pilot in advanced gear, much of it illustrating the kinds of work Walt had done for his defense industry customers.

Post-war, Walt’s work largely returned to normal. He focused once again on glass industry designs, patterns, and molds. But along with these jobs, the family remembered other intriguing projects that came into the shop in Carrick. Plastics, composites and other advanced materials were finding growing acceptance and new applications in a thriving peacetime economy. This included an array of new opportunities for independent pattern and mold makers. Walt’s youngest son recalled that around 1952 Pittsburgh Pirates’ General Manager and baseball legend Branch Rickey even consulted with his father at the house in Carrick, in conjunction with Rickey’s research, development and eventual sponsorship of the first protective batting helmets in the early 1950s.  (This was similar to work with protective headgear that Walt had done during the war.) With the onset of the Cold War, Walt again became involved with some defense work, including interesting projects linked to the incorporation of new ceramic materials into the missile programs of the period, including the Redstone Rocket program.

Filled with a creative passion his entire life, Walt continued to work into his later years. He often remarked that he felt lucky that people would pay him for “Slopping around in plaster and playing in clay all day.”  The cost of that passion and work ethic was quite high, however, as a lifetime of breathing in plaster dust and solvent fumes would cause him an assortment of breathing and circulatory problems. Walt would eventually pass away in 1977 at the age of 78.