After a while, I began to feel that studying great art and accomplishment isn’t enough. Writing a thesis about art didn’t seem to be as fulfilling as trying to make the art. I had the special background with Karl together with the exceptionally academic nature of Reed, and then I stumbled onto William Morris, and things began to coalesce. One day I went to Lloyd Reynolds, the great calligrapher and teacher at Reed and showed him pictures of my wood work. I asked him what he thought I should do. He said, “You have a teacher who helped you make this? I think you ought to leave Reed immediately and go to him.” I finished out the year, my sophomore year, but after that meeting I was on my way. I wrote a zillion letters to European craft schools and universities where I could study woodwork, not realizing at that time that further work with Karl was a possibility, and eventually I was accepted at two—Carl Malmsten’s school in Stockholm and the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. I was actually on my way there when I stopped in Pottstown to see Karl and stayed ten years. In the spring Alumni Bulletin of Hill School for 1972, I began an article about Karl in this way— . . . Born in a tiny self-sufficient village at the foot of the Tatra Mountains of Slovakia, Karl Pacanovsky . . . was apprenticed in woodworking at eleven and a half years and took his first job at fourteen; as a journeyman he traveled through much of central Europe. Perhaps most influential were the years he spent building the monumental carved Gothic altars which were the expression of religious faith in his region. . . . Pacanovsky came to the United States in 1944. In twenty-eight years at the school he built a powerful foundation for the philosophy which we embody today. When he retired I merely took up where he left off. His influence still lives in this room. And he’s alive, too. I see him every week or two.
Consequences of climate change for the soil climate in Central Europe and the central plains of the United States
