Artist Rudolph (Ruddi) Sedlak
West Virginia Glass Houses
BY BETTY JOYCE NASH
A special friendship occurred between Ruth Murin, a clerk at the Glenville, WV Post Office and artist Ruddi Sedlak during the time of WWII. Here is the story of two hand painted platters, which became reunited through the Gilmer County WV Historical Society and a visitor at our Holt House Museum this summer in 2022.
Story to Accompany a Photo of a Ludwig Glass Factory Plate
Painted by Rudolph Sedlak and Given to the Murin Family
Story written by Julia Murin Lee
Submitted to the Gilmer Co. Historical Society, July 18, 2022
During World War II, in the early 1940s, my father and mother – Nick and Ruth Murin – found themselves setting up housekeeping in Sacramento, California. They had met and fallen in love as students at Glenville State College back in West Virginia. Eventually, they got married in Reno, Nevada. Now Dad was Sergeant Nick Murin in the U.S. Army Air Corps and was stationed at Mather Air Base where he worked in the control tower under the supervision of Captain Jimmy Stewart, MGM film actor who had left Hollywood to do training for the Army Air Corps.
My parents had just gotten their family started – blessed with a son named Nicky – when they learned that Dad was to be deployed to Europe. So Mom and Nicky headed back across the United States to Glenville where they would wait for Dad to return after the war. Their temporary home would be with my maternal grandparents who lived in Glenville’s Northview Addition.
Although Mom was a certified teacher, there were no teaching jobs open for her when she and Nicky arrived in Glenville. There was, however, a job for her at the post office downtown. There, she sorted mail and interacted daily with the townspeople.
One person who Mom said she got to know was Ruddi Sedlak, an artist who painted plates for Glenville’s Ludwig Glass Factory. He was nicknamed “The Old German” and was well-respected by others there who learned his skill. Two of the factory workers who Sedlak trained were Ace Collins and Boyd Boggs.
Mom eventually got to know The Old German who regularly picked up his mail downtown. When she would see him making his way to the post office, she would quickly gather his mail and have it immediately available for him as soon as he stepped up to the counter. He appreciated her service and told her one day, “I’m going to paint something for you.”
Sure enough, not long after that, Sedlak entered the post office carrying a gift to Mom – a beautifully hand-painted plate depicting a winter evening scene. In the scene’s foreground, Sedlak had painted the figures of an adult and a little child making their way over snow-covered ground toward houses in the distance – houses with windows lit by a warm light. Of course, Mom cherished that painted plate.
As World War II came to an end, after completing his military service in 1945, Dad returned to his wife and son in Glenville. He became a teacher and coached high school sports while Mom kept house as the young family grew.
By 1953, Nicky had three younger sisters: Marilyn, Mary Helen and me. Many changes had come to Glenville. The glass factory closed and Ruddi Sedlak left town. Some say he headed to Morgantown where a glass factory still thrived.
As many more years passed, The Old German’s hand-painted plate was displayed in every house our family lived in. Eventually my parents became “empty nesters” and then Dad passed away in 1995. Widowed and living alone now in a much smaller house with fewer possessions, Mom still kept the Sedlak plate. After she passed away in 2011, the plate went to the youngest daughter, Mary Helen, who also proudly displayed it in her home in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Eventually, the plate traveled back to West Virginia with Mary Helen when she made her home in Vienna in 2015. In 2022, I discovered another plate that Sedlak had hand-painted. It was on display at Gilmer County Historical Society’s headquarters. During a tour of the headquarters at the Holt House, I found the plate propped on a fireplace mantel. It depicted a winter scene similar to what our family’s treasured plate featured. And it was signed “Sedlak.”
I talked with Ace Collins’ son, Jim, and Glenville glass historian, Willard Wright; and I learned more about the glass painting artist known as The Old German. Jim even showed me a Ludwig Glass Factory dish painted by his father who had clearly learned the art from Sedlak. The Collins dish had the same content but with Ace’s own unique style. You could see that Jim was just as proud of his father’s hand-painted dish as I was of our family’s Sedlak-painted dish. So I decided to write my family’s “plate story” for the Gilmer County Historical Society.
To this day, when I look at the winter scene on the plate The Old German painted for my mother, I like to imagine that the adult in the painting’s foreground is Ruth Murin, and the little child holding her hand is Nicky. They are headed home to Northview Addition, in Glenville.
If you’re interested in more about our Glass Factories of West Virginia, here are a few links you might enjoy seeing. Happy discoveries!
https://www.loc.gov/item/2018673788/
https://www.americanantiquities.com/Journal%20Articles/Origins%20of%20glassmaking.html