Chuck Kusak's showroom and shop was filled with well-wishers last Thursday evening. Perhaps a couple of hundred people showed up, including the mayor and his missus. But busy as Kusak was, greeting old friends and customers wishing to share a few words, it didn't stop him from walking up to a complete stranger to give him a warm welcome. Glad to have you. Let me show you around.
Listening to Chuck tell it (on his birth certificate it's Anton Kusak III, but please, just call him Chuck), that sort of treatment is part of what has kept his family-owned business going for 90 years.
At Kusak Cut Glass Works, a customer gets "a beautiful product at a fair price, with excellent customer service," he said. "The most important person is the customer. We have people come in every day because they know they will get something of value for what they spend."
Marlene Miller is one of those people.
"Kusak's made my grandmother's crystal," Miller said. "It sat in the cupboard for years, because it was Grandmother's crystal. But Chuck said, 'You have to use it. You have to have each generation's rub-off.' And he said, 'If you break one, we can always make another.' "
The Anton Kusaks, all three generations of them, have been cutting designs into glass around here since 1914, when the first of them, an immigrant from Moravia with stops in New York City and West Virginia along the way, set up shop on Jackson Street. He stayed there until 1926, when he moved down to the heart of Garlic Gulch, to the 1300 block of Rainier Avenue South. (That block is now part of that short, barren stretch of Rainier that never escapes the shade of the Interstate 90 overpasses). Kusak's has been in its present location, 1911 22nd Ave. S., since 1984.
The business isn't exactly what it was when his grandfather threw open the doors, said Kusak (pronounced "coo," the sound a dove makes, and "sock," what you put on before you put on your shoe). But in many ways, it isn't so different, either.
"The heart and soul is in freehand stone-wheel engraving," he said, just as it was back in the day. (He pointed out that the machine the steady-handed Idalia Perez, an engraver with Kusak's since 1966, was working at was bought secondhand in 1926.) "The driving force in our business is now the recognition and trophy business, and chandeliers."
"We still do a real nice stemware business," he continued. "We've also gone a bit contemporary. We've discovered we've had to change with the changing desires and lifestyles of people."
The expansion into other product lines began in earnest about 15 years ago, Kusak said. He acquired the machinery to make the corporate awards and such and found the supplier for that sort of glass in China. (The lead crystal still comes mostly from his grandfather's homeland, now the Czech Republic, whose crystal industry is the world's largest.)
Kusak's voice brightens when he speaks of the "optic pure" glass used for awards.
"It's amazing because of its clarity and color," he said. "There's no distortion. It absolutely gleams."
The traditional business, where things are still done mostly by hand and personalized customer service is more than an advertising slogan, does some things the ultra-modern way. Just the other day, Kusak's made an online sale of a chandelier to a customer in Japan.
But around the shop and showroom, it's all craftsmanship and tending to the hands-on necessities of getting the products made and out the door.
Al Nance, one of 14 fulltime employees, has been with the company 32 years. He's a stone-wheel engraver, "but we're a small company, so I do everything."
And so does Chuck Kusak.
"You have to be able to gift wrap, to come into the showroom to talk to people, you have to pack," Kusak said. "Everybody has to multi-task, including me."
While there's a certain magic to the glass that comes out of the little shop in the Valley, Kusak works to remove the mystery behind the product. He wants his customers to know where it comes from and how it is done.
"We designed the showroom so you can see the craftsmen at work," he said.
The company has stayed in this district for all its 90 years, and that's a point of some pride for Kusak. As he tells it, there isn't a better place to be. His place is close to downtown, and close to highway access to the Eastside and points beyond.
Kusak himself bought the Mount Baker district house his grandfather moved in to when it was new, in 1923. It had been out of the family for 14 years.
"It was like it was meant to be," he said. "Now there's never an excuse not to get to work."
The house is about nine-tenths of a mile from his shop, and the shop is maybe a third of mile from where it had been for nearly 60 years. Old customers still come in and ask him when he moved. That it has been 20 years, and that people still ask that question, is, Kusak said, a sign of just how briskly time marches on.
But heirloom-quality glassware is a way of connecting to the past, and customers still value Kusak's people-centered way of doing business.
"I'm a family member," said Nance, the engraver. "I'm not family by blood, but we're like family."
In telling what might be the company mantra, Nance sure sounds like someone who has spent a lot of time around Chuck Kusak.
"Once you do a job right, people realize it," he said. "Chuck knows that. We give people what they pay for."
So Chuck Kusak carries on the trade his grandfather earned his journeyman's stripes in back in that village outside Brno, Moravia, when he was 15 years old. And Anton III shows no signs of slowing down.
"This is still my passion," he said. "I still have some coal in the furnace."
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