1987…I was a tenure-tract faculty person at San Jose State University teaching classes in Ceramics and 3D Design.  At the time my clay sculpture consisted of raku fired 2-3 panel woven screens, each coiled panel 72”X18”X2” and raku fired extruded woven wedges 30”X18”X9”.  Shipping to exhibits was a nightmare.

SJSU had a large metal facility for both casting and fabrication.  The atmosphere was intimidating and the casting process very time consuming.  The male faculty and male students were very protective of me.  The smallest grinder available was 6”, too heavy.  I noticed that women were not encouraged to participate in the pours.  Millie Soloman was president of the Sculpture Guild and had been at the Foundry for awhile.  She said she was 76 (she was actually in her 80s).  I asked her if she would lead an all-female crew.  We gathered a crew of students from Ceramics and Glass, people that were used to working with hot materials.  During our initial pour the men on the sidelines were telling us what to do.  The next pour we locked them out of the building.

When I was preparing for my first exhibition of bronzes the sand blaster broke and I had to take my work to a commercial facility.  While I was waiting for my work to be blasted, I visited a small foundry next door.  They were doing Petro-Bond sand molds.  I didn’t know about sand molds, but it occurred to me that I could lay out clay patterns the night before, tamp the sand the next morning when the clay was leather hard, pull the clay out and ladle molten bronze into the sand patterns.  In the afternoon I could weld the parts together.  24 hours and a completed piece, faster than raku.  Our all-female crew began to meet every Monday morning to prepare our molds and to pour.

About this time John Battenberg retired and my male colleagues were pressuring me to teach metal casting.

The problem was that no one really knew what they were doing.  I realized that without a good understanding of foundry practice and general metallurgy, it was not only an impediment to the growth of my work it was, also, an obstacle for my crew, the women who looked to me for answers.  I began making long distance phone calls to grad programs that included metal casting in their programs.  One name kept popping up and I soon discovered that Thomas Walsh was not only an acknowledged artist but was a leader in the use of the ceramic shell investment technique.  I phoned the foundry building at Southern Illinois University and talked for half an hour with one of his graduate students.  She was positive about Walsh and positive about the program he was running.  I was warned that much of his hard-nosed attitude was a front, he was, really, a teddy bear. 

I immediately wrote a California Lottery grant and invited Walsh to give a one-week workshop at San Jose State.  During the workshop it took Tom about 20 minutes to realize that Millie Soloman was the one that ran the place and he treated her with respect.  After coaching Tom to tell my colleagues and Dean that metal casting is too dangerous to be taught by amateurs, I hosted a dinner at which the 3D faculty plus the Chair and the Dean of the college were invited.  At one point during the meal the Dean asked Walsh what he thought should be done re: the foundry.  Walsh answered that they should hire Linda to get up to speed with the technical aspects and then appoint her Director.  I, in the meantime, was circling the table with a tray of dessert cheeses and at the precise moment of Walsh’s reply, hooked my shoe on the rug and fell flat on my face.  All of the male faculty stayed glued to their chairs while I turned over to see Tom helping me get to my feet…and I remember thinking, “This is an interesting man”.

Later, when I asked him if he had any children, he quickly said 14 (the number of his graduate students).  It was not unlike how I felt about my students.

I took a one year “leave of absence” to move to Carbondale and study foundry with Walsh.  A year later Tom and I were married.