Ask Bill when he began collecting things and he can’t remember back that far. He knows he moved up to the small attic room in his parent’s house so that he could have a place to put the oddly shaped stones and unique wood pieces he picked up on camping trips. Ask him about the letter he sent “the girl back home” during his time as a combat infantryman in Germany, listing the odd stuff he had in his field jacket pocket.

Then there is the time during his college vacation when he rode helper on a semi, taking copper and brass scrap to a plant in Rome, N.Y., scrap barrels full of refrigerator name stampings. He salvaged a few of these and attached a “cold something” stamping to the dashboard of his ’37 Plymouth.

Probably the first big “found object” accumulation came when he was teaching in Oneonta, N.Y. and was offered stained glass windows from a church being demolished. This lead to several years teaching himself to do stained glass work and to some used glass mosaics. The mosaics were an invitation to place other things in these accumulations of clay and glass…and we have, at last, a “found object” artist. He remembers scrounging old lantern slides and placing pictures of cows and people in his stained glass pieces. The constructions started about this time, and wood scraps began to appear, along with dowels and letters from various sources, the first piece containing “Come live with me and all the pleasures we will prove…”

Today we can find Bill at the flea markets all over Florida, searching for the unexpected objects he uses so well. A box of wooden letters turns up, eventually proving to have no vowels in it…but he will find a use for them. Things to go with them might be at a yard sale or one of the many second hand shops around central Florida. That man you see picking up discarded Copenhagen snuff tins might be Bill because he loves the raised letters on the lid. He fondly remembers the woman who brought him a bag of old clocks while he was showing some of his art work at a street show in Gulfport, Florida.