Radko returned to Poland, commissioned more ornaments made from antique molds, and during his lunch breaks from the talent agency where he worked embarked on door-to-door rounds, showing the wares to hard-nosed department store buyers. Friends who had seen the shimmering glass baubles insisted on buying them, which gave Radko pause to consider the retail possibilities. But those ornaments never made it to the family tree. Radko returned home jubilant that he would be able to present his grandmother and parents with several-dozen replacement ornaments made in the Nineteenth Century manner. He had located a retired glassblower who could work from old molds and the sketches Radko provided to recreate some of the beloved figurals, umbrella balls and Victorian icicles that had been lost in the Christmas tree crash of ’83.
It was during a visit to his family’s ancestral homeland of Poland that Radko unwittingly stepped onto a path that would change his life forever. Instead, there was plastic or Styrofoam, the materials of the Atomic Age … without any heart or soul.” They had died off in the early ’70s,” Radko said, “when department stores looked at the bottom line and saw that it was cheaper to import ornaments from the Orient, where there was no tradition of glass-making. Replacing the shattered heirlooms became a mission of paramount importance to Radko, but when he set out on his buying quest, he soon found that mouth-blown glass ornaments were next to impossible to find. There was already enough guilt riding on the young Columbia grad’s shoulders, knowing it was he who had replaced the rusty but trustworthy old cast-iron tree stand with a new and obviously less-reliable aluminum model, but Radko’s anguish was further compounded by his relatives’ not-so-subtle reminders that most of the demolished ornaments had come from Europe and dated back to his great-grandmother’s time. That was the scene, Christmas 1983, in the Scarsdale, N.Y. You can just imagine the sound: A majestic, 14-foot Christmas fir, loaded down with thousands of antique glass ornaments and lights, suddenly teeters off-center and then – with a lumbering, time-stopping swoooosh – crashes to the floor.
All net profits from “Braveheart” (above) will benefit the Liberty Fund of the American Red Cross in greater New York. Radko creates a line of charity ornaments every year. Three of Radko’s favorite ornaments of all he has produced over the past 15 years. “Whispering Pine Church,” from Radko’s newly resurrected Shiny-Brite collection.
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