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STAR-TRIBUNE, SEPTEMBER, 1999
Smoothing the Jagged Edges By ROSALIND BENTLEY In your most private moments, do you ever think, "I'm doing the wrong thing for a living"? Not because you've had a bad day at the office, but because you know just as sure as you're livingt your job doesn't quite fit who you are. Kind of like wearing a poorly cut jacket. You can get by, but you're always pulling at the fabric, trying to make something fit that never will. And do you ever sit, content with your 401k and three weeks' vacation, wondering what would've happened if you'd followed your heart? Do you wonder if you sold out for comfort? Look, then, to a spot in south Minneapolis - near Hiawatha Avenue in the shadow of the grain elevators. Here's a little bungalow that is a grand and glorious mess inside. Damaged stained-glass windows lean against walls like worn volumes in an overstuffed bookcase. Sheets and chips of colored glass, organized by hue, are stacked carefully in plywood bins that wrap all the way around the living and dining rooms - well, what were the living and dining rooms. A mammoth shop table takes up all but a few feet of the floor. Its length is covered with pliers, grinders and shards of aquamarine, blood red and a gold that looks like a beam of harvest moonlight. Every available inch of wall is blanketed with posters, calenders and photographs of stained glass in every possible composition - Tiffany lamps, church windows, dime-store sun catchers. This is Howarda's place. He knows something about what-ifs and can-bes. About fifteen years ago, he operated a punch press machine at Boker's Inc., a Minneapolis metal-stamping plant that makes washers. Honorable work. Spirit-dulling work. At 25, it seemed to be his present and his future - running machines on the second shift from 3:30 p.m. to midnight. Maybe he'd get a promotion and move to days, but he'd never run the company. Then, 13 years ago, he began taking classes in stained glass. Now, change doesn't happen overnight, and sometimes it takes years to hone courage and skill. But once sharpened, the two can be wielded with life-altering effect. Just over a year ago, Pauna used them both. He left Boker's and struck out on his own with a stained- glass making and repair business. At 38, he is not the most experienced in town and he is not the highest-paid. There are months when he isn't sure if he'll make all of his bills. But he is respected by his peers, sought by customers and, most important, he is following his heart, doing his life's work. "I know now that this is what I'm supposed to do. I just feel it," he says. "It's kind of a blessing. You know you're 50 or 60 years old and you're thinking, `Maybe I could have made it.' But thing is, you didn't, because you didn't try. I've been at this now for over a year. What's the worst that could happen? I could lose it all and have to get another job. But at least I could say I tried." Sharing his joy K this going in: Howard Pauna is a talker. Ask him at noon about his work and he'll talk seamlessly for the next hour, relaying the story of how he got started, why he does it, how he does it, how others before him did it. The tale is as familiar and resonant as a leather-bound classic: Little guy gets out from under the corporate monster's greasy thumb to chart his own path. What makes this all the more compelling is the teller. Pauna doesn't come across as a braggart, not in the least. This guy practically dances a jig when he talks about glass. His eyes brighten, his voice rachets up an octave, his soft, rounded frame shakes as he re-creates through gestures the huge Tiffany church window he saw last week. He rifles through a massive old oak desk and finds a stack of pictures. "Look - that's one piece of glass! Can you believe it?" he says with the sort of aw-gosh passion that people usually reserve for photos of their children's first Little League games. It wasn't like he spent his whole life wanting to do this. As a kid, when his family went to church at St. Luke's Lutheran in Minneapolis, he paid more attention to the sanctuary windows than the sermons. At the end of his fifth-grade year, his dad bought into the family dairy farm in Menahga, Minn., and moved him, his mom, brother and sister there. The church there didn't have such pretty distractions as St. Luke's, so that was that. By the time he graduated from high school, he'd tired of farm life and moved back to Minneapolis. For a guy with a high school diploma and with a recession going on, Pauna did well to get entry- level work at a machine shop. And true to the times, he soon got laid off. It was the odd job here and there for a couple of years until his uncle got him the job at Boker's, running a punch press. It sounds exactly like what it is: It punches holes in washers. Day after day after month after year. "The job was OK, but I was like, `Do I really want to spend the next 25 years there?' I couldn't see it," Pauna says. The money from the monotony helped Pauna acquire two things - a modest home and a serious substance abuse problem. The drugs and alcohol numbed the discomfort of doing a job and living a life that seemed as though it wouldn't move. Sometimes he'd get high at night and then be too messed up to go to work the next day. And drunken driving once got him a DWI arrest. There was no wife, no kids. But there was his little house, his salvation. So he set about fixing it up. He took a home improvement class through a local community education program. The teacher mentioned stained glass during one of the sessions. Pauna thought a couple of those windows might spruce up the place. He signed up for a $10 glass-making class at Roosevelt Community school and, well, let him tell it: "I took this class from this little old lady and when I finished her class then I took every stained-glass class that every studio offered in town. Then I flew to Cincinnati for a week and took a course out there and I guess I was pretty good at it; then this little old lady says to me, `Howard, I'm going to retire. Do you want to take over for me?' and I said, `I can't afford to volunteer,' and she said, `Oh, you get paid $12 an hour,' and I said, `Yeah, I think I can do that. . . . ' " By then, he'd moved up to days at Boker's and was picking up weekend teaching gigs at established studios such as Gaytee Stained Glass. This began about an eight-year juggle of five hours of sleep a night and two jobs - one he had to do, the other he felt called to do. Pauna became so consumed by the meticulous work of glass-cutting that one year he took his entire two weeks of vacation and sort of apprenticed himself at Gaytee just to get better. "I would have paid them to work there," he says. "It would be like taking a college course. I was hungry." And soon he wanted to get high less and less. "The stained glass was a real salvation," says John Salisbury, owner of Gaytee. "I'd hate to think what he'd be doing now if he hadn't found this." For the love of it What Pauna did is what Dr. Debra Condren says she wishes most of her clients would do. She's a business psychgist, president of SuperiorCareer.com, and based in New York City and San Francisco, Calif. The people she works with make far more money than Pauna but are just as miserable as he used to be. Making huge amounts of money as a corporate executive is one thing; being happy is another. Condren hears all the reasons why people feel they can't make a change - their consumer debt is too high, they have kids in college, their wives would kill them, their families would disapprove. All are valid things to consider, she says, but in the end are not good enough reasons to stay stuck. "I mean, what this guy did - using his vacation to work as basically an intern - that's motivated," she says. "You have to start with a vision, something that inspires one to take the pain of self-discipline. This is not a quick fix. Even when you're having a down day, you have to keep going." And Pauna certainly had bad days. They usually came on Mondays, when everybody at the plant talked about their weekends. Partying, hanging out, is what they others would say. Things he did before he dried out and got clean. Hey, Howard, what did you do? And Pauna would pull out his pictures of the intricate bent panel lampshades he'd made, or the cracked church windows he'd repaired and he'd tell them how he did it. "What are you doing that stuff for?" was the question he usually got back. Pauna would slide his pictures back into his pocket and move on. If his feelings were bruised, he didn't let on. "I knew, one of these days, `I'm going to be out of this place,' " he says quietly. His break came about a year ago. A former student passed his name to Minneapolis chiropractor Dr. Keith Prussing. It was a big job. Fifteen windows. A ffigure check. Prussing remembers. He could see the passion, as well as the hesitancy, in Pauna the minute he walked through the door of the 99-year-old mansion that houses Prussing's office. "Howard was knowing but not jumping yet, which I think most of us do," Prussing says. "We have the golden handcuffs on. We say, `I'll start living in three years when I pay this off,' or, `When I get seniority I'll do this.' But there ought to be more to work than effort in exchange for pay and benefits." Prussing encouraged him, as did Prussing's office manager, Fay Atchison, who remembers how Pauna removed, then swooped up each glass window with the ease and joy of a parent picking up a toddler.
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