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Trained at his father's kiln. Designer Willet acquired a second-generation ease with his materials which has enabled him to perpetrate many a monkish jest in solemn designs. The first work he ever submitted to Architect Cram showed a young, red-haired craftsman offering a sample window to a stern king with Cram's features. In classical script appeared the legend: Non tam bona quam quaedam fortasse mon tam mala quam quaedam alia certe.* Cram looked it over, asked: "What is that little devil doing whispering in my ear?" Said Willet: "Oh, that's C. J. [Connick] telling you the window is no good." In a recent job, a Spanish War window given by the widow of Secretary of War Russell Alexander Alger (1897-99) to the Grosse Point Memorial Church near Detroit, Willet showed Theodore Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill. When he learned that Mrs. Alger did not like Roosevelt, he merely changed Roosevelt's face to Alger's.
From his farm near Ambler, Pa., Henry Lee Willet drives every day into West Philadelphia where he has a big, three-story studio and about 20 craftsmen working full-time on jobs which at the moment include windows for Minneapolis, St. Louis and Louisville. He pays apprentices $12 a week, experienced artists as much as $85, mechanics according to the union scale, which is $1 per hr. in Philadelphia. Like Lawrence Saint, he is a Presbyterian elder, recently persuaded the Presbytery of Philadelphia North to establish a committee of social action. He and Saint are good friends but he thinks Saint's life-long labors at making his own glass (TIME, July 20, 1936) are "all hooey." Mr. Willet buys the glass he uses from English craftsmen or from William Benko of Milton, West Virginia, whom he rates as the best U. S. glassmaker. Despite this businesslike attitude and despite having produced several of the best examples of medieval stained-glass humor in the U. S., Willet has very serious theories on window designing, which he regards as nearer to music than painting. He prefers the 12th Century masters who used large pieces of glass in the primary colors, simply juxtaposed, rather than designers of the 13th Century, who broke up their glowing blues and reds in complex patterns at the risk of purplish vibrations of light. "Purple addles your brain," Henry Willet says.
Last week, at the new Universalist Church of the Restoration in Germantown, Pa., designer Willet's latest and most guild-minded window was dedicated. It was commissioned by Architect J. Roy Carroll Jr., in the belief that, if the church had at least one good stained-glass window, parishioners would be inspired to replace the others, which are plain. When the contractors, subcontractors and workmen heard that Henry Willet was designing a "Workmen's Window" to represent the various trades engaged in building the church, they clubbed together to pay for it. Designer Willet happily put Architect Carroll at the bottom of the window, looking pale, and the stained-glass craftsman at the top, under a benevolent angel. A vine etched in gold joins the 14 figures in between—iron worker, excavator, stone mason, carpenter, woodcarver, electrician, roofer, plumber, plasterer, painter—and lettering sets forth: "We Are Laborers Together; Let Every Man Take Heed How He Buildeth."