Welcome to our dining room! Pull up a chair. Not that one, that one's for the gravy boat.

We're Stephen and Alan. Stephen is a pharmacist at a hospital here in Long Beach, and Alan is a paralegal downtown. We've been together since 1987, which makes twelve years, a house, a cat named Homer and, at last count, four hundred and twelve pieces of Fiesta dinnerware in eleven colors, both the old stuff and the new. We each wrote some of this page, and we've signed our parts, so you'll know who to argue with.

How It Started | The Collection by Color | Sunday Dinners | The Piece We Fought Over | How We Display It
VINTAGE OR NEW? HOW TO TELL | OUR WANT LIST

It started with one turquoise pitcher at a swap meet in the summer of 1989. I'd been dragged along by Stephen, who likes to get there at six in the morning with a flashlight like a burglar. I was bored, I was cranky, and then I saw it on a blanket between a box of eight-track tapes and a lamp shaped like a poodle: a round, flat pitcher shaped like a fat disk, with rings on both sides, in the most beautiful blue-green I'd ever seen. Twelve dollars. The man said it was "real old Fiesta, from the thirties."

I carried it around the rest of the morning like a baby. I put it on the kitchen table and kept moving it so the light would hit it. And then I went to the library, because I'm a paralegal and I can't help it, and I found a collector's book on Fiesta, and I learned two things.

The first was that Fiesta had a whole history. The Homer Laughlin China Company in West Virginia brought it out in 1936. It was designed by their art director, Frederick Rhead, with those Art Deco rings, and it came in bright solid colors at a time when most people's dishes were white with little flowers. The first colors were red, cobalt blue, yellow, light green and ivory, and turquoise was added the next year.

The second thing I learned was that my pitcher wasn't from the thirties. The line had stopped in 1973, and then it came back in 1986, in new colors, and turquoise came back with it in 1988. My "real old Fiesta" was about one year old. I wasn't even mad. I was hooked. Now I wanted a real old one too.

The man at the swap meet wasn't lying, by the way. He just didn't know. Most people don't. That's why we wrote the Vintage or New? page.

— Alan

Here's the inventory, as of the Labor Day weekend. I keep it on index cards in a recipe box, one card per piece, with the color, the shape, the mark, where we got it, what we paid and who was right. "Old" means made from 1936 to 1973. "New" means 1986 and after. We only list colors with the same name together when they share a name, like the old cobalt and the new cobalt. They are not the same blue, believe me.

About the red. The old red glaze, the orange-red that everybody pictures when they think of Fiesta, was colored with uranium oxide. Yes, that uranium. Hold a Geiger counter up to an old red plate and it clicks. (A radiologist friend from my hospital did it at our house one Sunday, and the whole table went quiet.) The amount is small and it's perfectly safe on a shelf, but I'm a pharmacist and I'm not putting food on it. Our 38 red pieces are for looking at only. They live on the top shelf, and nobody eats off them, ever.

About the gaps. The colors changed a lot over the years. Red went away during the war, in 1943, and didn't come back until 1959. In 1951 light green, cobalt and ivory were dropped and four new colors came in: gray, rose, chartreuse and forest green, the "fifties colors." Medium green came along in 1959, and it's the hardest of all the old colors to find, which is why there isn't a single piece of it in the table above. (See the Want List. See it often.) Since 1986 the new line has had its own colors: white, black, rose, apricot and cobalt at the start, then, among others, yellow, turquoise, periwinkle, sea mist green, lilac, persimmon and chartreuse over the following years.

What we skip. We don't collect the new white or black (Alan says they look like a restaurant), and we don't collect apricot (we just don't), and we have made a solemn vow about lilac, which you can read about on the want list.

— Stephen

Here's our philosophy: dishes are for using. We don't collect Fiesta just to look at it behind glass (though the red, see above, never leaves the cabinet). We collect it so we can set a table that looks like a party every single week.

Sunday dinner at our house is at six. The regulars are our friends Jimmy and Kevin from down the block, Dora from Stephen's hospital, who brings the wine and the gossip, and every other Sunday Stephen's mother, Frances, who was skeptical about all of this for years and now asks to see the new pieces before she takes her coat off.

The rule is no two plates the same color at one table. The bowls never match the plates. The cups never match the saucers. Everything matches everything, because that's the genius of it. Mr. Rhead designed it so you could mix the colors any way you liked, and more than sixty years later, it still works.

Stephen does the main course, usually something that came out of his mother's kitchen, enchiladas or chile verde or her albondigas soup, which we serve in the cobalt tureen. I do the side dishes and the setting of the table, which takes me about forty-five minutes, because I'm an artist. Frances has started bringing flan, on a turquoise chop plate, so it will be "in the colors."

Tonight is the Labor Day weekend dinner. It's ninety-two degrees, so it's a cold supper: Stephen's gazpacho in the yellow bowls, chicken salad on the light green plates, and Frances's flan. I've set it already. It's gorgeous. Don't tell Stephen I said so before he did.

— Alan

His version. It was June of 1997, at an estate sale in Lakewood. On a card table in the garage was an old red carafe, the round one with the stopper, complete and perfect except for one tiny nick on the foot that you'd need a magnifying glass to find. The lady wanted eighty-five dollars. Alan said, and I quote, "Eighty-five dollars for a jar you won't even put water in?" We argued in the garage. We argued in the car. We argued on the 405. We did not buy the carafe.

The next afternoon I came home from my Sunday shift at the hospital and the carafe was in the middle of the dining room table, with a bow on it. He'd driven back to Lakewood for the last day of the sale and talked her down to seventy.

— Stephen

My version. All of that is true, except I argued very reasonably, and I'd like the record to show that I got it for seventy. Also, it is still a jar you can't put water in. It's the most beautiful thing we own.

— Alan

About half of it is in daily use and lives in the kitchen cupboards, stacked by size, not color, which drives Alan crazy. The rest is in the dining room, in the one very sturdy china cabinet: a big oak cabinet from the 1940s that we found at an antique mall in Orange and that took four men to get up our front steps.

• The order. Alan arranges each shelf like a rainbow, red to periwinkle. I move one piece out of order every few weeks to see how long it takes him to notice. The record is eleven minutes.
• The top shelf is the old red, all 38 pieces, with the carafe in the middle like a queen.
• Plates stand up in grooves cut along the back of each shelf, so you see the whole face with the rings.
• Earthquake putty. We live in Southern California. Every piece in that cabinet sits on a dab of museum wax, the kind that holds things down in a shake, and the doors latch. We learned the hard way. The Northridge quake in 1994 rattled us all the way down here, and we lost an old ivory teacup and the lid of a gray sugar bowl. The sugar bowl lid is on the want list.
• Light. There's a little light inside the cabinet, and at night, with the room dark, it looks like a jukebox. Frances says it's the first thing she sees when she pulls up.

— Stephen

Vintage or New? How to Tell  ·  Our Want List

Friends on the Boulevard. Stop by Tom & David's Home Page, right here on our street: ten years together, two dogs, a garden and a very small kitchen. We'd bet that kitchen could use a turquoise pitcher. And if you collect colored glass instead of colored pottery, see the Prairie Pinks Depression Glass Club in Topeka.