Tom Edwards

Born and raised in Manhattan Beach, California, Tom Edwards took his first ceramics class at Mira Costa High School when he was fifteen years old. “I remember being very excited about the process of pottery right from the start. It was like magic for me as I had always been really bad at drawing and painting, and here was something artistic that I really enjoyed.” The summer before his senior year, Tom's teacher loaned him a potter's wheel for the summer and he took it home to make pots in his basement. “By the end of the summer, I had all these pots made so I decided to do a local craft fair. I ended up making three hundred dollars, which was a lot of money for a high school kid in 1973.”

While pursuing a B.A. degree in Art History at UC Santa Barbara, Tom took two years of studio art classes in ceramics and sculpture. During his senior year, he realized that he wasn't cut out for the world of graduate studies in art history, so he decided to make pots for a living. “A lot of my friends were graduating with engineering degrees and they were looking for 'real' jobs. The thought of a real job was daunting, so I concocted this plan to make pots for a living. It was so naive!” With a thousand dollars saved from a summer job and a working automobile, Tom started renting studio space in 1978 at Santa Barbara Ceramic Design, a small art pottery factory. Working at SBCD turned out to be a smart move as the potters and artists there were an excellent learning environment for someone trying to make a living in clay. Tom's early work were functional pots with colorful glazes, the kind of pots you saw everywhere in the 1970's.

By 1983, Tom had a relatively successful line of pottery which was sold mainly through retail craft fairs. It was at this time that he came up with the idea of Wally. “A friend of mine was in med school and she had a delirious patient who kept talking about Nappy. After a week or so, she realized that he was talking about a dog. I made this weird little plate to commemorate the incident and I really liked the way it looked. I was compelled to make more pots like this. I got the name 'Wally' from these British guys I worked with. Calling someone a Wally in the '80's was like calling them a nerd. One day I started drawing these really simple Wally jokes on the pots just for my own amusement. When I took them to a craft fair, the response was incredible. Within a month, I had an order for a complete dinnerware set and people were asking for more Wally adventures.”

The next year Tom moved to Los Angeles where he built a small studio in his sister's garage. He stopped making his previous line of pottery and he began decorating all of his pots with cartoon imagery. With his work selling well in galleries, Tom took on a full-time employee to help with painting and shipping. In 1986, Tom married Lori Crane, his college sweetheart, and the next year they purchased a home near the Fairfax area of Los Angeles. They built a small studio in the detached garage in the backyard and installed a 16 cu. ft. gas kiln outside. The demand for Wallyware was growing and Wally's adventures started to take on a more political bend. One of the big sellers at this time was, "Wally urges Spuds Mackenzie to seek treatment at the Betty Ford clinic." Robin Edwards was born in 1989 and Monica Edwards followed in 1991. Lori received her PhD in Public Health in 1991, just four days after Monica was born. In the fall of 1991, Lori got a job offer with AMC Cancer Research in Lakewood, Colorado. “It was an offer we couldn't turn down. I remember thinking how bad we'd feel if we didn't make the move to Colorado,” said Tom. This turned out to be especially true because the day after the Edwards-Crane family left Los Angeles, the LA Riots began. “It was a surreal experience, to say the least,” mused Tom.

Tom and Lori's new home in Evergreen was big and the studio remodel job was ambitious. The studio took five months to complete and, like all great remodeling projects, it cost more than estimated. Putting an 18 cu. ft. propane-fired shuttle kiln inside the structure with proper permits turned out to be a real challenge. By the fall of 1992, the project was complete, Tom had hired a new assistant and they were producing pots for the holiday season.

Wally's adventures continued to become more bizarre and outrageous in the 1990s. A big media event in Colorado in 1993 was the ill-fated cross-country ski trip of Ken Torp and six others in Aspen, CO. For two days, the TV news broadcast dire reports on the lost skiers. When the two leaders of the group skied out on their own, taking the only stove with them, the media turned on Ken Torp, the guy responsible for leaving five people in a snowstorm without a stove. Fortunately, all seven survived the experience. Tom was quick to capitalize on this story with, “Wally and Ken Torp go rock climbing. Ken decides that Wally can't keep up.” The cartoon shows Ken cutting Wally's rope. This one design led to numerous newspaper articles about Tom and Wally, an eight minute spot on "Good Afternoon Colorado", and an angry “I'm gonna be his worst nightmare!” threat from Ken Torp. “It was really fun to have vocalized the public outrage over this event,” said Tom, “even if it did make me worry for a few weeks about what Ken was going to do to me if he ever got hold of me.” Ten years later, the Denver Post ran a lengthy “where are they now” article about the seven skiers, and one paragraph in the story was devoted to Tom and Wally's part in the aftermath of the event!

In 1993 Tom and his assistant, Christopher Smith, also took on the job of creating the editorial cartoon, “Lookout World”. Featured in the editorial pages of The Canyon Courier, The Columbine Courier and The High Timber Times, it was a unique collaboration that featured Smith's wonderful cartooning skills and Tom's biting point of view. “Chris is a great guy to work with and we really learned the craft of editorial cartooning by doing that job together.” In 1996 they won the Colorado Journalists' award for 'Best local newspaper editorial cartoon." Says Tom, “It was so cool! They had this 'academy awards' type dinner at The Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. All the local radio, TV and newspaper journalists were there. They would read the nominees and then the winners. It was really fun to win and it was really funny to have two guys who had never even taken a class in journalism be recognized like that.” After three years of entertaining their readers in Evergreen, “Lookout World” ended when Chris moved to Boulder.

The “Lookout World” experience inspired Tom to create the “Wally” cartoon which ran for eight years in The Canyon Courier. "Having a weekly cartoon deadline was a great way to develop ideas and learn to draw." When the newspaper acquired a new editor in 1994, the Wally cartoon was canned for the sake of a slicker looking newspaper. While numerous Wallyfans threatened to riot "like Evergreen has never seen before", the passing of the Wally cartoon was observed peacefully.

Tom's current life is a blur of making pots, driving his daughters to various activities and training for long distance races. "When I turned forty, I hadn't run much at all for over ten years. I was a serious runner in high school and college, but I lost interest in the sport in my thirties." Tom now is back in the kind of shape he was in the early years of high school. "Yeah, it's kind of like living in 'The Twilight Zone' of running. I'm running the same marathon times I could run my sophomore and junior years of high school for the past few years (just under three hours), and I should be able to run like this well into my fifties." We'll see! For an overview of Tom's running career and pics of him running in the Alferd Packer trail marathon, take a look at his bio at runningplaces.com.