Pay your respects to ‘The Bongfather,’ a Eugene paraphernalia artisan  

Work starts early at Special K Glass, where Kris Uhlhorn and his squad comprise a well-oiled, lean, mean, bong-making machine, soundtracked by the roar of a furnace and MF DOOM’s “Rapp Snitch Knishes.” 

The team gets to work each day around 7:30 a.m., handing off each step of the process to the next person with assembly-line efficiency. Each piece takes just minutes to make inside the Goshen garage space, charting a path from red-hot molten glass to bespoke pieces outfitted with speckled colors and added spirals. 

Call them bongs, water pipes, functional glass, whatever you’d like: Uhlhorn’s bread-and-butter product occupies a number of strange half-spaces between stereotypical college dorm-room movie prop and investment-worthy functional pieces and artwork, as well as between still federally illegal drug paraphernalia and accepted fixture of a cannabis culture now more mainstream than ever. 

In 2003, a crackdown on paraphernalia called Operation Pipe Dreams brought federal agents to the front doors of big names in cannabis, including Tommy Chong as well as prominent Eugene-based pipe glassblower Jerome Baker, for selling pipes over the internet. 

Twenty-three years later, cannabis paraphernalia is rampantly available online at all price points, with many décor-friendly brands leaning into pipes and bongs that look more like sculptural vases than something to pass around at a party.

Uhlhorn grew up in Eugene, started blowing glass in Seattle in his 20s and then moved back to Eugene to raise his children. He has had a front row seat to the waxing and waning trends in the glass industry: the pipe frenzy of the 1990s, the bong heyday of the 2000s, a shift toward dab rigs in the 2010s, and a pandemic-fueled return of the bong for at-home smoking. 

That also meant a career split by a firm demarcation line, from technically illegal interstate sales of bongs packed into a car, to an increasingly celebrated strain of American folk art he’s free to /sell over social media.

Truly being the Bongfather is a big name to fulfill. It’s a nickname he and a friend jokingly gave to a know-it-all glassblower they both knew. Then Uhlhorn took it for himself when he started making pieces. He thinks he has lived up to the name.

“I’ve literally made half a million pipes and bongs,” he said. “There’s a pipe or bong on every city block, in every city in Oregon and Washington, there’s that many Special K bongs out there. I’ve lived up to my own nickname.” 

How liquid molten glass becomes finished bongs

The Special K team works quickly, a necessity in a medium that can only be sculpted at superhot temperatures but cools off with each passing second. 

First, red-hot molten glass is gathered from a pot furnace, shaped by hand using wet newspaper as a buffer and rolled into colored glass that absorbs into the blob. Then a bubble is blown into the blob with a blowpipe, which forms the internal chamber, but must be rolled to keep the bubble even. Picture a slow-dripping glob of molasses, spun to keep it from unevenly drooping. Now imagine it’s around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

From there, the spinning continues as another person keeps blowing the glass to swell it to proper shape. A blowtorch is a handy tool for keeping the glass at a malleable temperature, as is a smaller “glory hole” reheat furnace. Finishing touches — and Special K’s signature spirals and airtight glass-on-glass downstem pieces — are added, before joining the fleet of already-completed bongs in an annealing oven. 

The team moves smoothly between these stages, despite the challenge of wielding molten glass in a tight workspace. Uhlhorn described the process, which involves different people responsible for each step and passing off the glass as it makes its way to a finished piece, as akin to a classic basketball drill. 

“It’s a lot like the three-man weave,” he said. “We have a five-man weave. You start with the pass, and you pass it off to someone else, and you pass it off to someone else, and you’re all these moving parts.”

When your work goes from illegal to everywhere

Eugene is known as the birthplace of the underground glass movement — artisans working on bongs and pipes at a time when it was  still a state and federal crime to make drug paraphernalia, as chronicled in the documentary “Degenerate Art: The Art and Culture of Glass Pipes” — thanks to the influence of Bob Snodgrass. 

Snodgrass, who recently turned 80 years old, is a glassblower who traveled with The Grateful Dead in the 1980s and sold his “Glass by Snodgrass” pipes in a van-turned-shop in the informal “Shakedown Street” vendors in parking lots outside of concerts. He landed in Eugene and kick-started a pipe-making movement in the city.

As a hometown kid, it’s no wonder Uhlhorn found his way into glass blowing. The Bongfather grew up in Eugene, on 26th and Hilyard, and was in high school when Snodgrass’ pipes began to spread. He picked up his first Snodgrass pipe at the Oregon Country Fair in 1989. 

In Seattle, Uhlhorn’s glassblowing studio was across the lake from Dale Chihuly’s famous boathouse studio. Though Uhlhorn said the fine art glassblowing world has largely looked down on bongmaking, any notes of Chihuly influence in the Special K’s speckled layers of color may not be misplaced. 

“Young people working for Chihuly right across the water would come over to our shop when they were done, get high and make bongs,” he said. 

In the 2000s, when Baker, Chong and other glassblowers caught up in Operation Pipe Dreams got in trouble, Uhlhorn was wary of shipping across state lines. Instead, he would drive his wares to old-school head shops up and down the I-5 corridor between Eugene and Seattle; on the occasions where he was pulled over with merchandise in the car, he said, police officers would idly check out the glass pieces, but not put him in cuffs. 

Going from that clandestine process to an era of wide legalization was a watershed moment for Uhlhorn’s career. (Like many online sellers, Special K’s online material does not specify the pieces are to be used for marijuana, skirting federal regulations on selling drug paraphernalia with vague language, like many online sellers.)

“It took a long time to muster up the courage to actually even create a website and try to sell directly to consumers outside of Oregon and Washington,” he said. 

Instagram, bongs and community

Each month, Special K sells around $20,000 worth of bongs just over its Instagram livestream sales, on an account followed by more than 47,000 people. Its website is also direct-to-consumer, but those transactions are nowhere near the volume of the ones over livestreams. 

Julia Rhodes manages Special K’s Instagram presence, running livestream sales and getting video footage of the bongs-in-progress. She knows the audience’s dedication firsthand: she started off as a collector of Uhlhorn’s pieces, before realizing they were local to Eugene and offering to help with social media.

Though the account has tens of thousands of followers, she said, the goal is to connect with a like-minded community of glass piece collectors and bong enthusiasts, not just sell merchandise. 

“We’re not trying to become millionaires,” she said. “We’re just trying to show people how beautiful this industry is.”

Uhlhorn’s son, Will, has also been a useful voice when it comes to internet bong evangelizing. He has millions of followers across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram as WillSurvives, where he documents his attempts to live comfortably in built-from-scratch set-ups in off-grid environments. 

It’s not as much about a flash-in-the-pan viral moment, he said, as it is building a steady core of collecting customers, though Uhlhorn is happy to hop onto a trend and has experimented with daily giveaways and, for a time, nonfungible tokens during the NFT craze. 

Some suggestions, though, have been vetoed. 

“He wanted me to do all kinds of dances, we’re talking like eight years ago,” Uhlhorn said. “I was like, ‘Hell, no, I’m not gonna do any dances.’”