God in the Details

LeCompte had other interests. He had an uncle who was an architect and a painter, and an older brother who liked to draw. "Art was respected in our home," LeCompte says.

He remembers the exact date his life was changed. July 1, 1939. "It was a gorgeous day. The sky was blue. The air sparkled."

That day his aunt took him on a tour of Washington and he fell in everlasting love with the Washington Cathedral. "It was a blessed day for me," he recalls. "I was dumbfounded. I had never seen such as this."

The building, three decades old, was still under construction. There was a derrick perched above the main nave. There were wooden steps, unfinished columns, tin walls and tarpaper roofs, but visitors could see the grand plan starting to unfold. "I stepped inside and was immediately in another world," he says. "It smelled like wax. There was music."

The aromas, the sounds, the sights. And the windows! LeCompte remembers the North Rose "floating in the dark" and he was struck by the stained glass "glowing in this gloom."

It was, he says -- his eyes twinkling like crystals -- "the most electric hour of my life."

He went again a couple of months later and focused on the stained glass. "I was thunderstruck."

Back in Baltimore, he walked to the Enoch Pratt Free Library and read every book he could on the process. He found affordable scraps of material in a stained-glass shop in Baltimore. "I started making little studies in stained glass," he says, "and selling them for five dollars apiece." The heads were modeled after 13th-century figures in Chartres Cathedral windows.

Drawn to the spaces where stained glass loomed, he frequented certain churches in Baltimore. One day, he dropped by the Cathedral of the Incarnation to glory in the glass, and the canon introduced him to a man named Philip Frohman, who turned out to be the architect of the Washington Cathedral.

When LeCompte eventually visited Frohman in Washington, "he was very welcoming to me," LeCompte says. "He told me something that was priceless. He said there were three qualities he longed for in modern stained glass: clarity, richness and sparkle."

Ever since the teenage LeCompte heard those words, he has tried to piece together his windows -- and his life -- accordingly.

At the cathedral's request, LeCompte created his first window: a beautiful, medieval-style rendering of Saint Dunstan. He was paid $100.