Betty Wales and J. J. Goldman

Ambitious and imaginative, J. J. Goldman filed
a patent for a button-detachment device in 1893.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Jacob J. Goldman and his brother Michael were chugging along in the garment business in New York City.  Their company, Gold Quality Skirts, manufactured skirts for women and girls. 

They were the sons of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before the Civil War and settled in Baltimore.  Their father Samuel had brought a trade from Poland:  he was a tailor who specialized in hoop skirts.

Therefore, it is not surprising that Samuel’s sons went into women’s apparel.  By 1880, Jacob had moved to New York to start his career.  Michael soon joined him.   

At that time, the “needle industries,” as some called the garment business, occupied large swaths of Manhattan.  As far north as Fiftieth Street all the way down through the Village and ending east of City Hall, women’s wear was manufactured in tenements and factory buildings where immigrants toiled over sewing machines and other equipment or worked by hand.  These places were known as sweatshops.*

This 1922 map shows how the garment industry
(red and blue) was eventually consolidated
below 34th Street in Manhattan.

Around 1900, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) began to demand better working conditions and humane treatment of workers.  In 1909 they scored success with 14-week strike in which 20,000 women participated.

That same year, the Goldman brothers met their own kind of success with the new Goldman Costume Company.  By 1910, J. J. was ensconced on Riverside Drive with his wife Lollie and their two children.  

Then J. J. had an idea. It may have arrived via his daughter, Bessie.  Perhaps she brought the Betty Wales books to his attention in the same way that Walt Disney’s daughters showed him Mary Poppins.

Edith Kellogg Dunton published Betty Wales, B.A. under her pseudonym, Margaret Warde, in 1908.

Either way, it made for an unlikely pair:  Jacob Josiah Goldman and Edith Kellogg Dunton – Smith College graduate and author of the bestselling girls’ series Betty Wales.

The daughter of a judge, Edith was born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1875.  At the age of 18, she entered Smith, where she flourished as a writer.  After graduating in 1897, she worked as an English teacher in Rutland.  She also managed publicity for Smith, and received praise for her clever public relations strategies.

Then inspiration struck.  Edith decided to write a series of books for girls, all starring a capable young woman named Betty Wales.  There would be eight books, from Betty Wales, Freshman (1904) to Betty Wales, Business Woman (1917), all published by the Penn Publishing Company in Philadelphia.  Edith used the pseudonym Margaret Warde although her fans soon uncovered her identity.

Edith Kellogg Dunton, 1900

Many aspects of the stories seem autobiographical as Betty makes her way through the fictional Harding College and out into the world, surrounded by a circle of devoted friends.  The books were promoted as “college stories” about modern young women.  They quickly became bestsellers.

Now here came J. J. Goldman with a proposal for Edith and the Penn Publishing Company.

J. J. wanted to create a clothing line for younger women featuring a stylish, contemporary look.  He planned to call the line “Betty Wales Dresses,” and hoped to harness the popularity of the books and its heroine.   

The deal was sealed in 1915.  Within a few years, J. J. renamed his company Betty Wales Dressmakers.  Eventually, after his brother Michael died, he manufactured only Betty Wales dresses.

Ever the innovator, dubbed “father of a great idea,” J. J. devised all sorts of gimmicks to build the brand. 

His opening gambit was that every woman who purchased a Betty Wales dress would receive one of the books.  In the early 1920s he staged a contest guaranteeing a free dress to booksellers who sold a certain number of Betty Wales books.  Another contest asked for slogans; yet another for essays on “Why customers buy Betty Wales dresses.” 

As sales rose, J. J. spent heavily on advertising, especially in women’s magazines.  No one had done that before.  Patent medicine and soap?  Those items had been advertised for years in the Ladies Home Journal. 

But never a women’s clothing brand.

J. J. decided to make Betty Wales dresses available exclusively at one store per city, and eventually, he started a chain of Betty Wales Dress Shops.  By the 1930s, a kind of fervor surrounded the dresses, as reported in The American Cloak and Suit Review:

Betty Wales is a practical Twentieth Century personification of an idea, with the power to materialize to the modern girl or young woman in the form of a dress, a smart, refined, wearable and original dress, more dear to the heart of a girl than any legendary Goddess.

The dresses were popular through World War II and lingered into the early 1960s, although J. J. had long since sold the business and moved to Florida.  He died in 1948.  Edith spent most of her life in Rutland, where she died in 1944.  Penn Publishing continued to turn out juvenile book series through the postwar era.

And Betty Wales – she lifted her lamp beside the golden door of merchandising.   

*The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire killed 145 young women who could not escape the sweatshop because the doors were locked.  That tragedy led to major reforms demanded by organized labor.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/09/betty-wales-and-j-j-goldman.html

Leaving Lord & Taylor

Main entrance to Lord & Taylor (1914)

Goodbye to yet another great American department store.  

Lord & Taylor’s Fifth Avenue flagship palace, built in 1914 in Italian Renaissance style, closed its doors on January 2.

Soon a company called WeWork, a decidedly 21^st century enterprise, will carve the space into offices and meeting rooms available to the general public.  WeWork’s design team takes itself as seriously as did the building’s original architects, the firm of Starrett & Van Vleck.

Of course, it has been many years since shoppers could take the elevator to the tenth floor and dine in the Wedgwood Room or the Loggia: a cup of clam broth, a tongue sandwich; Cantaloupe Lillian for dessert.*  

And decades have passed since a fountain and frieze of glazed terra cotta decorated the walls and ceilings of the Cut Flowers Department.**

The Cut Flowers Department was located on a second-floor balcony; the
 Rookwood Pottery Company of Cincinnati created the architectural faience.

Once upon a time the Toy Department displayed its mechanical water toys in a 7 ’x 16’ tank.  And between 1914 and 1938, the Sixth Avenue Elevated conveniently stopped just a block away from the store.

Yet even as change came to Lord & Taylor, the store had a habit of standing still.  It evoked an earlier city.

I don’t mean that the store was quaint.  Rather, it connected generations:  for us, the tail-end baby boomers, to the city where our mothers emerged from the Depression and war and fully came of age.   

A child feels very comfortable being held by the hand as an adult knowledgeably navigates a large, old building.  Such a place was Lord & Taylor, just like Grand Central Terminal. 

Lord & Taylor (1914)

The store has a long history.  Samuel Lord and George Washington Taylor opened their shop in 1826, far downtown on Catherine Street in a neighborhood now known as Two Bridges.  French satins, Indian shawls, and the like were purchased abroad.  The merchants aimed high.

Over time, Lord & Taylor moved north to the Lower East Side neighborhood, and then to Broadway where Lincoln’s funeral procession passed its black draped building in 1865.  But the city kept moving uptown, and in 1912, the company purchased land on Fifth Avenue between 38^th and 39^th Street.  The new store – with 600,000 square feet of floor space, a carriage and automobile entrance, and an employees’ gymnasium – was completed in 1914. 

Lord & Taylor was designed for women but its president – no surprise – was a man, Samuel Reyburn.  In the early 1920s, he became captivated by “the Little Shavers,” a quirky collection of small male and female dolls with odd names and colorful outfits.  Hand-crafted of cloth, with painted faces, the Little Shavers quickly became a fad among women and girls alike.

Drawings of Little Shavers from an article by Elsie Shaver

Two sisters, Elsie and Dorothy Shaver, had imagined the dolls after moving from Arkansas to New York City after World War I.  Elsie turned them out and Dorothy marketed them.  That is how she met Reyburn, who soon hired her to join his staff.  Dorothy rose through the ranks, establishing the store’s Bureau of Fashion & Design in 1925.  Soon after she was elected to the Board of Directors.  And in 1945, she became president of Lord & Taylor.

$110,000 Earned by Arkansas Girl announced a New York Times headline one year later.  She was the first woman to head a major retail store.  

Dorothy Shaver, 1950s

Dorothy Shaver brought Lord & Taylor into the modern age.  She had a gift for spotting trends and shifting tastes.  During the late 1920s, she decided to introduce modern art and home furnishings.  Off she went to France and brought back furniture, rugs, silver, glassware, and paintings by Utrillo, Braque and Picasso, which were exhibited in the store.

In 1932, Shaver introduced “the American Look,” championing American designers such as Claire McCardell.  She opened branches in the suburbs, helped establish the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, and generously supported the Greater New York Fund and the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies.

Eventually she became a vice president of Associated Dry Goods, which owned Lord & Taylor.  She died in 1959 at the age of 66.

“We came to New York on a fast-running, extra-fare train from Chicago because Elsie was in a hurry to start her career,” Dorothy Shaver once told a reporter.

“I had no thought of a career for myself, then.  I just came along for the ride, and because New York sounded fabulous and exciting.  It was, and has been, fabulous and exciting to me ever since.”

Dorothy Shaver introduced the American Beauty
rose as a symbol of Lord & Taylor

As Joan Didion reflected in her 1967 farewell to New York, Goodbye to All That:

“I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”

And the same for Dorothy Shaver as she strode through her department store, across the travertine floors edged with black Egyptian marble.

She really understood what Lord & Taylor meant to its patrons.

Lord & Taylor on Catherine Street
1830s

*Cantaloupe Lillian, named after the actress Lillian Russell, was a half-cantaloupe with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in the middle.

**The Rookwood Pottery was established in 188o by Maria Longworth Nichols, inspired by her visit to the 1876 U. S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.  Many of its designs relate to the Arts & Crafts Movement.  The company is still in business.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/01/leaving-lord-taylor.html

Mom & Abe Del Monte

Gloria Stromberg, age 17 (1945)

During the war years when my mother was coming of age in a neighborhood called Inwood at the northern tip of Manhattan, she went to the U.S. Employment Service in search of summer jobs. The office had been created by FDR in 1933 to boost Depression-era employment.

She expertly navigated the city via buses and subways. Through the 1930s, her parents owned a series of luncheonettes, including one on East 20^th Street opposite the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace and another right off Times Square. Therefore, she ventured out of her zone more than most of her peers.

In my mind’s eye, I can see her running down the steps to catch the “A” train at 207^th Street.

On her first visit to the employment office, she met with a woman who said, “Next time you look for a job, be sure to wear gloves.”

In 1944, she found work as a clerk at a company on Varick Street, which runs through the neighborhood now called Tribeca. There were blueprints all over the place; the business had a contract with the U.S. Army.

The following summer, my mother filed paperwork at a company that manufactured house-dresses which were exported to South America (as we used to call it). That’s where the manager called one of the clerks into his office and said:

“How many times have I told you? Always try to put the blame on someone else!"

She still laughs about that.

During the summer of 1946, she worked for a hat manufacturer “in the West 30’s,” she recalled.

“Where in the West 30’s?’

“In the millinery district.”

“Where’s the millinery district?”

“At the edge of the garment district.”

So, it looks like Abe Del Monte & Company made its home on West 38^th Street where both the office and plant were located. My mother spent each day copying data from sales sheets into a book. She sat at a desk across from a woman who had endured a mastoidectomy, an operation commonly inflicted on children who had chronic ear infections during the first third of the twentieth century.

Because of some fear related to the mastoidectomy, the woman refused to let the fans run in the windowless room. This made one of the workers, a veteran, very grumpy because he handled the “felts,” which were large, contoured fabric shapes piled high on tables along one side of the room. Eventually they would become hats.

The felts were heavy and probably exuded fine dust.

My mother never met Mr. Del Monte, but she did have her first encounter with a gay man, the hat designer.

It turns out that the company was a pretty big deal, well-known in the millinery world. As his business flourished through the 1920s, Abe Del Monte moved to a large Tudor house in Mt. Vernon, N.Y. He lived there with his wife Essie, three children, a butler, and a cook.

Abe joined the Masons and two country clubs. He became a go-to philanthropist for Jewish causes. And until the war started, he traveled regularly to Europe to check out new fashions.

Born in New York City in 1886, Abe Del Monte started his career while a young boy, working for J.M. Van Note, a successful sales agent for women’s hats. A writer for The Millinery Trade Review took note in 1904:

Truly Abe Del Monte, who has been brought up by James M. Van Note, has developed into a salesman of no little repute. He is a young man who understands the ladies’ hat business and is making himself of use to the trade as well as to his house.

In 1915, Abe started his own company and did so well that in 1918, The Illustrated Milliner ran a longish story about him.

The success of the firm was instantaneous, and amongst his friends you would often hear, “Abe is a wonder. I can’t understand how he handles his big business in so small a place.”

He moved on to larger quarters with a showroom and workshop.

Everything about the new premises points to the continued success of the progressive house of Abe Del Monte & Co.

It would be interesting to know what the writer meant by “progressive.”

After the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911, investigations of industrial working conditions proliferated. Progressive-era regulations were put in place. The United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Union organized the workers at Del Monte & Co.  

My mother didn’t see the factory although it operated in the same building where she worked. But in the course of transcribing sales information, she learned that Del Monte charged Saks twice as much as it charged Sears for the same hat.

The next year my mother graduated from college and never worked in hats again. Like all American women, though, she wore plenty of them until the 1960s arrived.

Abe Del Monte, early 1920s

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/05/mom-abe-del-monte.html

 

First Lady Afternoons

First Ladies Hall pamphlet, 1968.
(Note that Mrs. Johnson's gown, far left, is the most recent dress on display.)

She must have been in her early 50s but seemed ancient to me with her gray hair, wavering voice, and thick eyeglasses.

I’m sure that she offered a snack but the real treat lay spread out on a large table: intricate drawings of the First Ladies’ gowns, which were then displayed on mannequins in vast glass cases in the Smithsonian Institution, along with the muslin patterns she was creating.

Going back to a 3rd grade homework assignment, First Ladies completely, utterly fascinated me. But during the 1960s, just a few anthologies contained brief sanitized biographies of the women. Bottom line: if you were interested, it was largely about the gowns.

Mrs. Sally Taft had been commissioned by the collection’s curator to preserve the designs and details of the dresses that were starting to fall apart after years of being exhibited under bright hot lights. A very fine seamstress, she had worked in couture at some of New York’s best department stores. Her correspondence with the curator, which resides in the Smithsonian’s archives, suggests that she came to the project through a mutual acquaintance at Julius Garfinckel’s, an exclusive women’s clothing store in Washington, D.C.

One of my mother’s friends had arranged the visits with Mrs. Taft. Thrilling! Every few months during my last years of elementary school, instead of walking home from school I went over to her house. I knew a great deal about the First Ladies and she knew everything about the dresses. We found lots to talk about. 

The ladies who followed Eleanor Roosevelt into the modern era, along with Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and Dolly Madison, held little interest for me. They were far too popularized. But the mournful mid-19th century women whose husbands were military heroes (of a sort), who never wanted to come to Washington, rarely saw visitors, holed up on the dark second floor of the White House – very intriguing. Perhaps unbalanced, too, although I didn’t quite know the word.

One of my clearest memories is of Mrs. Taft describing how the gowns exuded the ancient odor of perspiration.

So many years later, the Smithsonian’s exhibition smartly focuses on role and image with minimal whitewash. Some gowns and memorabilia are also displayed. The staff includes experts in chemistry and textiles as well as historians.

Sally Taft’s muslin patterns are history, too. It’s hard to argue with technology. What I love most about this story, though, is that in 1966 the Smithsonian curator didn’t think the job called for an academic. She was just looking for the best dressmaker she could find.

*Mrs. Sally Taft was not related to President Taft.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/first-lady-afternoons.html