Seattle, Washington Fall Fashions, 1955

 

Mrs. Hoge Sullivan wears a Ben Reig suit of salt and pepper tweed while she rides the miniature railroad at the Woodland Park Zoo with her daughter Mary Lou. 

This was about all that Town & Country wrote about this beautiful woman in their 1955 August issue but the internet yielded much more. 

1) The fashion designer Ben Reig was called dean of the New York Couture Group. 

2) Her husband served in Africa and Italy during WW II. And he was the first manager of Seattle's Space Needle! 

3) I found an earlier picture on eBay that was no longer for sale of Mrs. J. Hoge Sullivan and her daughter Mary Lou! 

I love her swimsuit!

 

Mrs. Gordon Ingham wears a B. H. Wragg jumper ensemble of Shamokin wool at the Seattle Yacht Club. 

1) B. H. Wragg was famous at that time for its separates to be mixed and matched, the fabrics often designed by famous artists.

2) Upon the passing of our model above at the age of 77, The Seattle Times wrote about how she (then Annette Ingham Lobb) and Gordon Ingham met. Her father took her abroad "to discourage an undesirable suitor." 

The plot twisted: Young Gordon Ingham, a fellow passenger, proposed on Dal Lake in the Vale of Kashmir. She accepted. They stayed married until his death in 1988.

Gordon and Annette raised four sons and were active in many charitable causes. But what really intrigued me was that she was a prolific although unpublished poet. I love what Annette said:

I would like to have been a really good writer, but I know I am not. But I like to write, and so I do...it's good therapy.

And amen!

 

 Mrs. Thomas A. Davies is the great-granddaughter of one of Seattle's founders and is program director of the Seattle Art Museum Guild.  She's wearing a dressmaker suit of Lesur wool (one of the best quality fabrics of the 1960s).

I couldn't find anything else out about Mrs. Davies but there is plenty about her great-grandfather, David Thomas Denny, a member of the Denny Party that traveled by covered wagon to Oregon, and then by ship to Seattle, landing September 25, 1851.

 

 

Mrs. William L. Green is shown at the Seattle Flower Mart wearing a box-pleated suit of red wool by Henry Frechtel. I came to a dead end with Mrs. Green but Oh, how I would love to go to the Seattle Flower Mart! And Pinterest is full of models wearing beautiful Henry Frechtel designs.

 

I love the photo above! First of all that automobile. Look at all the leg room! Next, that suit!

Mrs. Lawrence H. Arnold arrives at Canlis Charcoal Broiler with her husband in a Packard Patrician. She wears British worsted by Irene. 

1) There was hardly a leading lady in Hollywood in the 1930s who was not dressed by Irene! And in the early 1960s Doris Day film Midnight Lace, that gorgeous black lace outfit was designed by Irene.

2) Canlis is Seattle's landmark fine dining destination, the most upscale dining experience there. It is still owned by the same family, in a midcentury-modern house. The "old-school posh" restaurant is temporarily closed of course but I got hungry just looking at pictures of the food plates on their website. 

3) Mr. Arnold died in 1962 of cancer and a library was donated in his memory, and that of his mother, to the Hutch, world known institute for cancer research. 

 

Mrs. Charles Callahan is at the Seattle Tennis Club wearing a casual tweed dress by Mollie Parnis. Parnis dressed two presidents' wives, Mamie Eisenhower and Lady Bird Johnson. 

 

 

Mrs. Walter P. Shiel, Jr., the former Barbara Jean Harlow, is watching the Kalakala Ferry at Coleman Dock. She is wearing a coat of Anglo tweed by Frank Gallant who designed coats and suits for Saks, Lord and Taylor, etc. I found Barbara Jean as a 12 year old in the 1940 census. 

 

Not a very good picture but I love the neckline of Mrs. Peter Barrett's cocktail dress of silk and rayon satin by Ceil Chapman that she is wearing at the Seattle Yacht Club. 

Ceil Chapman designed glamorous cocktail and party dresses in the 1940s to 1960s. She was Marilyn Monroe's favorite designer. She designed Elizabeth Taylor's trousseau in 1950 for her wedding to Conrad Hilton.

 

I'll end my three 1955 fashion posts from Town & Country with a dress for the young. Miss Sally Jensen and Mr. George Philip Koon are at the Olympic Hotel. Her ballgown is white lace over ombré shades of tulle by Howard Greer who designed for Katharine Hepburn. I found plenty of Koon family members in Seattle but nothing specifically for George. I did find a Sally Jensen in the 1940 census, which would have made her 18 in 1955. That sounds about right.

The magazine said this about Seattle in 1955:

It is a sleeves-up city which enjoys meeting new challenges and takes a fierce pride in solving its own problems without government assistance.

 I didn't make that up, folks. I promise. 

 

New York Fall Fashions, 1955

 Some of my favorite magazines from my collection of vintage women's magazines are the fashion mags...Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Town & Country. 

And now that I can only fantasize about dressing up and going somewhere, I love paging through the old magazines that showed the fashions of my mother and grandmother's past. 

When I looked through my 1955 Town & Country I was reminded of the wool suits my mother made, beautifully tailored.

These two young women are posed on the George Washington Bridge. Mrs. Serge Sarasin, on the left,  wears a tunic suit in City Tweed by Davidow. I found there are still beautiful vintage Davidow suits for sale online.

I have to admit to snooping on the internet when I find the names of the models in my old magazines. Partly because I love researching for its own sake and partly because I'm nosy curious. 

1955 was a time when women were introduced by their husband's name with a Mrs. in the front. I learned that Mrs. Sarasin was Sue C. Nelms before her marriage in 1952. I love her tunic suit and her pretty red purse and gloves.

I have a thing about gloves, wrote about them in a post here in "The Shorter the Sleeves, the Longer the Gloves."  

The woman on the right in the bridge photo is Mrs. John S. Radway, wearing a beautiful blue suit of British Linton tweed, carrying a matching coat. I wasn't able to find out more about her but Linton tweeds are still being produced in England.

The next two models are posed at The Cloisters in New York, home of Medieval art and the famous Unicorn tapestry. The Cloisters have been used for backdrop in many movies, including my friend Tammy's favorite, Portrait of Jennie.

 Jane B. Gillespie, above, wears a three-quarters length coat and matching skirt of Anglo tweed by William Devitz. I wish more of these fashion shots were in color because when I googled both Anglo fabrics and the designer William Devitz I found the most beautiful colors and vintage clothing for sale online. Alas, I could not find further news of Miss Gillespie online.

 

 I love the fitted look of this suit above of Pinehurst hand-woven fabric by Bellciano that Cynthia Brooks Towell wears. I couldn't trace Cynthia any further but I'm guessing she was petite as Bellciano was known for their Bellciette line for women under 5 foot, 5 inches.

Town & Country described this suit as a taileur, meaning a suit meant for town wear. I love that word!

 

Let me introduce you to Mrs. Charles A. Dana, Jr., shown at her New Canaan, CT home. She's wearing a John Barr tissue tweed suit. I couldn't find out what tissue tweed is but it sounds as if it would be very soft and comfortable. 

I drew a blank at the fashion designer but discovered that Mrs. Dana was the former Eleanor Waters Langhorne and she and Charles were married in 1951 at Park Avenue Methodist Church. And Mr. Dana was head of the Dana Foundation that contributed to many worthy causes including a cancer institute.

I wish the magazine had given the name of her beautiful dog!

 

Our last model is my favorite, look at that smile! 

She was described as being Mrs. Thomas Morgan Schriber, the former Holly Seelbach, chair of the New Canaan, Connecticut Junior Red Cross. 

She is wearing a coat of O'llegro by Claire McCardell. I found out that fashion designer Claire McCardell is credited with first creating American sportswear for women. She inspired many of today's top designers and believed that women's clothing should "be practical and sturdy as well as feminine."

I found Holly's obituary and her picture shows that beautiful smile.

 Evidently Hilde (Holly) Seelbach Henderson Schriber Rohde graduated from Wellesley, married a Mr. Henderson and had two children and then was widowed during WW II. In 1947 she married Thomas Morgan Schriber and they had two children, the youngest who must be the small son shown with her in the picture.

I was fascinated reading that Hilde (Holly) Rohde (her second husband had also passed away and she remarried a third time) co-owned The Yarn Tree in New Canaan "where she sold yarns, and designed and knit sweaters and needlepoint."

This lovely woman with the radiant smile passed away this past May 27, 2020, "quietly at her home in New Canaan."

Her story and her smile touched my heart.

There are two more main fall fashion stories in this 1955 issue of Town & Country that I want to post about this month, one about what young men wore to college then--oh, how the times have changed--and one about the women of a city that has been much in the news lately. 

Vintage Fall fashions are my favorite, that is until Christmas fashions come along. 

The Family Farm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 "Corn Harvest" by Leslie Randall was reproduced full page in the September 1944 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. 

I love this painting so much that I was tempted to cut it out of the magazine and frame it except that I am wholeheartedly opposed to harvesting pages from the really old magazines in my collection.  When I see pages for sale on eBay from them I want to steal the seller's scissors and remind them that once these old magazines are gone they're gone forever.

This painting was on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1942. It speaks to my heart, probably because my father was raised in a farming family and my sisters and I were raised hearing the stories of farming.

To me, there is something almost sacred about a family farm and it hurts to see so many disappearing in our country. I guess it's why I follow so many of the homesteading bloggers and hope that one good thing to come out of this pandemic time is that more people are turning to growing their own food.

I remember one hot summer afternoon twenty years ago when my father and I sat on the front porch and talked about the book I was writing about two families of farmers. I took page after page of notes as he reminisced, giving me authentic details I had questions about. 

Then we started talking about so many farms being foreclosed on that year.  Daddy got almost emotional, telling me that it could only hurt our country when small farmers were losing their farms to the big industrial conglomerates. It really bothered him. And our conversation stuck with me.

I know he would be proud of the young adults today who are trying to raise as much of the food for their family as they can. His father would be, too. 

 

The hay appeareth, and the tender grass showeth itself, and herbs of the mountains are gathered. [Proverbs 27:25] The Book was made for those who live on the land.

David Grayson in The Countryman's Year, 1936

 

[I don't know why there's such a gap between the picture and the following paragraphs. It's not that way on my draft.] 

Real Winter Comfort

Anything can contribute to a spring-in-winter mood--an understanding friend, great words in an enduring book, the sound of music or laughter, the inner silence when the emotionally cold world holds its breath, a job that must be done, or helping someone in greater difficulty than yourself.

Faith Baldwin in Harvest of Hope

Blog friend Nan of Letters from a Hill Farm motivated me to get out my 1920s women's magazines when she wrote about the real Roaring 20s.

I've kind of ignored my 1920s magazines, focusing more lately on the 1930s when our house was built and what the people who built it might have been experiencing. And I always naturally am led to the 1940s and 1950s, what I consider a more romantic time period. 

But the 1920s were fascinating too, that jazzy age before the October 24, 1929 Wall Street crash. I find that I'm curious about the homemakers of that decade, wondering about the similarities and the differences between them and myself.

But that's for another discussion. Today I'm interested in Real Winter Comfort and what we can do to bring it on!

 

This full color ad for insulation is from my January 1929 issue of The American Home. Isn't it gorgeous?

I could list all the things that speak of comfort to me in this picture, including the purple dress she's wearing (extra points with me for that and its cuddly feather trim), but why don't you tell me what's comfy and cozy in this picture?

And tell me what you are doing to bring yourself Winter Comfort!

While you're considering that, here's what Ella, Dimity, and Winnie think about January comfort in Miss Read's Battles At Thrush Green. 

'And now we've January to look forward to,' sighed Ella. 'Talk about the January blues! What with the bills, and the general damp and gloom, and so long to wait for spring--it does get one down!'

'I cheer myself up,' said Dimity, 'by tidying a cupboard. It makes me feel so virtuous and efficient.'

 'I buy a new pair of shoes,' said Winnie.

'A packet of bourbon biscuits pep me up,' said Ella. 'Or putting out a new tablet of soap. Very therapeutic, putting out a new tablet of soap, I find.'

The floor is all yours, friends and family--and I'd faint if any family did comment! Some of them do read it though so I always write as if they are.
 

   

Story of a 1930s Woman and Her French Normandy-style Home

Today is our tenth wedding anniversary. You may think it odd that I've chosen to celebrate this milestone at home. I turned down John's offer to take me out for dinner and dancing in the city, and my best friend's insistence on a party in our honor at her house.

Tonight I want only to be with the three most important people in my life, John and our two children. At nine years old, Johnny is growing up so quickly and little Joyce won't be a baby much longer either. The years ahead will pass all too quickly.

As I set the table for dinner I can't help thinking about the years when the children were so young and John was always home from work to see them before they went to bed.

Now he works such long hours to see his company through a tough year.

Maybe we shouldn't have built the big house last year, but we both fell in love with the houses of Normandy when we honeymooned there, staying with a friend John met during the War. John says that when this Depression ends, the house will only rise in value.

But will it be too large for us once the children are grown and gone from home? We've not been able to have a third child yet. I've always wanted a house full of children and even grandchildren someday.

And John by my side, us growing old together.

I think back to our first anniversary when John and I celebrated at our favorite Italian restaurant.

We were so much in love and so happy talking about what we would do the next day. Our Sundays alone together were so important to us because we worked in the city six days a week.

As we ate our dinner, John told me his plan for our returning to France in five years. We were like children let out for recess in our happiness, discussing all that we would do and the places we would visit. 

Our plans changed once the children came along, only postponed, John insisted. 

I hear Joyce coming down the stairs and turn to see her pulling her dolly behind her and rubbing her eyes sleepily from her nap. I put the last plate down and hurry to her, forgetting about Paris.

Paris could wait. It always has.

***************************************


You all know my love of the 1940s and 1950s. I have an armoire full of women's magazines from the late 1800s through the 1960s but have tended to ignore the many 1930s magazines produced during the Depression years.

But recently I began wondering about the homes and families of that time period because our house was built in 1935. I've been spending hours immersed in those 1930s magazines and have become fascinated by the women of those years. 

I kept coming back to one woman in an ad for laundry soap, wondering why it drew my eye.

 I love her green dress, her hairstyle, her pearls and her poise. And then I found the perfect home for her, in the same magazine, a French Normandy house. 

Aren't the clustered chimneys fabulous? And the slate roof and the green shutters? Look at the casement windows. I've always loved casement windows but can you see that the little awning window over the casement is open on the second story? I wonder if all of them open? Darling!

And the porch is quaint, don't you think? Hopefully, it will never be ripped off by an HGTV host, being that it is in a historical district.

This house is from a real neighborhood, the very desirable Forest Hill in Cleveland, Ohio. The entire neighborhood was planned to include only house designs of European Provincial architecture. 

It is on land from the John D. Rockefeller Estates. Four hundred French Normandy-style houses were planned but only 81 built. These houses still stand as they were built of masonry walls, concrete slabs and steel joists.

Here is a link to the historical society there.

The pictures of the Normandy-style houses are gorgeous! You are in for a treat if you watch the slide show of the houses. I even spotted the exact windows I talked about on many of the houses.

Have any of you ever heard of this neighborhood? 

One of my favorite books of old is Came A Cavalier by Frances Parkinson Keyes, set in Normandy. Have any of you who have had the good fortune to visit France ever been to the Normandy region?

Thank you for reading my story and for indulging my new passion for the 1930s!

[All of the above pictures were from the March 1932 issue of Ladies' Home Journal.]

 

1968 House & Garden December Issue

This 1968 House & Garden magazine is a star in my large collection of vintage magazines, although it's difficult for me to think of anything 1968 as vintage. if you were born as early in the 20th century as I was, you would understand what I mean.

I thought it would be fun to show you a few things featured in this December 1968 issue.

There is a fabulous article on Christmas tables done by designers--we used to love those before bloggers took the world by storm with their own tablescapes.

This pretty one above is a Christmas Eve supper done by interior designer Chessy Rayner and Mica Ertegun of Mac II. I'm afraid I didn't even get to Mica as I completely fell down the rabbit hole researching Chessy Rayner. Just google her name and you'll find lots of photographs of her interiors and the newspaper account of her life as a fashion and designer icon. 

Her table above brought to mind one I did, among three others, in a December 2013 post called 'Tis the Season to Set the Stage.https://awindow-lookacrosstheway.blogspot.com/2013/12/tis-season-to-set-stage.html

I went back myself and read the post again--do you bloggers ever do that?--and saw sweet comments from many of you there.

RH and I had so much fun doing those four tables for a Christmas link party, but I have to confess that I've not done a single holiday table yet this month. I know some of you have, I've seen some lovely ones.

I may not follow through on everything that inspires me from my vintage women's magazines anymore but I love to spend an hour at night looking through them, notebook and pen in hand, jotting down ideas, ideas that I may never get around to doing. 

These old magazines are as comforting to me as a beloved classic holiday movie. 

This issue had a section on seasonal light displays across the U.S., like this one on Alamitos Bay near Long Beach, California. Do any of you readers live near that and know if the annual practice has been continued?

There was a fascinating article about Broadway star Joel Grey showing his apartment in Manhattan designed by Albert Hadley, who grew up in Nashville, while Grey was starring in Cabaret. 

Zebra rugs, chinoiserie, and trellis design must have been very popular that year. 

I loved the bedroom of his eight-year-old daughter Jennifer--didn't she star in a little film with Patrick Swayze when she grew up? 

The magazine also featured a beautifully iced fruitcake, something I've been researching because RH and I love good homemade golden fruitcake (well, he'll eat almost any store-bought fruitcake too, not me) and this year I really want to ice mine.

Maybe try something simple like this one I saw on Pinterest...

I'm smitten by the ones on Pinterest that use marzipan and then fondant icing, the only problem being that I've never used either of those products before.

Have any of you ever baked with them? Would a novice make a complete mess of it? And I also have to think about this fruitcake lasting us a long time, at least until Easter, because no one else in our family will eat fruitcake. How will the icing hold up with the cake refrigerated? I welcome any advice from you!

Meanwhile, it's getting drizzled with Calvados every few days and kept in a cool room. I'm thinking that we'll save it for Epiphany to let it season longer so maybe I have time to watch a lot of fondant videos before trying it.

How about you? Do you like, love or loathe fruitcake?

If you don't care for it, maybe that's because of the citron in it. I never put citron in mine, citron should be banned from the planet! And I buy my cherries from the King Arthur people.

I hope you liked a glimpse into what the magazines were like in December of 1968. I got out my first Christmas family scrapbook and found only one page from 1968, we just didn't take many photos back then. And our little girl was almost hidden by the toy box, her older brother with a big smile.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

I'll tell you mine if you'll tell me yours...

Those of you who have visited me here and at my other blog for almost five years now might think I'm slightly obsessed with the 1950s and earlier, and you wouldn't be far wrong.

There is one subject I cannot get enough of, am besotted with, and that is:

The Life of the American Family

in the 1950s and earlier,

as portrayed in vintage women's magazines

A sure cure for the blues for me is pulling out a few of the old magazines from my collection and sitting down to lose myself in the pages.

These old magazines inspire me and I get up a better and happier woman after my time with them, more cheerful, more optimistic, more motivated.

I know that sounds crazy but Jane Davison and Lesley Davison understood the popularity of the early women's magazines in their book How to Make A House A Home:

And all of us who were turning the pages were receiving parts of the same message: we can make ourselves, our homes, our lives better by working and buying, by caring enough."

I get up from reading a vintage issue of Woman's Home Companion or Ladies' Home Journal or McCall's or more obscure magazines feeling that I've taken a magical antidepressant--without any bad side effects!

And sometimes I am inspired to cook a meal or even bake a cake.

This Brown-eyed Susan Cake from the September 1937 issue of McCall's magazine was fun to make and decorate.

Guess who made the brown-eyed Susans on it? RH did! He used almonds for the petals and chocolate covered raisins for the eyes.

But I'm not going to give you the recipe here because it was not that great. After all, it is a recipe from The Depression years, and recipes from those years are often very skimpy on sugar and other ingredients. So this is what I'll do when I make another one.

I'll take my best Devil's Food Cake recipe, which happens to be a fabulous one from RH's mother and has buttermilk and twice the sugar, and bake that.

The banana cream filling was okay but nothing to write home about so nix that. The coffee icing that I boiled to a soft ball stage was not sweet enough or intensely flavored enough so next time I will find a richer recipe for that online and use it for both filling and icing.

Because we can keep the good things of the old days and discard the bad. It's just deciding what is good and what is bad that's sometimes difficult, isn't it?

I made this cake and shared it with a brother-in-law and sister-in-law, along with a dish my mother often used to make when I was a child, Swiss Steak. As good as my mother's Swiss Steak was, 

                           I used Alton Brown's recipe instead.

I've never had an Alton Brown recipe to fail and his Swiss Steak is fork tender and full of flavor. 

RH helped me make it because we doubled the recipe so we could share it, and it required trimming the fat from two large bottom round roasts and then slicing them in 1/2 inch slices, dredging them with flour and seasonings and browning them for a few minutes on each side. That took some time, and knife skills.

Then we had two pan loads of thin sliced onions to sauté, next celery and garlic.

(And yes, I'm a messy chef.) Then we cooked the sauce, tripling it because the leftovers from this dish make the base for a wonderful vegetable-beef soup.

The day after I made the cake and Swiss Steak, I found a recipe for Swiss Steak in the October 1951 issue of Ladies' Home Journal. It was identical to Mama's, good but not as fabulous as Alton B's.

What was fabulous though was the pretty presentation of the dish, of the entire meal. The picture sure makes my Swiss Steak look pitiful. I hadn't even put a sprig of parsley on to serve it.

Get my point? That recipe needed improvement but a 1951 magazine inspired me to next time put more effort into the beauty of my meals because we also eat with our eyes, don't we?

Yes, I adore my old magazines, even though not everything in life then was as good as it is today. We have to take the good from those days for our lives now and change what was bad, I believe. And we certainly could take some of what is bad now and return to what was good in The Old Days, amen?

I admit that I am obsessed with The Old Days, the 1950s especially.

Evan Jones, in his biography of my favorite chef from that time, James Beard, quoted this from the New York Times:

"A typical American family then could afford three children, a house, two cars, three weeks at the seashore, a television set, and meat seven times a week, all on a single wage earner's income."

Ah, those were the days, my friend...

So I will continue to read and research and dream about the 1950s and earlier. I think that in my retirement years I've earned the right to immerse myself in the study of this time period. And often I will share my passion here at Dewena's Window.

Are you rolling your eyes at me?

I could pick a stranger topic to be passionate about, for example:

"ancient Scottish grasses"

That's what a minor character in one of my favorite Louise Penny books, Bury Your Dead, was passionately interested in and spent his days in the library studying. The elderly man told Chief Inspector Armand Gamache:

"Ironically, now that I'm so near the end of my life

I seem to have all the time in the world."

I've adopted that stance too. I have all the time in the world now, and if I want to spend it in the first half of the 1900s, that's what I'm going to do, by golly.

Now, my very dear friends who are reading this, I shared my passion with you. Would you please share your passion with me?

What is your "ancient Scottish grasses"?

And many many thanks to a dear blog friend, Peggy of Season to Season,

who sent me some delightful magazines from the 1920s--Modern Priscilla--for my collection....just because she felt they wanted to be with me.

Wasn't that nice!

See there, if people know what your passion is they just might send you a gift of it sometime........

Unless your passion happens to be George Clooney, maybe?