LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE
Written and illustrated by
ILENE BECKERMAN
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
© 1995 by Ilene Beckerman.
All rights reserved.
First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, April 2005.
Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 1995.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Robbin Gourley.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beckerman, Ilene, 1935-
Love, loss, and what I wore / by Ilene Beckerman.
p. cm.
eISBN 9781565127678
I. Costume—New York (N.Y.)—History—20th century.
2. Beckerman, Ilene, 1935– . 3. New York (N.Y.)—
Biography. I. Title.
GT617.N4B43 1995
391′.009747′10904—dc20 95-20460
CIP
To the wonderful women in my life
my mother,
my grandmother,
my aunt Babbie,
Miriam Landey,
Dora and Gay,
Bonnie,
Isabelle, Lillie, and Julie,
Allie, Olivia, and Chloe,
and Elisabeth
The 1940s
My Brownie uniform.
My mother was a Brownie leader at Hunter College Elementary School, 69th Street, between Lexington and Park.
When I was seven, I went to Camp Brady, a sleep-away camp in Brewster, New York, for Brownies and Girl Scouts. My sister, who was five years older, was a Girl Scout and looked after me at camp.
There was no electricity. We had no flush toilets and had to go in an outhouse.
A store-bought brown dressy coat with matching leggings (to keep legs warm) and galoshes (to keep feet dry). I hated putting on the leggings (which were held up by suspenders) and always had a tantrum.
Note the brightly colored mittens. My mother was an excellent knitter and was always making mittens for my sister and me. My sister inherited her knitting skill and made argyle socks, using many bobbins.
Rag curls were a popular hairdo.
You made them by tearing old sheets and pillowcases into strips (white was the only color they came in), wrapping the strips around dampened hair, and tying a bow at the bottom.
After a night’s sleep, the rags would be carefully undone and beautiful long curls would appear.
While my mother made our curls, we’d listen to our favorite radio programs. My favorite was The Lux Radio Theater because they acted out movies on it.
We lived at 333 East 66th Street, between First and Second Avenues, in a first-floor railroad flat that faced the front. One room was connected to the next in a straight line, like railroad cars.
My mother made this gray-and-white-striped seersucker pinafore with red rickrack trim.
She made almost all of my sister’s and my clothes and we had many “sister” dresses. This was one of my mother’s favorite patterns. She also made it in a floral chintz with lace trim.
My sister wore a blouse under her pinafore. I didn’t have to.
I wore this black taffeta outfit to dancing school at Ballet Arts in the Carnegie Hall building on 57th Street.
Note colored embroidery across the midriff. My mother made this for me. I liked it very much, but what I really wanted was a store-bought outfit.
Sometimes I would take the crosstown bus to Ballet Arts by myself. My mother would walk me to the bus. She would yell at me for wearing perfume and mascara but forgetting to wash my neck.
My mother made this plaid taffeta party dress for my tenth birthday. Note the unusual neckline—straight across—and tiny black velvet bows on each shoulder.
The dress made a wonderful swishing noise when I walked. I wore it to school the day of my birthday and got a lot of attention.
When I walked, I “turned in” on my heels so I had to wear special shoes with arch supports from a store called Julius Grossman’s. Everybody else wore loafers or saddle shoes and for parties red or black Mary Janes, but my shoes were brown and had laces. For parties, I had a brown pair with buckles on the side.
White dickey with Peter Pan collar, wool sweater, plaid wool-wrap pleated skirt with safety pin, and high white knee socks.
A typical outfit I wore to elementary school.
My mother made this black velvet hat, lined in quilted red satin. It had decorative trimming and tied under the chin. Sonja Henie, who was an ice-skating movie star, used to wear similar hats.
It used to be very important to keep your ears covered and warm so you didn’t get an ear infection.
Everybody said I looked good in hats. This other hat is a “scotty” hat my mother bought for me. I wore hats on Easter Sunday and Passover.
My mother made this pink, green, and black iridescent-metallic plaid taffeta gown. We bought the material at Macy’s at Herald Square. They had a whole floor just for selling patterns and fabrics.
I wore it to my cousin Sally’s wedding. We weren’t friendly with that side of the family—my father’s—but I was excited to wear an evening gown.
I wore a big pink bow in my hair.
Easter Sunday outfit. Coral wool suit with pleated skirt. White short-sleeved sharkskin blouse with drawstring neck.
We always got a new Easter outfit. Easter Sunday, we’d find a bench in front of Central Park, at around 65th Street, and watch the people walk up and down Fifth Avenue in their holiday outfits.
A variety of braided hairdos: Loops. Crown. “Hamburgers” over the ears.
We wore short, full jackets in springtime, which we called “toppers.”
This was one I had in coral.
A new fabric was introduced called “tubular jersey” and my mother made matching dresses for my sister and me.
She crocheted a black wool border around the neck and sleeves.
My mother made this forest-green wool jersey dress embroidered with red cherries for my sister.
My sister was tall and had a voluptuous figure. Her name was Blossom, but everyone called her “Tootsie” except my grandfather. He called her “the pig” and he called me “the monkey.” Everybody else called me “Gingy” because I was born with ginger-colored hair. We called my grandfather “Pop.”
Later, when Tootsie married Shel, Shel didn’t like her names and called her “Bonnie.”
My sister had long, red fingernails and loved Frank Sinatra. She cut out pictures of “Frankie” from movie magazines (Photoplay, Silver Screen, Screen Gems) and taped them to the walls of the bedroom we shared. Whenever we had a fight, I would try to tear the pictures off the walls and she would scratch my arms with her nails.
I bit my nails and they were very ugly.
My mother made this sexy red dress for my sister. It had a keyhole neckline and peplum and was accented with hand-sewn gold sequins.
Peplums were very popular in those days.
Sewing on the sequins was tedious work. My mother also sewed multicolored sequins on printed silk scarfs, which we’d give to our teachers for Christmas. Sometimes we gave them fancy soap or flowered handkerchiefs instead.
Black faille dress with a shocking-pink silk rose at the waist.
This was one of the few dresses my mother didn’t make. She bought it for my sister on sale at Henri Bendel’s on West 57th Street.
&nb
sp; My sister wore it when Shel came back from the army before they got engaged.
She bought another black dress when Shel was wooing her. Note illusion sweetheart neckline.
My mother made this gorgeous green taffeta strapless gown for my sister to wear to our cousin’s wedding.
Note silk flowers (sewn on elastic band) worn around upper arms. The skirt was extravagantly full.
My mother was a large, handsome woman who didn’t wear fancy clothes, maybe because we couldn’t afford them. Once my grandmother surprised her with a silver fox stole (for her birthday or Mother’s Day, I can’t remember which). My mother tried it on but never wore it after that day.
She usually wore a dark print dress and brown shoes with a buckle. For a while she worked as a nurse’s aide and would wear a blue-gray jumper over a white blouse. But she never had the kind of cape the nurses had in paper-doll books.
Even though she was a Brownie leader, she never got a Brownie leader’s uniform. It was too expensive.
She had a premature white streak in the front of her hair. She never wore make-up, only sometimes a little lipstick that she would put on without looking in the mirror and then make even by pressing her lips together.
She wore glasses. Her face had a beautiful shape and her eyes were hazel.
The spring after my mother died, my father took me to B. Altman’s department store on Fifth Avenue to buy a dress for my thirteenth birthday.
I selected two navy-blue dresses (see this page and next). This one had a removable cape collar. Each dress was very expensive, about forty-four dollars.
I wore one of them to the thirteenth birthday party I had with my friend Jean Lowrie. Her birthday is June 10. Mine is June 15.
Jean’s mother took us to the Stockholm Restaurant for a birthday lunch with some of our school friends. My grandmother gave her money for my share.
One day my grandmother came and got my sister and me. She didn’t want us to live with my father but with her and Pop and my aunt Babbie.
They owned a brownstone building at 743 Madison Avenue, between 65th and 66th Streets, and had a stationery store on the street level. It was called Harry Goldberg’s. They lived above the store.
After we went to live with my grandparents, I never saw my father again.
Jean, who lived at 24 Central Park South, picked me up at the store every morning and we’d walk together to Hunter College Junior High School at 68th and Lexington Avenue.
My grandmother’s name was Lillie but we called her “Ettie”. She had very beautiful, long silver-gray hair that she twisted up on top of her head into a bun that she called a dreidel, keeping loose waves in front.
She used two large haircombs to keep up the hair in back and several large hairpins to keep the dreidel in place.
She put Vaseline on her hair to keep it nice. She believed in two cures: Vaseline for anything wrong outside the body and hot tea with lemon for anything wrong inside the body.
My grandmother usually wore a navy-blue or charcoal-gray cardigan sweater in the store, no matter what the weather was.
The sweater had two large pockets into which she would slip quarters from the cash register.
She told us that she was saving the quarters for me and my sister but we never got them.
The telephone number of the store was RHinelander 4-8096.
My grandmother, like many older ladies, rolled her stockings below the knee instead of wearing garters.
I wore this black bathing suit when I went to Florida with my grandmother. I was fourteen.
I met a boy on the beach named Bernie Maybrook from Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was twenty-six. He wanted to go on a date with me, and my grandmother said okay as long as she could go, too. So she did, along with Bernie’s father.
The 1950s
I bought this cotton waffle-weave dress in Bloomingdale’s basement. It was red and black and had a Mexican look to the print.
I went with my friend Judy Gellert to buy it. Judy went to Hunter College High School with me. She lived downtown in Stuyvesant Town.
I had another friend at Hunter named Marilyn Herman. She had long blond hair and was pretty but fat. She wore her clothes too tight. Her mother also had long blond hair and wore big “picture” hats. She was also very pretty and fat and she worked in a court. Nobody else’s mother worked. Marilyn had no father.
I wore this blue lace dress with white collar and blue satin cummerbund when I was confirmed at Temple Emanu-El, 65th Street and Fifth Avenue, on May 18, 1951. I was sixteen. The rabbis were Dr. Perlman and Dr. Marks.
Everyone in my confirmation class had a topic to speak on. We didn’t choose the topic; it was given to us. Mine was “Mercy.”
My hair was short and I had bleached it blond with a bottle of peroxide. Whenever my friend Dora saw a woman with a terrible bleach job, she would always say, “Almost as bad as you, Gingy.”
My sister wore a green dress with vivid cerise flowers, and a hat with flowers.
After the ceremony, my grandmother made a small party for me at the Alrae Hotel on 64th Street, around the corner from the store.
My aunt Babbie (her real name was Pauline) had enormous breasts. She never got married.
She had very beautiful small hands. Once someone asked her if she wanted to be a hand model but nothing ever came of it.
She had her nails manicured every Saturday afternoon with Revlon’s Windsor pink nail polish. She also had her eyebrows arched and her hair done.
After the beauty parlor, she would take my sister and me to lunch, usually at Child’s Restaurant, and then to a movie—preferably a double feature at Loew’s 72nd Street or RKO 58th Street.
On one of her hands she wore a black onyx ring. On the other, a marquise-shaped ring with diamonds and emeralds, which I wear now.
In high school, my friend Fran Todtfeld and I would go to an Army-Navy store to buy real sailor middy blouses. We also bought pea jackets there.
My friend Gay and I wanted to have “basketball sweaters” but we had no team and no boyfriends to give us their sweaters.
We found a store on the Lower East Side that made those sweaters to order but you had to get at least four. So we found two more girls who wanted sweaters and formed a club. We chose maroon sweaters with white stripes and white writing.
You were supposed to have the name of your team on the back of the sweater, but since we had no team, we had no name. We decided on WC’WD, which stood for “We Couldn’t Think of a Name, So We Didn’t.”
When we went to order the sweaters, the salesman measured our chests with a tape measure. We thought he was very vulgar.
Once we had the sweaters, we gave up the club.
A typical outfit worn to high school (Riverdale Country Day School) by my best friend, Dora.
Long-sleeved, white silky blouse with pearl buttons, black ballerina-length full skirt, and black ballet slippers.
Dora usually wore her long, straight, shiny black hair in a high ponytail.
Note Dora’s real beauty mark at the end of her eyebrow.
Dora lived at 22 East 65th Street, across from my grandparents’ store.
Color looked gorgeous on Gay, my second-best friend. She usually wore a chiffon scarf—pink, turquoise, aqua, lavender, or purple—knotted around her neck, and a purple sweater.
The color of the scarf and sweater brought out the extraordinary colors in her eyes, eyelids, and cheeks. She said she never wore eye-makeup but I didn’t believe her.
Gay and I made these yellow-and-black-striped cotton circle skirts. It took forever to hem them.
Gay lived at 30 East 70th Street. Gay and Dora were my best friends. They still are.
Gay had a brother named Peter. He was three years older, taller, darker, and kept to himself.
Gay’s parents were Armenian. Her mother’s name was Zabelle. She made yogurt, wore white satin nightgowns, and read lots of books. They had a baby grand piano in the living room that she played. She visited frie
nds who weren’t feeling well. She used to tell Gay to speak more softly and to speak through the front of her mouth.
Gay’s father’s name was Zarah. He was very handsome and an architect. He also painted Utrillo-like scenes in oils. He drank martinis and often went out with beautiful women. When I went to their house in the morning, sometimes he’d be sleeping on the couch in the living room. I never said a word to him nor he to me.
Long-sleeved black turtleneck jersey, gray quilted circle skirt (or gray accordian-pleated skirt when I could borrow it from Dora), and wide leather belt from Greenwich Village.
This is how we dressed when we went out on a “plain” date to someplace like Jimmy Ryan’s to hear Dixieland or to the movies.
We got more dressed up when we went to the Rainbow Room on top of the RCA Building, the Persian Room at the Plaza, or the Columbia Room on the Astor roof.
My grandmother bought me this dress from MacWise, a very exclusive store between 65th and 66th Streets on Madison. The people who owned the dress store were customers in my grandparents’ store, so my grandmother got it for very little when they couldn’t sell it.
The dress was much too sophisticated for a high-school girl, but my grandmother didn’t know that. It was strapless, with rows of black velvet alternating with rows of black faille. It was very tight.
I wore it to a party I went to with Dora on the West Side. We usually didn’t go to the West Side because we lived on the East Side and we were snobby. We thought the boys on the West Side were too fast. I almost got into trouble at that party (very rare because I was so shy). I think it was because of the dress.
Love, Loss, and What I Wore Page 1
