Summer at Tiffany
Page 17
I nodded.
As the Riverside bus pulled away from the curb, I threw my arms around Jim and kissed him in broad daylight. I was vaguely aware of people passing, horns honking, and someone bumping into us, saying, Lucky guy. I didn’t care. This was good. This was right, and I felt my Norwegian heart melting.
I kissed Jim once more and took his hand in mine, squeezing it tight. And together we walked into the park.
Summer After Tiffany
In the winter of 1945, Marjorie Jacobson returned to New York City to spend New Year’s Eve with Jim. While there, she visited her friends at Tiffany and purchased some Spode china plates that she still has today.
Later that winter Jim came to Story City, Iowa, to meet her family. By then he was an ensign in the navy, and he left for the Pacific after the Story City visit. During her senior year at the University of Iowa, Marjorie met William (Bill) Hart, and they fell in love and were married on December 20, 1946.
After graduating from Iowa, Marjorie was an instructor at the Music School at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. There, as a cellist, she performed and toured with the Aeolian Trio, and taught piano and cello. She remained at DePauw during the 1946–1947 academic year before moving to Estherville, Iowa, where her husband began his career as a dentist.
Marjorie gave birth to her eldest daughter in 1949, and had a son in 1951, leaving little time or opportunity to continue her musical life. When the Korean War began, the Hart family moved to San Diego, California, to honor her husband’s military commitment. After his tour of duty in Korea, they settled in Del Mar and San Diego, where William Hart built his dental practice, and they added two more daughters to their family.
While her husband was in Korea, Marjorie saw a small note in a local newspaper about a “doctors’ orchestra.” She joined and made many musical friends, some of whom she still plays with. Marjorie joined the San Diego Symphony in 1954, and the Starlight Opera. She also performed during that time with a number of Hollywood luminaries, including Peggy Lee, Liberace, Sammy Davis Jr., and Nat King Cole.
She went back to school in 1965, earning her master’s degree in music and music performance from San Diego State University. She joined the music faculty at the University of San Diego in 1967, and performed with the Alcala Trio. Three of her four children went on to graduate from the University of San Diego—one in music—and the other graduated from Santa Clara University. Marjorie became chair of what was then the Department of Fine Arts in 1978 and retired in 1993 as professor emerita.
Marjorie retired from professional cello performance in 2004 when she turned eighty years old—celebrating her birthday as soloist with the University of San Diego Symphony, with all of her children and grandchildren sitting in the front row. She performed on her Carlo Giuseppe Testore cello—like the cello she’d admired during her summer in New York City—which she’d purchased in 1970. She still plays three or four times a week with several string quartets.
William Hart passed away in 1981, and she remarried in 1986. She and her second husband, Peter Cuthbert, now live in La Mesa, California. Her four children have nine children, and Peter has three daughters and five grandchildren.
Martha “Marty” Garrett graduated in 1947 from the University of Iowa with a B.S. degree in finance. She then moved to Chicago and worked for the Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Company of Chicago—the largest bank under one roof in the United States, as Illinois had no branch banking at the time. She lived in a girl’s club on the University of Chicago campus, where she met her future husband, Paul Jackson, who was majoring in mathematics, finishing his education after serving three years in the army in Europe.
They were married after his graduation in June 1949 and moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where her husband became an actuary with the Aetna Life Insurance Company. In 1964, he joined the Wyatt Company in Washington, D.C., and they moved to Bethesda, Maryland, where he was an actuary for pension plans for GM, IBM, Penn Central, and AT&T, among others, and was on many actuarial committees. Through his job they traveled all over the world.
They were the proud parents of three sons, each of whom was born while they lived in Hartford. Marty balanced motherhood with being active in volunteer work through the Junior League, work she continued after her move to Bethesda. Most recently she was active on the Women’s Board of the American Heart Association that holds an annual fund-raising luncheon and fashion show every February for twelve hundred guests. The board has raised $3.3 million for the lifesaving research work of the American Heart Association since the event’s inception over five decades ago. Her hobbies were golf, tennis, and paddle tennis, which she enjoyed playing with her husband and friends at Congressional Country Club. Now she enjoys her grandchildren and bridge. After fifty-four years of marriage her husband died in 2003.
Marjorie and Marty remained lifelong friends; Marty’s accurate recall of details from the summer of 1945 were invaluable to the writing of this book.
Margaret (Mickey) Shuttleworth Vernallis graduated with a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Iowa, and during her lengthy career was a psychologist and professor of clinical psychology at California State University, Northridge. She has three daughters, a stepson, and several grandchildren. Currently living in San Fernando Valley, she is a Sierra Club leader and a music lover, and enjoys being with her family.
Katherine and Dick Munsen still live in Story City. They collaborated on the book Bail Out Over the Balkans, the story of Dick’s miraculous survival during WWII, and Katherine has also authored six other titles. Philip Jacobson was director of finance for Global Missions, ELC Lutheran Chruch. He and his wife, Diane, live in Bloomington, Minnesota. Marjorie sees both families several times a year, and both her sister and brother still serve lutefisk and lefse for Christmas dinner. Bill Craig, a family friend who also grew up in Story City, lives and works in Manhattan at Sotheby’s International Realty.
Hans Koelbel, her teacher at the University of Iowa, remained in Iowa, and he and his family visited Marjorie one summer in Del Mar.
Marjorie inherited the Royal Doulton Old Leeds Spray china from her mother, and still has her beloved Spode teapot and Tiffany brochure, given to her on her last day as a page at Tiffany.
While Marjorie shared many of the stories and pictures with her parents from her summer in New York City, she never revealed her opportunity to transfer to Yale. And she never regretted her decision to return to Iowa.
After her 1945 trip to New York City, she didn’t return to the Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue Tiffany store until 2004.
About the Author
MARJORIE HART, now eight-three, is the former chairman of the Fine Arts Department at the University of San Diego and a professional cellist. She lives in La Mesa, California.
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Credits
Cover design by James L. Iacobelli
Cover illustrations by Edward Kurtzman/www.lottreps.com
Copyright
Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint the following:
“Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, © 1936 (renewed) George Gershwin Music and Ira Gershwin Music. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
“Love Walked Right In,” music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, © 1937, 1938 (copyrights renewed) George Gershwin Music and Ira Gershwin Music. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
“That Old Black Magic” from the Paramount picture Star Spangled Rhythm. Words by Johnny Mercer. Music by Harold Arlen. Copyright © 1942 (renewed 1969) by Famous Music LLC. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
SUMMER AT TIFFANY. Copyright © 2007 by Marjorie Hart. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyrig
ht Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hart, Marjorie, 1924–
Summer at Tiffany / Marjorie Hart. —1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-06-118952-4
ISBN-10: 0-06-118952-9
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780061754982
Version 02152013
1. Hart, Marjorie, 1924– 2. Tiffany and Company—History. 3. Department stores—Employees—United States—Biography. I. Title.
HF5465.U64T544 2007
381'.141092—dc22
[B]
2006047225
* * *
07 08 09 10 11 WBC/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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