Have you see The Help? I read the book and saw the movie, so when Octavia Spencer won her Golden Globe and brought the house to tears I remembered a day when I was little. I was probably 4 years old, and since my Mamma was busy writing and I was alone I decided to go lie in the ditch beside the road and pretend I had been dumped there, a sad, lost child. I was in my nightgown and no one noticed. I lay there for what seemed like eternity until finally Ollie Belle, who was our help at the time, called for me to “come see the poach”…..(the porch, which she took great pride at scrubbing and making pretty). Only Ollie Belle seemed to notice that I was missing, and saved me from certain death from wild wolves or boogie men. Like most children I had a pretty wild imagination, still do. My Mamma was preoccupied with her writing and I was feeling lonely and alone and wanted some attention.

Perhaps I was a little spoiled in those days. After all I was Daddy’s little girl and he had gone off to work, leaving me at home to fend for myself in those days when Mamma just couldn’t stop typing, as the words flowed so effortlessly off her fingertips onto the crisp white typewriter paper, loaded carefully into the typewriter along with the slick black carbon paper.
I awoke each morning to the sound of her typewriter, and I went to sleep to the sounds of the black and white television. I loved watching television while sitting on the sofa next to my Daddy. I would drift off to sleep while Jackie Gleason made Daddy laugh, or while the June Taylor dancers entertained us on Lawrence Welk.

There was a lot of black and white, in those days,  there was a visible distinction between the two. I loved my Ollie Belle and was fascinated in trying to understand our differences, and why there were differences, and what it meant. Why did she eat a moonpie and an RC Cola every day? I was not allowed those things, and when Mamma wasn’t looking sometimes Ollie Belle would let me have a sip or a tiny bite. She ironed our clothes with a sprinkler top put onto a cola bottle, and she had a clean fresh smell about her that I can still smell, this very day. She was strong and efficient, she dressed with an apron, and she didn’t talk the same way my Mamma did. She didn’t have a car. She made our sheets clean and she made our pillowcases smooth and soft and when I went to bed in my comfy little bedroom she was the one who had tidied it up and had folded my clothes.

I grew up where two small towns came together, and at the center line there was a building where only Colored were allowed. I remember that handpainted sign, black paint on a white board. What did “colored” mean? I asked my Mamma. In my mind I thought that it meant colors, like crayons, and I thought the place must be filled with vivid wonderful colorful toys and art and beautiful things. I so badly wanted to go inside, and couldn’t understand why my Mamma said that we weren’t allowed.  On the outside of the building were two water fountains. A sign over each one, one sign said colored and one sign said white. What did that mean?

Ollie Belle was our help and I am certain that my mamma liked having her around as much as I did. I don’t know how she got to our house or how she got back to her home. I do not know how much she was paid. I do not know if she had children at home, or if she was married. I am going to ask my Mamma what she knows about Ollie Belle, what she may remember about this help of ours, who rescued me from the ditch and who made Daddy look good at work with starched and ironed shirts and saved my mamma from household chores so she could write. Ollie Belle, who ate moonpies and drank RC Colas, made my world a better place and for that, I am thankful.

As Bob Dylan said, the Times They Are A Changin, and I mean this in the nicest sort of way. As a historian of sorts, a scavenger, an urban archeologist, a hunter and gatherer of remnants and particles of the past, I have seen how change has left family homeplaces….. in odd places.

Sometimes they crumble and cave in, and sometimes they get lucky and get loved again, found by a new family building their own history.

Amityville horror home, it got a new owner

Luckily, this is what happened for the sprawling Dutch colonial that had been built on a long rural road in the county, in 1920, and abandoned in 1990. What happened in between is speculation and this is where I use my imagination.

it may have looked like this at one time

the home probably looked a lot like this in the 30s

Baking bread made the family their dough, and distributing the brand all over the state made them millions,

bread delivery trucks like this

but in the end all that was left was cat litter and pigeon droppings, liquor bottles and movie star magazines, or so I thought.

My initial visit to the remains of their homeplace left me cold. It was winter, the house was creaky,

abandoned dutch colonial

yet it beckoned me to come back and explore and I accepted the challenge.
The house had basically been closed and locked, and what vagrants didn’t take, was what I found. There were lots of movie magazines; they were waist deep in the den. They buried an old maple rocker and a bakelite paneled rabbit eared television set. The magazines dated from the 1930s. There were covers with portraits of starlets with rosy cheeks, and blue tinted eyes. Magazines like Picturegoer

and Photoplay, with images of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis,

Bette Davis

Olivia de Havilland, Dorothy Lamour. They brought the Golden Age of Hollywood to a house in Guilford County. There were scandalous covers on magazines like Movie Star, Photoplay, and Photo Screen.  There were photos of Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Julie Christie.

The front foyer, as large as most living rooms,

imagine this, with crumbling wall paper and the floor filled with cat litter

was filled with cat litter. The holes in the ceiling gave way to pigeons in the rafters and there were droppings throughout.

What happened, where did this family go, why did they leave this behind, and what made them vanish? As I dug deeper I learned a little and I imagined a lot.

Mother and father had doted on their 3 children.  I could see it in the old photos. In the twenties and thirties they were children of privilege. While many suffered and struggled to find food, they had miniature horses and play houses and fur hats and snowboots, sleds and dogs and kittens and dollbabies.
Mother loved to shop and she had her purchases delivered to the estate in the county, and her invoices delivered to her husband’s office in the city. There were 143 pairs of shoes in their original boxes,

shoes like these

their matching dresses and suits and coats and hats remained in the home, long after Mother was gone. Montaldo’s and Meyer’s loved Mother. The store boxes held tissue and taffeta, felt and feathers, and rhinestones and receipts.

Her three devoted children had worked in the family business, although two got married and had adventures away from Greensboro, they eventually returned to operate the business.

But one, a daughter, never married nor left, until she had to be forcibly removed for health and sanitation reasons and she was placed in a facility. This is when the doors to the mansion were closed and locked.

Research tells me that the family business shut down around 1974, and the building itself burned in 1989, about the time the mansion was closed and the daughter carted off.

I imagine that Mother’s glamourous outfits, her metallic trimmed platform shoes and sequined dressing gowns

dressing gowns fit for movie stars

reminded the daughter of Hollywood, of starlets she read about in her magazines. Stars like Shirley Temple, Katherine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, Marlene Deitrich. She had been a curly haired princess growing up in the south. A little girl who’s holsum childhood had been filled with dance lessons and voice lessons,

voice and piano, make a good child, or a child good

piano and ponies. A little girl who never grew up, who never left, who never trusted anyone but herself, who never left her magazines and her homeplace and her mother’s closets. A girl, a woman, who must have had dreams of becoming a starlet herself, at one time.

On my second explorative visit I went into the attic, up a dark narrow set of stairs that opened into a huge third floor former playroom of sorts.

playroom toys like trains

Hidden in the eaves were old toys

toys like this doll carriage

and surveying the floor I discovered  a square of dirty red plastic. It was a purse, and inside it I found a label, “Shirley Temple” was the logo and there was a mirror and comb, all with Shirley’s signature.

a logo like this one

This might have some real value I surmised, so I carefully cleaned it and photographed it.

I spent the next 4 weeks cleaning out the remains of the home, and eventually I made myself and the home’s new owner enough money to get us both through our first winter, his in his “new” home and mine in my new business.

the home was almost as bad as grey gardens

Going through the family photos I found so many wonderful images. Father and son in front of the business, of the girls playing in the yard, of flowers and children and parents and automobiles. But one grabbed my attention. It was one of a cute little girl with curls, standing in front of a gigantic tinsel tipped spruce pine Christmas tree.

similar to this photo

Standing in her nightgown she was surrounded by toys and with a twinkle in her eye and she was holding the Shirley Temple pocketbook that I had found on the attic floor.

The little girl who stood in front of the tree that Christmas, 1934, holding her new Shirley Temple pocketbook, well, her good ship never came in, and liquor replaced her lollipop,  as she spent her days daydreaming and drinking and watching tv.
I imagine that Christmas of 1934 had been a special one for the girl. The girl who had  Hollywood dreams, and Greensboro nightmares. The girl who grew up but never out, of the house, that sat on the rural road. The house that ironically sits near the new by-pass, that now ……heads out of town. The homeplace, that ended up in this odd place, the homeplace…….where no one knows what really happened…… if only those walls could talk!

WLLSqpYyPD8 ( listen and watch   the adorable Shirley Temple sing ” On The Good Ship Lollipop”  )

I hadn’t thought about them in 10 years or so. I was sitting on a stool in a swanky Manhattan bar in the late 1970s,

Cocktail hour at a Manhattan Schrafft's. Photo: New York Social Diary

chatting up a young textile executive wannabe.

my favorite after hours bar was here in the Barbizon Hotel

He asked me where I grew up and when I told him, he asked me if I had ever been to see the Hoochie Coochie shows at the fair there. “Of course not, what do you think I am?” I replied. http://www.mortaljourney.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Little_egypt_dancer.jpg

early hoochie dancer, ours didn't wear this much

I have been asked that same thing several times over the years. Seems many many men from many many places all seem to know about the Hoochie Coochie dancers

ours weren't quite this glamourous

who graced the stage at our small town family friendly fair each fall. The fair was a big fundraiser for the local Lions club, or the Civitans, or the Rotary, or some male organization. I can’t remember exactly which one, but what I can remember is the way those girls looked. Tired and a little bit dirty and you know, they just didn’t look “healthy”, in that peaches ‘n cream glowing sort of way, like the gals in the Dove commercials look.

cute and pink

I never saw the girls on the inside, but I certainly did get a good look from the outside. The outside, meant standing at the end of the midway watching the dancers grind around a pole on a stage on the back of a flatbed truck. Curtains covered the inside details, and my friends and I were fascinated. I guess that would be the right adjective.

I remember Jerry. Jerry was a quiet fellow, who spent his summers priming tobacco,

Lewis Hines photo boy with tobacco

he had dark thick glasses, and his hair was always greasy. I remember in second grade he would fall asleep in class, and the teacher would slap him awake with her ruler. He wore plaid shirts and jeans, often the same thing for several days in a row, and in grade school he had a cowlick that he slicked down with a special creme when he started junior high.

not Jerry, but coulda been

A bunch of us went to the fair almost every night that year,

fairgrounds c. 1970

I believe it was eighth grade. Every night we would pass the hoochie coochie strip of flatbeds and we would steal a glimpse. We heard rumors about which men in town had been spotted going into the tent to watch the ‘real’ show the dancers put on. We giggled and wondered about the dancers. What did they do? How did they live inside of those trucks? There were girls who looked to be close to our age. How did they go to school? We wondered.

1970s girl group The Runaways

Then we saw Jerry eating supper with one of the dancers, at the local B-B-Q tent, he was sitting close to her on the backside of the tent on a wooden picnic bench, we fell dead in our tracks. He had his arm around her shoulders and he had a smile on his face that you could have seen a mile away.

he was pretty happy!

They had two plates of chopped B-B-Q and a side of hushpuppies to share.

We never saw Jerry again. He dropped out of school and rumor had it he took off in search of the fair. I like to think that maybe sometime somewhere along the way he helped those girls, or maybe he just became the next Hoochie Coochie man, the one Eric Clapton sang about.

from Muddy Waters, first

I suspect  those girls weren’t happy.  I could see it on their faces, but they brought much joy to a young boy named Jerry. A misfit, a poor country boy who didn’t have much in the way of prospects to get him out of town, except for the hoochie coochie girls and their torrid traveling sideshow.

The Ink Spots the Best Things in Life Are Free      (please enjoy their music while you read this post)

I was thinking back to one of the most unusual estates that I ever had the pleasure of investigating and i thought of the unique quirky little cottage in the woods. It had been built by a former ship captain

not this ship captain

in the style of a ship.   I wish I had thought to take photos, but here are some unique examples of other homes built in the semblance of a ship

wow, these kids are lucky!

shiplike home

this ship like home is a masterpiece!

Looks like a party boat to me!

Located down the street from where I used to live,  I had actually seen the owner a time or two through the years. We had met when she stopped by my open house when I was selling someone’s estate doll collection.

antique doll collection

Her husband the ship captain, had sailed on many years earlier.     She said that she loved dolls but she didn’t have money to buy any.   She also told me that she was legally blind. We had a nice neighborly chat but i was busy and didn’t want her to linger because I had dolls to sell and customers with money,  and then she was on her way.

After her death a former student of hers was given the challenge of disposing of the contents of the home so that it could be sold.

Her home looked a lot like this at first glance

overgrown

here are some more really amazingly weird homes if you are interested:

http://realestate.aol.com/blog/gallery/weirdest-homes-in-america-unique-homes-for-sale/

I was called to help clean out the quirky little house, which was barely visible from the street, having been consumed by the overgrowth of trees and weeds. It’s charm was not appreciated by everyone but I found it to be like one of those places I had visited many times in my dreams.  It was a magical place full of tiny treasures. Treasures picked up on excursions abroad as well as from neighbors trash piles. Inside was as surreal as the outside. Amid the overgrowth I found the yard full of  little seating areas with vignettes scattered with litter that had been “one man’s trash”……..

I came to find out that Dreama had spent her career teaching music within the public school system. During the summers in the fifties she traveled the world with her husband.

Her home was covered inside as well, every square inch! She had fine art and magazine clippings, both taped or thumbtacked to the walls and ceilings. There were chipped and cracked figurines, tarnished brass and scratched tole and toile accessories, torn tapestries and moth eaten scottish tartans. There were compact built-in drawers and fold down shelving designed with precision by the ship captain, and they were filled with collected collectibles, dirty and stained and oddly assembled. Her bathroom was covered in pink flowered motif collectibles and towels and vases and plastics. Her beds, more built-ins, were cozy and covered in old throw pillows, needlepoints and quilts and linens and crochetwork, hodgepodged softgoods that made me sneeze just looking at them. There were dressing table containers filled with broken beads and sterling and gold jewelry bits, pearls and rhinestones, cabochons and crystals. Did I mention books yet? Stationery? Postcards and Travel guides? The kitchen was filled too, cooking and serving pieces, potting containers and chalkware vegetables. As weird as this may sound, I loved it all. You see, everything had a design of some kind…there was nothing that was plain or solid or smooth or flat. The house and the yard were beautiful. Being a product designer and a collector, I fell in love with every smidgen of Dreama’s collection and every inch of her house and yard, as dusty as it was.

In her later years Dreama had arranged her assembled curiosities and vignettes by touch and feel. As she aged and lost her eyesight and retreated deeper into her cottage in the woods, I am certain that she had a lifetime of memories to sustain her.  She had her memories and her collections, and these made her happy. She had her piano too, it was in a strange little sliding door room on the side of the house, that may have been a carport. It was covered with baskets and figurines, and was crammed in among other found pieces of broken furniture and remnants of old potted plants. I couldn’t tell when the last time was that she had played that piano, but i bet it sounded wonderful. As wonderful as her voice and her memories would have been to hear about…….

Dreama surrounded herself with this beauty, and in her old age and blindness that beauty became but a memory. A memory that I had the pleasure, and i mean the ultimate pleasure, of discovering and touching and cleaning and sorting and assembling and selling and wondering about. The items that had been collected for free, as Dreama had ambled down the road of her life. That road was a big one, it went from her neighborhood in Greensboro to the streets of  Madrid. When she came down my road that summer morning, to touch and feel the dolls that I had gathered  to sell, I wish now that I had taken her up on that invitation. That morning as she had left, she had asked me to come and visit her sometime. She told me she lived down the road, in the cottage on the hill, and that I was welcome to stop in and visit with her any time…or she said I could just come and sit in her yard.  I wish I had done that. Maybe next time someone invites me i will take them up on that offer, before it is too late.

Design Archives opened on Sept 1, 2001. I can’t believe it, but I have survived for ten years! There have been a couple of moves, which is major for a vintage store because there are tons and tons of inventory that can quickly accumulate. The best thing is YOU the customer….because of your love, we have survived in this tough decade and we will continue for at least another ten years…..in our new incarnation we have added the Emporium, a building leased to vendors to stock with their OWN vintage and handmade products. Guess what? Tonight I am gonna get it together……time allowing….. and add some photos from the past 10 years and this weekend I am going to add some photos of the current space …….Thank You for 10 wonderful years!!!xoxo

Her name was Gertrude and she was born in 1899.

19th c baby tintype

She came of age just as women were given the right to vote and she lost a young boyfriend to the war in Europe.

doughboys

The Twenties Came in with a roar and she was romanced and married

bride doll, passed from bride to bride

a young insurance executive who moved her to Greensboro,

insurance building, lower right

just as Greensboro built its first skyscraper and insurance joined textiles and education as a major growth industry…it was at this time that many began referring to Greensboro as the “Hartford of the South”.

She was fair haired and had the largest blue eyes her husband had ever seen, http://fashionableetsy.blogspot.com/2011/02/just-because  which she used to her advantage, tucking her flapper girl ‘bob’ into her cloche and batting her lashes

gertrude's eye makeup

at him everytime she wanted to ride the Elm St trolley in downtown for shopping and tea at Meyer’s Department Store.

1920s girlfriends shopping

It was in 1922 that she purchased this pale peach feathered cloche,

she wrote notes on the storage box lid

designed by the ultimate milliner, Lucille.

feathers were on everything in the twenties

On a warm spring evening Gertrude wore the cloche to a dinner and dancing with her husband, at the sunset drive home of the President of Guardian Life Inc.
It is that evening that I like to think her daughter was conceived. The daughter who brings me Gertrude’s lovely belongings, but needs to move into assisted living and can no longer be the protector and archivist for her late mother’s finery.

looks like gertrude's daughter in the late forties

So, to my delight, I am the new owner of this beautiful hat and many other lovely dresses

1930 evening gown

and accessories, which I will sell to a young lady all over again. This is what makes my job as owner of Design Archives Vintage shop a delight on so many levels, every single day of my life!

Here they are! The eagerly anticipated glitterati rococo transexual starfish! Buy them each or purchase a set of four. $11 each. We will pack and ship to your destination…send email to kitrodenbough@yahoo.com……and….we’ll paypal invoice you your total based on your zipcode. How simple is that? pimping the starfish…..

It has been a super busy week for us here at design archives vintage and handmade emporium, and in the midst of all the festivities and preparations for First Friday Downtown Greensboro    http://www.downtownfridays.com/  , we had a celebrity visitor!

Before we reveal the celebrity of the week, I must interrupt this broadcast with a note from our sponsor………

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-Wy_BRFElc

A couple of weeks ago, we had a surprise visit from Australia’s first Idol winner, and now a judge on their X-Factor show;

Guy Sebastian! Guy is touring the US promoting his single http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh7cclkPJGE  Who’s That Girl

Guy was kind enough to send us a photo where he is wearing one of the pendant necklaces that he bought from us. Monique made it, as part of her collection she calls Crown Jewels. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Crown-Jewels-Designed-By-Monique-Sparks/146222955444664      Isn’t it great? He bought quite a bit from us, so we have decided to call him our Celebrity of the Week….so now we expect to name a celebrity each week……

This brings to mind the time Fantasia, her little girl, and her mommy, were shopping vintage with us. It was 2003 and Fantasia said that she had a callback audition, hoping to make it to the stage on a show named American Idol. Yea right, and my Daddy is Santa Claus, I thought.   Well, the rest is history and i try not to be such a skeptic now.

Here she is wearing one of the many items she bought from us that day…..Now I will get back to the beginning and what I started out trying to tell you, about our current celebrity of the week. This gal June Gardens, shopped with us on thursday, in the midst of my scurrying about preparing for first friday, so I couldn’t pay her too much attention but i started following her blog, and I am laughing out loud…scaring my little doglets  (photo of Bruno, looking scared, Bebe humping him)who gather around my feet when I am on the computer, and I cannot believe that she lives somewhat anonymously RIGHT HERE in the Boro! She is HILARIOUS.

http://byebyepie.typepad.com/bye_bye_pie/2011/08/dont-go-chasing-starfishfalls-i-know-that-made-no-sense.html

Check out her stats. They are huge!!!! She has groupies all over the country!!!

I look forward to a wonderful lasting friendship with our newest celebrity June Gardens, and i highly recommend that you check out her blog, especially if you are interested in laughing daily. See why I posted those starfish photos?

June, you are Celebrity of the Week #2 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have gotten off schedule, surprise surprise….I am working on three different stories and got sidetracked by some other crap and I know that you are sick of seeing that guys face from the last post pop up every time you log onto the website ….so here goes……

while I write the next fantastic story, please enjoy the music, and the photos of some of our lovely customers from over the years…..

can you guess where their clothing came from????

It was a Saturday at twilight and it was still crispy, therefore I was assured that the snakes were not yet crawling about. There may be some spiders, so I needed to wear gloves, and boots if I had them.

she got the part about the boots right

Properly outfitted, it was time to take a road trip out to the county.
I love these excursions, these “digs”. I feel like I have been doing them in some manner since I was a child. The first ones leave me with warm and fuzzy memories, picnics with friends after church, down by the river,

picnics with friends

and walking the old tobacco rows searching for arrowheads.

We would line up our finds on the kitchen windowsill, and wash them gently til we could better see how they were made. There were the beach trips

wearing socks on the beach

and walking and searching for shark’s teeth. We would line them up across the cottage mantle from end to end.

sharkjaw sold at auction in dallas 2011

Now I was finding myself doing “digs” like crawling into vacant deserted homes and barns and searching the floorboards, under old moldy books and newspapers, and crawling up into the attics.

Usually stairs don’t hold up very well with years of neglect, so getting up into an attic space can be a challenge. But that is the sort of thing that makes the find memorable. The harder you work for it the more exciting the discovery is.

Most people want to work. We are hardworking Americans, after all, aren’t we?
Back “in the day” when there was work for us, a lot of us worked in places called “mills”.
People could graduate (or not) from high school and start work in the local mill the next day. The mills built villages

mill village greensboro nc

for their workers, and some even had schools for the workers children.

Mill workers: before the mill built schools, even children worked in the mill

There were mill stores, and doctors, and gymnasiums, and churches. Small towns were built around mills.

When I climbed into the attic in the house in a former mill village guess what I found? Socks. Hundreds of them.

socks, a whole passel of 'em covering the attic floor

Patterned socks made on sock machines that no longer exist in this part of the world. The socks were beautiful! Stripes and argyles and checks.

Socks, a key fashion element for jitterbuggers

Oh bliss, surrounded by colors and yarns and textures dirty and dusty, and maybe giving housing to snakes and spiders. I didn’t care.

Back in the not too terribly distant past I worked in a sock mill. I designed socks.

designing socks, 1991

To get patterns like what I had just found, I had to send sketches to contacts in the far east. It took about 6 weeks to get sock samples back. They were cheap, and sometimes with the language barrier I got hilarious interpreted versions of what I had hoped I would get. Eventually I could put together enough samples to go to sales and then into production, if the quantities were large enough. Minimums were very high, when dealing with vendors thousands of miles away. But they were cheap.

Is this what Americans really want? Cheap socks that we get after we order millions of pairs to be made on machinery that is in buildings that are thousands of miles off shore? Made by children

children working makes me sad

and mothers and feeble old people?

You think yes, I like a good sale, I like commodities like socks in packages of 12 prs for $6. They wear out anyway and I can toss them in the garbage and get more next month.

Really? Really people? Think about it. I don’t have to lay it out for you. The economy…it holds a direct correlation to people     WORKING …..    and when there are no jobs, and people are not working and therefore not earning then guess what? The Economy sucks.
We are Americans, and we really want to work.  As I said earlier, in doing a “dig”the harder you work for it the more exciting the discovery is.
I challenge you all to figure out a way that you can put yourself to work. You are gonna have to take charge yourself, no one else can do it for you, they’ve tried. You got to do it yourself.
Just do it!

there aren’t many of these socks found or available to purchase in the world, but occasionally Rustyzipper.com may have some…

http://www.rustyzipper.com/shop.cfm

This link takes you to mill village information, and more:

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newsouth/3.0

Here’s an interesting menswear link bout 1920s fashions including socks

http://www.wear-mens-suits-with-swagger.com/mens-fashion-of-the-1920s.html

fabulous swing dancers vintage blog site

http://vforvintageblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/stripey-socks.html