Preparing for the Tying the Knot Display at the Avenir Museum
“News Flash” was the
subject of an email that popped up from my college friend Terrie. “Now I
can finally tell you….” she wrote, “your mother’s wedding dress will be on
display at the Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising as part of a Tying the Knot exhibit of unusual
wedding dresses.” She went on to describe,
“there will be about 15 gowns on display of many colors but your Mom’s is the
only salmon colored one…and it has the very best story of any of them.” (http://avenir.colostate.edu/avenir-museum-gallery.aspx)
I read the email twice
with growing excitement and then a sudden feeling of sorrow. I wanted to tell Mom the exciting news. But of course,
she has been gone now for two years…
Terrie is a special
friend whose life passion has been museums – collecting artifacts, cataloguing
them, and organizing them. Her career was as a Museum Director in a variety of museums out West.
I inherited several family wedding dresses and
kept them in a drawer until the summer Terrie came to visit me.. Pulling out two of the three wedding dresses I asked
her, “what should I do with
these?” She knew right away…
My grandmother’s 104-year
old Victorian wedding dress went to the Iowa Historical Society in Des Moines
after my corresponding with the director and writing the story of grandmother’s
wedding in Des Moines in June, 1908.
Terrie then suggested
that perhaps the Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising, part of Colorado
State University in Ft. Collins, Colorado, might be interested in my mother's dress. Terrie volunteers at the
Avenir and offered to speak to the director. They did want mother’s wedding dress. I sat with Mother one afternoon, having spread
out her dress and hat on her bed and we talked about her wedding. She told the story while I took notes and then wrote it up. It was one of the best afternoons we spent towards the end of her life.
The Well Traveled Wedding Dress
“I am so glad you
brought the dress and hat over,” my 93-year old mother tells me gazing at the
pinky beige short wedding dress and hat to match that I have spread out on her
bed. The dress is simple but
stylish with short sleeves, knee length, square-neckline with several pleats at
the waist in the front. “I had forgotten what it looked like, but I remember
the color.” My mother has told me many times how there wasn’t a single photo
taken of her in this dress, nor of her wedding, because she was married in
Santiago, Chile and neither she, nor my father, owned a camera.
Virginia
Cory, was born in 1919 and grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. She met my father, Richard Sampson, at
Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. When they graduated in 1941, they got
engaged. My mother tells me, “in those days you went to college for
the degree but also with the hope that you’d leave with a diamond engagement
ring.” In the fall of 1941,
Virginia accepted a high school English teaching job in Springdale, Iowa and Richard
went to Yale Graduate School.
In December 1941,
following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Richard withdrew from Yale to join the
Army Air Corps as a pilot. Because
there were not enough airplanes, he was told he would have to be waitlisted.
Having quit school, and with no job, he went to New York City where Panagra
Airlines was hiring. He signed on
and was sent to Cochabamba, Bolivia to work as a Flight Dispatcher. Marriage plans were put on hold until
two years later when Virginia was able to get a passport. Richard was then living and working in
Santiago, Chile and Panagra airlines sent a ticket to Virginia to join him so
they could be married.
Virginia
quit her teaching job in late fall, packed her trunk, wedding dress and hat and
travelled to Santiago in January 1944 to join her fiancé she hadn’t seen for
two years. Virginia and Richard
were married in Richard’s small rented house, on February 5th, 1944
by a Chilean Justice of the Peace. The wedding was at 3:30 p.m. and about 30
people came – Chileans, British, and Americans. The ceremony was in Spanish and
Virginia always remembered that she didn’t understand a word of it but when
prompted, she simply said “Si”.
“We served some refreshments thinking everyone would leave by early evening
but no one wanted to go home. They
were having such a good time that the party lasted till 10 p.m. and everyone
ended up in the street singing the Chilean National anthem,” recalls my
mother. Virginia and Richard were
married 67 years until his death in 2010.
Studying her wedding dress after so many years,
I know that my mother is looking for that 24-year-old petite, carefree girl
with the long wavy red hair who wore it.
“I wonder what size the dress is?” she asks me. There is no label in the
dress with size or manufacturer, because a dressmaker made it. Mother begins to share memories of Mrs.
Chambers in Des Moines, who made all her clothes from the time she was in 2nd
or 3rd grade. She tells
me that it was not common to have your clothes made, but during the Depression,
when her family had no money, her mother had met Mrs. Chambers and started
having clothes made over for herself and her two daughters. Mrs. Chambers charged very little
money.
Mother
recalls that she could walk to Mrs. Chambers’ house from elementary school
where she went for fittings.
“She was a heavyset woman who had no children. You had to climb many steps up to the front door of her
house on a hill and once inside, you went up two more flights of stairs to her
sewing room. Everything was
immaculately clean and quiet. I
liked being there to try on clothes because it was like going shopping.”
“Mrs. Chambers could make over anything you
wanted,” she continues. “I even
took one of my father’s old gray wool two-piece suits to her and she made it
into a darling ladies suit with skirt and jacket. She knew how to add ruffles to a man’s shirt so that I had a
completely new outfit to take with me for winters in Chile. She made all our
clothes - my sister and my mother’s and she even made all the bridesmaid
dresses and wedding dress for my sister’s large wedding.”
When Virginia knew she was to be married in
Chile in February, which is summer in the Southern hemisphere, she chose a
crepe silk fabric in a beige color to compliment her blue eyes, fair skin, and
copper red hair. She said she must
have had a picture of a dress to show Mrs. Chambers who also designed the
matching hat. Thinking she might
be married in a church, she wanted a hat. She told me she did not want a long
white dress because “I had seen all that being in my sister’s wedding and I
felt I had had it, too, and without any family coming I didn’t want that.” So a short dress with short sleeves for
a summer afternoon in Santiago would be suitable.
“I wore the dress with high heels,” she told
me, “and a double strand of costume pink pearls. I also bought long white kid gloves at Yonker Bros. Dept.
store in Des Moines but didn’t wear them.
I did not end up wearing the matching hat also made by Mrs. Chamber’s,
because the wedding was not in a church.
I did wear a corsage of Talisman Roses over the beige ribbons that Mrs.
Chambers had fixed as a decoration on the dress but there was no bridal
bouquet. My long red hair was
pinned up in back by a Chilean hairdresser whom I could not understand. I do remember having to pay for each
bobby pin she used in that hairdo,” my mother exclaims.
Virginia was allowed to take only 44 lbs. of
personal effects on the airplane, and she packed everything in an Army duffle
bag, and had a small carryon suitcase.
A trunk with the rest of her trousseau was shipped separately and
arrived months later. The wedding hat travelled safely in a round cake tin she
had bought at the dime store and was tucked away in the duffle along with the
dress, gloves, shoes and pearls. Because she never wore the matching hat at the
wedding, one day when Richard took her to the movies, she decided to wear it.
As she settled in her seat to watch the film, someone behind her asked her to
take the hat off as she was blocking his view. She never wore the hat again.
The wedding dress was put away and never worn
again after the wedding but it went along with every move Virginia and Richard
made from Chile, to Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Washington D.C., Colombia,
Uruguay, Vietnam, Mexico, Switzerland, Vermont, Hilton Head Island, S.C.,
Asheville, N.C., Chapel Hill, N.C. and finally back to Asheville, N.C.
Continuing to gaze at the dress Mother finally
says, “It’s amazing to see that dress again after all these years. It looks brand new.” When I question that, she clarifies for
me that she means that it is a style that could be worn by someone today. And she’s absolutely right.
The exhibit at the
Avenir opens the end of March and runs through mid August. But that may not be the end of the
story of my family wedding dresses for I have
one more…my own! That, too, has
sat in a drawer for 42 years but in another email from Terrie today she said
they may want my dress. It, too,
has a story of being worn twice for two wedding celebrations in two different
places . The Director of the
Avenir was thinking that having two wedding dresses from the same family –
mother and daughter, might be interesting. So I am waiting to hear more…
My long ivory wool wedding dress custom made for me in Athens, Greece 1975/
