CATEGORY: CENTRAL OREGON
PHOTOS: FASHION SHOW

At the beginning of my third year of living in Tumalo, one of my dressmaking customers, for whom I also did fashion designing, offered to finance me in my own shop.  This was a woman who’s husband was wealthy, who went on glamorous trips to Hawaii, San Francisco, New York and Europe, and who let me design and make anything I wanted for her.  It was such fun!  She was an attractive blonde, and she looked wonderful in my creations.  I could let my imagination go, and get paid for it.

She had my shop all planned for me.  It would be on the main street of Bend she said.  Her vision was that I would have dress makers and alteration ladies working for me, and I would do only designing.  I had my doubts about finding seamstresses in a place like Bend who could do the kind of fine tailoring and stitchery necessary for the garments I would design.  I also had doubts about finding enough customers in Bend, Oregon, population 12,000, for me to make a living, “only designing.”  It weren’t as if Bend were New York or Paris when it came to fashion!  However, she told me that she knew the shop would be a great success.  Her enthusiasm was infectious.

To get me started in that direction, my generous client thought I should have a fashion show for which I would design and make everything in the show.  It was to be at the “Town,” meaning The Town Tavern, which was not a tavern but the leading restaurant in Bend.  It was in a lovely setting across a lawn from the Deschutes River, and it had a good clientele.  The management had started having regular fashion shows every week.  All the central Oregon clothing stores were represented.

I agreed to do it.  I arranged it for a month in the future.  I still had to make a living.  I had my regular customer’s work to do plus all the clothes for the show to make.  I worked day and night.  I offered to sew clothes without charge if certain customers of mine would buy the material and model the garment in the show.  I found women who would model some of my own clothing.  Some of my past clients volunteered to wear the garment I had made for them.  Zach heard about it, and although he was now engaged, offered to model his suede shirt.  I also made something for my children to wear.  On the way to the show, Jari was sewing the buttons on her coat.  That is how close I came to not getting finished in time.

The above photos are a sampling of a much more extensive show.

The show was well received, but after it was over, I was exhausted.  I sat back and considered my prospects.  Did I really want to do this for the rest of my life?  Did I want to have a shop on the main street of Bend and go there every day?  No, I thought.  No, I did not!  But then I would think that this was the biggest opportunity that had ever come my way.  If  I rejected it, then what?  If I didn’t want to do this, what did I want to do?

After days of contemplation and agonizing, I sifted my thinking down to a revolutionary conclusion: my deepest desire was to be an architect!  So what if I were a woman!  There had been other very successful women architects, like Julia Morgan who designed Hearst Castle, and Mary Jane Coulter who designed Bright Angel Lodge on the rim of the Grand Canyon.  I had been designing buildings and drawing them to scale ever since I was old enough to use a ruler.  I had learned, by trial and error (many errors) to be a fairly good carpenter.  Designing clothing, drawing what I wanted to make and then making it, was not too different from drawing a house or some other building to scale and then figuring out how to build it.  The big difference was that I liked designing buildings better.

But how could I, with no means of making a living, with two children to support ever get through architecture school?  I felt as I had as a child standing in the hayloft of the barn getting ready to jump out into space.  One must realize that this was 1964.  It was before Women’s Liberation.  It was really taking a chance.

When I checked a little further into the intricacies of enrolling in college, I found that I could get a government loan.  Howard said he would help me financially with the children.  This was a surprise, since he had been so vehement about not giving me “one thin dime” when I left him.  I had confidence in my ability to live frugally.  Furthermore, I discovered that I could go for the first six terms at Central Oregon College, a community college in Bend.  This meant I could go on living in my Tumalo house (by then paid for) and hopefully still make a living sewing.  If I started at the beginning of the 1964 spring term and went right straight through, including two summer terms, I would be ready to start in architecture at the University of Oregon at the beginning of fall term in 1965.  I was apprehensive about my ability to get through the math, but I decided that I could go for just one term.  If I made it through that, I could go for another.

It was enough to push me over the top.