Clara Matynka, our CHM, was an entrepreneurial sort. Her shop for the custom manufacture of draperies and slipcovers was quite successful and ran for decades. Her business premises were a building with one huge room with ceilings clear up to what would have been the ceilings of the second floor of a house. Big picture windows in front let in light; a refrigerator in back held cold drinks and the ladies' lunches. The walls were light green; the air smelled like fabric and sewing machine oil; the floor was scuffed linoleum. But everybody's hands and dresses were completely clean at all times.
Huge heavy solid wooden tables - three or four - took up most of the space. Each one was something like, let me guess, 20 feet by 30 feet. Each one was fitted with a cream-colored canvas top, permanently ruled with lines 1 inch apart running across the table, and stuffed or lined with firm batting 1 or 2 inches thick. On these tables large bolts of fabric could be unrolled and precisely cut, for draperies that were sometimes quite large and also lined. Into these tables pins - giant stout pins with crossways handles to them - could be stuck.
You have to pin fabric down securely in order to cut precisely.
Under these tables and against all the walls were bolts of fabric, as well as the cardboard tubes left over once the fabric was used up. I don't know what Clara's Drapery Shop used those tubes for, but Marty and I used them to try to breathe through when hiding from bad guys under blankets (the breathing didn't work, but we did escape the notice of the bad guys.) Famously, one of those tubes became the mast for the Santa Maria in the Marilla production of Columbus Proves the Earth is Flat, starring Sharon Stroinski as a benignly inebriated Christopher Columbus.
But I digress.
Besides the cutting tables there were of course several specimens of sewing machine scattered around the back of the big room. Some had long tall arms to accommodate giant draperies for sewing. There were always two or three ladies employed at these machines, and my guess is that the two ladies on the right below are two of them.
So left to right we have CAMZ as a young teen, CHM boss lady, and two of the ladies.
One lady was introduced to me as Pani Edna. She had a brilliant smile and a warm personality.
CAMZ, likely in 1943, but where? Are those rosebushes on the right background?
Obviously Clara and Gertrude spent time there and picked up skills. Gertrude much later took the helm of the business. Clara was always tailoring. She must have been taught by those ladies, as well as her mother. Where did her mother, CHM, learn the art?
It just occurs to me that those ladies knew CAMZ as a girl, and so that explains some of the twinkle in their eyes when they greeted her daughter as visitor to their shop.
Julie
Are there any photos of the furniture refinishing shop owned and operated by Mazurowski, Stroinski, and Stawicki? What was the name of it? Would someone like to write up a history of the enterprise?
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