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VINTAGRAPH • WPA • WWII • YOU MEAN A WOMAN CAN OPEN IT?

Juvenile Footwear: 1955

April 16, 1955. "Children's shoes, Lord & Taylor. Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. Raymond Loewy Associates." Gottscho-Schleisner photo. View full size.

April 16, 1955. "Children's shoes, Lord & Taylor. Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. Raymond Loewy Associates." Gottscho-Schleisner photo. View full size.

 

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Today’s Top 5

The Welsh would probably cringe

These days I usually hear YOU-klin for Uwchlyn, LAN-erk for Llanerch, tra-DEF-rin for Tredyffryn, GWIN-id for Gwynedd, also BRIN-ath-in for Bryn Athyn.

Nit-picking

I'm still here in Bryn Mawr...pronounced Brin-Marr.
Bala Cynwyd is pronounced BAL-a KIN-wid. (not "wood")

Bryn Mawr is Welsh for "High Hill"...
Bala Cynwyd has a more complicated Welsh meaning...

http://www.balacynwyd.org/Bala_Cynwyd/Wales.html

Balance

I really miss steam engines; what glorious machines.

Lord & Taylor and the Main Line

The Lord & Taylor is still there, and all the Welsh community names are too. I grew up in Haverford, which was easy to figure out how to spell and say. But we had the towns/places of Bryn Mawr (brin-more), Uwchlyn, Llanerch (two L's sound the same as one L), Gwynedd (two d's become a th),and Tredyffryn Township (tred-if-er-in).
My mother took me to shop there many, many times, though not in 1955. Remember getting dresses there with her. Don't remember if I ever got shoes.

Philly

Bala Cynwyd is an affluent Main Line community bordering City Avenue in Philadelphia. As a kid growing up in a little village, Woxall, about an hour or so from there I could only marvel at its wealth. However like most of my friends, I wore shoes purchased from a nearby Grants.

That shoestore reminds me of...

an old shoe store in Orlando, Florida called Baer's Shoes downtown on Church Street. They had this enormous shoe in the window under a sign that said "We Fit Any Human!" My mother would take me there for school shoes every year because I had such wide, hard to fit feet. One time old Mr. Baer came out with one of those metal foot measurement things and commented to Mama on how wide my feet were and I'll never forget her response..."When I was pregnant with her, I was scared by a duck."

Re: Missing in action

And thankfully so! They didn't die out fully until the 1970's.

We had one in a High School Honors Radiation Biology program the summer of 1964. After carefully checking it all out and deconstructing it to the essential power supply and X-Ray tube, we got the wave to go ahead and plug it in for a few seconds.

40 feet away, the radiation counter on the teacher's desk went wild and saturated. The teacher (formerly a Los Alamos scientist) turned white as a sheet and got the infernal device out of there STAT...

Somehow, we all survived!

How many nightmares

Was that impressive lion responsible for? Its eyes are burrowing into my soul.

Pronunciation

I can't believe no one has asked how to pronounce this name of the Philly suburb. That would be Bala Kinwood.

And the winner is

I predict that the two-tone jobs on the right will do well this year.

Missing in action

Where is the X-ray machine whereby child, parent, and salesman can ensure a proper fit?

Clever Touch

The use of 'park benches' along the wall to make the space seem a bit more playful. Nice Lion.

Two months old

So much says "1950s" about this department's design. As the store had opened just a couple of months prior to the photo date, we're clearly seeing what was then considered trendy modern style, and of course the store spared no expense if it hired Raymond Loewy's company.

It's a very safe assumption that the department's been remodeled and possibly relocated over the years, so today it would bear little or no resemblance to what's pictured here.

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