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So hello, I haven’t written in awhile. I have been side tracked with some other little things, like helping Charlotte with some fabrics and a bit of other decorating stuff. I wanted to get back to the Jacobson’s years:  it really was quite a bit of my young career.

Kalamazoo isn’t a very big city. It was larger then but still barely more than a hundred thousand ; so to support a store like Jacobson’s with those few people was really quite something. I want to stress the kinds of things we had in the store. Baker Furniture in the 70’s was the ultimate to the retail client, of course there were other lines like John Widdicomb, (however they were not common to the retail shopper). We did have a piece here and there but Baker and Henredon were household names Baker being the Cadillac of furniture. It was not uncommon to see 5or 6 Baker settings on the floor at one time and even more Henredon. Then there were lines like Drexel and Heritage to sort of pick up the slack and lots of beautiful promotional upholstery as well. We had our own custom line of bedding with beautiful covers sold in the bedding dept. as well as the furniture dept. and many beautiful lamps mostly Chapman. In those days those lamps were very expensive maybe 250-300 dollars and that was a hell of a lot of money.

When I started there the Design Director was a man named Jim Beck he was a couple years older than I was. He had a very European Flair about him in his manner as well as his dress. We often went to dinner on Wednesdays the one late night we had to work. He would strut down the street in a big cape like we were off to the Ritz:  hell we were off to the Olympic Diner where we’d all order eggs because they were cheap .Nancy, Jim, myself and Rosemary all jammed into a booth smoking, drinking coffee, and laughing.

Nancy was one of the smartest women I think I’ve ever known she had a mind like a trap and a wild sense of humor. We were friends from the second we met. She spent many evenings at my house playing scrabble her favorite thing to do. She had an annoying habit of clicking her long fingernails on the table while her opponents were trying to come up with a simple word like sit then she would quickly and calmly make three words from that one  and collect a ton of points. She had a million stories. Her father’s name was Jack Ball.  He owned a restaurant in Saugatuck on Lake Michigan. When she was small her mother would enter her in Little Miss Shirley Temple look alike contests:  she was made up to look just like Shirley and she did. Once she was supposed to jump from a plane because the real Shirley was too valuable to do so but her father stepped in and said NO to that. Nancy died one evening while watching TV. When she didn’t show up at the store by noon they sent someone to her apartment...  there she was DEAD with her ever present cigarette sitting in the ashtray all burned down. Well at least she didn’t have to get old…..