Max Hess Jr. Puts Allentown on the Map

When Diane Stoneback, food editor of The Morning Call, the daily newspaper published in the Lehigh County seat of Allentown, challenged readers to a concoct a strawberry pie as scrumptious as the trademark dessert once served at the popular Patio Restaurant in Hess Brothers, a beloved department store, she found more than a flood of recipes overflowing her inbox.

Hopeful contestants who participated in the 2000 pie contest also shared their stories of excursions to Hess’s in the eastern Pennsylvania city and lunches at the Patio Restaurant that invariably concluded with the restaurant’s signature strawberry pie. What emerged from the contest was a slice of the community’s collective memory of the store that once drew throngs of shoppers to Allentown’s Ninth and Hamilton Streets before it closed in 1996, just one year shy of it centennial.

“My father took me to Hess’s when I was seven years old,” recalled contestant and retired teacher Weda Mosellie, of Phillipsburg, New Jersey. “I remember the revolving doors. No store in the area had them.” As soon as she obtained her driver’s license, she drove straight to Hess’s with her younger sister, where they treated themselves to club sandwiches and, of course, strawberry pie. Marilynn Reese, a resident of nearby Whitehall, remembered Patio lunches with her mother, who worked at Hess’s for thirty years. “We always shared a chicken chow mein and a piece of strawberry pie,” a tradition they continued long after her mother retired. Bethlehem’s Connie Stern, one of three winners, who won for “best-tasting” pie, described how she invariably took a doggie bag with leftovers home from the Patio so she “could save room for strawberry pie.”

Like everything else at Hess’s, the Patio’s strawberry pie – packed with eight pounds of fresh berries, piled high with whipped cream, and towering a whopping ten inches high – made even the briefest of visits to Hess’s a memorable, larger-than-life experience. Second-generation owner Max Hess Jr. (1911-1968), who owned and operated the store from 1935 to 1968, is credited with Hess’s remarkable success and turning Hamilton Street into a “Miracle Mile” for both retailers and shoppers. His unique brand of marketing created a department store that was as much theater as a place to shop and where the expected was the exception. “You walked into that store and you thought you were in another world,” recalls Rose Brucker, a Patio employee from 1975 to the store’s final day, January 15, 1996, and one of seven judges for the pie contest. “Where else in the Lehigh Valley could you see life-sized toys, imported chandeliers, an annual flower show and ten thousand-dollar gowns along with six-dollar blouses and a bargain basement?”

Even before Max Hess Jr. took over, Hess Brothers, named by his father Max Hess and uncle Charles Hess, had a flare unusual for a conservative, predominantly Pennsylvania German, medium-sized city. The German-born brothers owned a Hess Brothers retail store in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, when Max Hess Sr. visited Allentown for the first time in the 1890s. Intrigued by the business potential of Hamilton Street, he convinced his brother that they should open an Allentown “branch” of their Perth Amboy store. At precisely 7:10 p.m. on Friday, February 19, 1897, Hess Brothers, with two dozen employees, opened for business on the first floor of Victor D. Barner’s Grand Central Hotel at 831-833 Hamilton Street. “To-night the place will be handsomely decorated with flowers, ferns, palms and other tropical plants,” reported The Call and News in its preview of the store’s grand opening. “The Allentown Band will be stationed behind a bank of ferns and palms.”

Contrary to the predictions of soothsayers, who claimed that no business would ever survive on Hamilton, above Eighth Street, basically the city’s unglamorous wholesale district, the store proved so successful that the brothers sold their New Jersey store within a year to concentrate on their Pennsylvania store. They expanded into the hotel’s basement and second floor and installed an elevator. In 1902, they purchased the five-story hotel building and remodeled it as a department store.

Allentown residents had never before experienced a store quite like Hess Brothers. One Saturday, shoppers found themselves serenaded with opera music by a new­-fangled Victrola. A trout stream ran through the store’s buffet. “The stream rushes madly on its course,” reported The Morning Call in 1909. “Continuing on its course, the water can be seen as it runs into the babbling brook, represented by a large aquarium and in it playfully and gaily swim the gamey trout.” The display windows set the tone for Hess’s crowd-stopping store windows fifty years later. One window showcasing travel wear and luggage depicted a hand-painted background of the New York City harbor and skyline and a pier filled with people “togged out in everything proper and carrying the most elaborate baggage.”

In 1911, the store began offering free telephone service for customers through its own telephone exchange. Two years later, Hess Brothers debuted a “milk bar” and a restaurant seating four hundred patrons. By World War I, Hess Brothers was drawing customers from throughout eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. “The visitors were not all from Allentown,” reported The Morning Call, describing a mid-summer rummage sale in 1915. “Many came with handbags and suitcases in which to carry home their purchases. The outgoing trolley cars and trains were filled with folks who have come to look upon Allentown as the shopping center of the valley.”

By 1917, the year it celebrated its twentieth anniversary, Hess Brothers was the place to shop for the discerning customer. The main entrance featured exquisitely designed display windows on either side of the vestibule. Inside, customers ascended a grand marble staircase leading to the men’s and ladies’ departments on the second floor. In the twenties, the store’s more than one hundred specialized departments included a millinery department, a French Room with imported designer labels, a “Burnt Wood” department offering original art, a beauty salon, and an entire department offering only baby carriages.

Early on the brothers divided up their responsibilities to suit their temperaments. Charles, who remained single throughout his life, was the principal buyer, traveling across the country and throughout Europe and stocking the store with the latest fashions. Younger brother Max managed the day-to-day operations in Allentown. His marriage to Florence Rice in 1910 and the birth of their only child, Max Hess Jr., on March 23, 1911, assured a future for the store that would remain in the family for a half-century.

Max Hess Jr. enjoyed a privileged upbringing and the trappings that his father’s success accorded him. He attended the Allentown Preparatory School (1923-1925), Moravian Preparatory School (1925-1927), and Mercersburg Academy (1927-1929) in Mercersburg, Franklin County. The department store was a prominent backdrop during his childhood. He careened through the store on roller skates and, beginning at age fourteen, worked at the store after school and during holidays.

Max Hess Sr. died at the age of fifty-eight in 1922, followed by Charles seven years later. When his uncle died, eighteen-year-old Max Hess Jr., sole heir to the store, was just beginning his studies at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. Young Hess was not one to waste time on academic pursuits when he seemed destined to run the store. As soon as he turned twenty-one, in 1932, he dropped out of college to learn the retail business from the store’s management. Three years later, he took over as president. His first order of business was a store-wide clearance sale. The giant sale was the first of many “firsts” that kept generations of customers heading for the store – officially renamed Hess’s in the 1960s – long after suburban malls began drawing shoppers away from Hamilton Street. During his thirty-three-year reign, he turned Hess’s into one of the most highly recognized department stores in the United States, known for its fashion shows, celebrity-infused events, and innovative (and often daring) promotions.

On February 3, 1939, at the age of twenty-eight, Max Hess Jr. married Elizabeth Douglass (1913-1997), a native of Evansville, north of Reading, in Berks County. While he immersed himself in promoting the store, Elizabeth Hess devoted herself to civic causes, charitable projects, and community work. She served as a director of the Allentown Women’s Club, the Allentown Art Museum, the Wright School, and Family Service of Lehigh County. She also served as a member of the executive committee of the Lehigh Valley Crippled Children’s Society. Max and Elizabeth Hess were the parents of three children, Thomas, Jean, and Elizabeth, none of whom showed interest in carrying on their family’s legacy.

With his intuitive flair for promotion, Max Hess Jr. turned Hess’s into a magnet for shoppers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. While other retailers would adopt his strategies, his always had an extra dimension, a layer of drama, and hyperbole that made Hess’s like no other department store. He wasn’t satisfied just to attract customers to his store; he wanted them to enjoy spending time among the imaginative displays, newest fashions, and latest inventions. Using a blend of no-holds-barred customer service, exquisite visual displays, Hollywood style entertainment, and the glamorous restaurant, he transformed Hess’s from an upscale department store into an indispensable Lehigh Valley attraction. His motto was singular and straightforward: “Be the first, be the best, and above all, be entertaining.”

In the 1940s, he introduced a number of “free services,” including home deliveries, personal shoppers, monogramming for store-bought leather goods, gift-wrapping for purchases of ten dollars or more, and a complementary portrait of any baby born in Allentown. The store cashed checks as willingly as a bank and conducted art classes for adults and children. Hess invited customers to order goods by mail or telephone. He also invited shoppers to open a Hess’s charge account. To every customer who opened an account, he sent a personal letter promising “to do our best to see that every contact you have with us will be pleasant, every transaction completely satisfactory.”

He wanted his store to offer the newest, the biggest, and the best. He updated the store’s Edwardian-era exterior with a sleek, streamlined concrete facade in the Art Moderne style in 1936. He replaced the marble staircase with double bank escalators, the first moving stairways to be installed in a department store. In the late 1940s, he mounted a fifty-foot­-high, nine-cycle sign on the Hamilton Street facade that quickly became a beacon of downtown Allentown. As part of the urban renewal wave of the late sixties and early seventies, the sign was dismantled, in 1972, when city officials transformed Hamilton Street into Hamilton Mall by installing canopies to shield pedestrians from inclement weather.

Scattered throughout the store’s nearly quarter-million square feet of space were millions of dollars worth of the unusual and the unique. Dozens of opulent chandeliers, dripping with thousands of crystal pendants, and mirrored pillars greeted shoppers on the first floor. Counters were laden with monumental Oriental temple jars and palace urns, many of them set in elaborate ormolu and silver fittings; fabulous French ceramics, including prized Sevres vases; and sculptures in bronze, marble, and stone spanning several centuries. European settees framed in gilded wood and upholstered in the finest silks and a staggering array of antiques, decorative arts, and accessories culled from exotic and far-off lands were displayed prominently and tucked away in nooks and crannies, delighting shoppers who unwittingly happened upon them. Richly veined marble pedestals held high all manner of busts and likenesses of heroes and historical personages. Giant mechanical toys and miniature chandeliers made the store’s Toyland a “must see” wonderland for families, especially during the holidays when every inch of Hess’s shimmered. Each holiday season Pip the Mouse entertained thousands of shoppers – young and old – with his Christmas Eve antics in a wildly popular automated puppet show, “The Mouse Before Christmas.” For adults, the store was a virtual museum; for children, a spectacular, magical kingdom of make believe. It was, simply, Max Hess Jr. at his finest.

Hess delighted in surprising shoppers. One year a helicopter delivered Santa Claus, who parachuted onto the store building’s roof another “fust.” To celebrate the American debut of Ma Griffe, he invited two hundred “lucky women” to the store for a free bottle of the perfume. In 1960, he installed the first “talking elevators” in a department store. At the height of the Cold War, Hess’s introduced America’s first Soviet fashions, and, in another much publicized “first,” women’s topless bathing suits by designer Rudi Gernreich (1922-1985). Although Hess’s did not sell a single topless suit, the publicity generated by it was enormous.

“Max believed that retail should be theater,” says Irwin Greenberg, former president and chairman of Hess’s, who worked at the store for forty-four years, from 1954, when Hess hired him as a buyer, to 1990. In the 1950s and 1960s, the store’s crowd-stopping street windows played a major part in this vision. Wolfgang Otto, a display artist who created Hess’s magnificent window and floor displays in its heyday, transformed banks of windows facing Hamilton Street and Ninth Street into virtual stage sets with hand-painted murals, enlarged photographs, and props that seemed to bring the fashionably attired mannequins to life.

Hess loved to surprise customers with appearances by film and television celebrities. On any given day, shoppers might meet Tony Randall, George “Superman” Reeves, Rock Hudson, Jon “Ramar of the Jungle” Hall, James Garner, or television’s most famous canine star, Lassie. Superman surprised customers by actually helping deliver their purchases! Debuting in 1962, the annual flower show that turned Hess’s into a giant indoor garden with more than a quarter-million flowers, shrubs, plants, and trees, beckoned thousands from throughout the eastern seaboard. Every year a celebrity cut the ribbon formally opening the wee long extravaganza, among them Zsa Zsa Gabor, Dorothy Malone, and, in 1964, Pennsylvania’s own First Lady Mary Scranton. Ever the showman, Hess presented Mrs. Scranton with an orchid named in her honor.

Hess’s eventually became a popular venue for politicians, including President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, U.S. Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, U.S. Representative Morris K. Udall, and Pennsylvania’s Governors George M. Leader, Raymond P. Shafer, Milton J. Shapp, and Dick Thornburgh. Foreign dignitaries included Angie Brooks, of Liberia, the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly.

Hess’s flirt with celebrities didn’t end when the store closed for the night. He and his wife regularly entertained their visiting luminaries at their opulent residence in the city’s fashionable West End, at Livingston and Seventeenth Streets. “At the same time he was becoming a merchandising legend – ­propelled by pizzazz, drive, showmanship and chutzpah – Hess was also carving out a private lifestyle rivaling that of the princes of Hollywood at his home,” wrote Myra Yellin Outwa­ter for The Morning Call in 2001. The “sprawling 9,000-square-foot Dutch Colonial clapboard and brick compound on two acres,” built in 1927 by Henry F. Dicke, president of a local trolley line, was purchased by Max and Elizabeth Hess in the mid-1940s. One of the house’s most unusual features was an expansive nightclub, decorated in Moorish style, where the Hesses entertained many notables of the day, including the popular duo of Sony and Cher.

Crowned by local news reporters as the region’s “merchant prince … known far and wide for his publicity gestures,” Hess garnered newsprint no matter what he did. In late May 1950, for instance, all eyes in eastern Pennsylvania were on him when his pet kangaroo escaped. (It was captured and safely returned.) His pet alligators swam in a huge swimming pool.

For Max Hess Jr., Hess Brothers was not onyx a store, but also his vehicle for promoting the City of Allentown. “Hess’s in downtown Allentown became an extension of Hess’s outlandish personality,” wrote The Morning Call’s Elliot Grossman, describing Max Hess Jr. in the newspaper’s “Person of the Century,” a special supplement published in 2000. “With novel promotions, he drew people to the store, generating worldwide attention for the city.” The retailer’s unabashed faith in Allen­town’s business district helped Hamilton Street survive as long as it did. In a speech to fellow merchants in 1965, he referred to the “gold downtown waiting to be dug up.”

For many, the Patio Restaurant, opened in 1951, was an attraction in itself, keeping shoppers in the store for hours at a time. “When I was a little girl,” Mosellie remembered, “my Dad waited in line for a table at the Patio while mother and 1 continued to shop. He said we liked to shop too much!” The Patio was where business people conducted meetings, families and friends celebrated birthdays, couples renewed their vows, and Lehigh Valley residents entertained out-of-town visitors with fashion shows, celebrity watching, and an expansive menu of unusual fare that included “french-fried lobster.” Hess’s employees dined at the Patio free of charge on their work days and many frequented the restaurant when not working. It was also where Max Hess Jr. conducted business meetings with his senior executives and managers, dubbed the “Knights of the Round Table.”

Epitomizing Hess’s philosophy of “the biggest and the best,” the Patio’s oversized menu offered more than one hundred items every day, and the portions were titanic. As well as familiar standards, such as omelets, tomato soup, club sandwiches, and steaks, customers could sample more exotic fare, including escargot and lobster tail salad. The restaurant served Hess’s Patio Beer, produced and labeled by the Horlacher Brewing Company of Allentown. An array of delectable cakes, eclairs, puddings, and pies, strategically displayed at eye level at the entrance where customers waited for their tables, tempted even the most conscientious dieter. Children were served ice cream in tiny refrigerators and hot dishes in little stoves. Despite its popularity – diners often stood in line for hours waiting to be seated – the Patio lost money every year.

Fashion shows had promoted the store since the twenties, but Max Hess Jr. propelled haute couture into the limelight with fashion shows in the Patio. He also took the shows into the community at neighborhood centers and workplaces, and broadcast them as television specials. The first traveling fashion show in June 1951 made stops at the Lehigh Structural Steel Company in Allentown, the Whitehall Cement Plant in Cementon, and the Horace Kirby Farm in Macungie. The show featured Hess’s models in bathing suits with Hess himself providing a running commentary. Other fashion shows made stops in the southern anthracite region. Local historian Michael Havrischak, of Coaldale, said Hess’s brought models to the Panther Valley colliery operated by the Lehigh Navigation Coal Company in the late 1940s and early 1950s. “You should see the pictures from these shows,” he said. “There, perched on top of coal cars are these beautiful women swathed in organza and fur. Swarming around the cars are big, burly coal miners, their faces black with coal dust, gazing wistfully at the girls. These grizzly men were star struck! They loved it! Max Hess Jr. was a promoter. He was a genius.”

“Every American woman, no matter what her financial bracket, is interested in her appearance,” wrote Hess in his 1952 book, Every Dollar Counts: The Story of the American Department Store. “The chambermaid in her Sunday finery on her day off, the high school junior dancing at a Prom, the doctor’s wife attending a bridge party – ­who shall say these are less concerned about their looks than the lady who lives on a 100-acre estate? Clothes are a matter of pride and importance to virtually all of America’s 75,000,000 females – I would exclude only those under the age of 4.” He cited that American women were, at the time, spending more than four billion dollars for clothes each year.

“Style is no longer the private prerogative of wealth,” Hess proclaimed. It did not matter that few of his restaurant customers could afford the original Dior or Valentino gown worn by the model gliding effortlessly past their tables. “Max didn’t care if you were going to buy a five-dollar shirt or Vanity Fair lingerie,” says Irwin Greenberg. “He wanted you to be able to buy that shirt at the same place where you saw that gown.”

Hess’s fashion director, the late Gerry Golden, traveled throughout the United States and Europe to buy the latest spring and fall collections for the store. (Hess’s eventually opened offices in Paris, London, and Rome to keep current with the international fashion industry and its top designers.) Golden selected the clothes for the fashion shows and trained the models. “The models were all local and full-time Hess’s employees,” explains Susan Hartmann, who began her career at Hess’s by spraying perfume over the heads of customers as they entered the store, and eventually moved into fashion and then store management and regional director. “None was a professional model before working at Hess’s,” she added.

Diane Greenberg, a Bethlehem native and model in the late 1960s and early 1970s, remembers the models’ route from the second floor, down the escalators, to the basement-level Patio. “People stopped us and asked about the clothes. I loved it. I got to wear the clothes I couldn’t afford.” Lehigh Valley clothing designer Marla Duran recalls how she and her junior high school friends took a bus downtown to Hess’s every Saturday to examine the shoes, purses, and outfits. “I had a chance to look at clothes that no other store carried,” she remembered.

Not only was Max Hess Jr. an astute businessman, he was also an unorthodox boss who knew how to select talented employees and earn their loyalty. He never had an office or even a secretary. His “office” was the store. He liked to walk up and down the aisles with a box of candy, offering pieces to “co-workers,” as he called his employees, to signal them to an aisle consultation. He expected his staff to work as hard as he did, and he was generous with those who did. It was not uncommon for him to seek out particularly industrious “co-workers,” quietly thank them for their hard work, and then unobtrusively tuck “something” in their pocket. The “something” was cash-in several instances totaling one thousand dollars!

Thirty-year store veteran Steve Furst, who joined Hess’s as a management trainee in 1963 and moved up to president and chief operating officer in 1990, recalls the trips he made when he was a divisional merchandise manager. “It was first class all the way. When we went on buying trips to New York, Max told us to buy gifts for our families and treat ourselves to a Broadway show.” Susan Hartmann’s summer job after high school was supposed to be temporary before going on to college to study retail. Hess offered her a job as a management trainee and promised to pay her college tuition and expenses if she wanted to leave in January.

By the early 1960s, Hess’s was clocking forty­-eight million dollars worth of business, but by mid-decade sprawling shopping malls at the edges of Allentown and Bethlehem had begun to attract Lehigh Valley shoppers. Hess instinctively knew he needed to expand beyond center-city Allentown for his store to survive, but he had no intention of owning a chain of stores. Ironically, he had owned the 105-acre future site of the Lehigh Valley Mall in Whitehall Township, which he sold to Philadelphia developer John A. Robbins. It was time to move on. Since not one of his three children was interested in taking over the store, he sold it for seventeen million dollars in cash to local businessman Philip I. Berman (1915-1997) in 1968. And his handpicked successor was just as flamboyant.

Berman and his wife, Dr. Muriel Mallin Berman (1915-2004), a native of Pittsburgh, collected and shared art just as Hess collected and shared celebrities. Among their many lasting legacies, the philanthropists established the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Montgomery County. They donated contemporary sculpture to the City of Allentown and many communities throughout Pennsylvania. In 1995, the Bermans gave four huge stone sculptures to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC), which are displayed on the grounds of The State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. Philip L. Berman also served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1989 to 1997.

Berman added his own colorful imprimatur to the promotional events that made Hess’s successful. He brought media and political celebrities, including Barbara Walters and U.S. Representative Wilbur D. Mills, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, to Hess’s. Like Max Hess Jr., he continued courting show business personalities, among them Rock Hudson, Eddie Albert, and Troy Donahue. During seventeen years at the helm, he expanded Hess’s into a thirty-eight-­store operation. To keep the original flagship store competitive, he opened a free parking garage in 1976. Three years later Crown American, headquartered in a building designed by renowned architect Michael Graves in Johnstown, Cambria County, acquired Hess’s in a takeover bid, expanding into fourteen new malls with Hess’s as the anchor. By the late 1980s, Crown American, headed by Frank J. Pas­querilla (1926-1999), owned more than seventy Hess’s stores in eleven eastern states. Hess’s Hamilton Mall, as the flagship store was called, hung on, even as other downtown retailers moved or went out of business.

By 1994, when the York-based Bon Ton chain took over, Crown American had closed more than twenty of its Hess’s stores. When the Hess department store chain closed two years later, it hardly resembled the store that Max Hess Jr. had created. Gone were the stylish models and popular (but unprofitable) departments such as Toyland. Except for the Patio, which continued to serve strawberry pie until the store’s final hour, Hess’s appeared to be no different than any other department store. Its distinctiveness had dissipated into ordinariness, its glamour to everyday plainness.

Allentown business leader (and former PHMC chairman) Kurt D. Zwikl – whose father, William R. Zwikl (1916-1986), headed Hess’s photography department from 1953 to 1981 – was president and chief operating officer of the Allentown Economic Development Corporation when the city purchased the shuttered store. Plans were in the works to turn the building into a modern office tower, but it was in such poor condition that the city decided to demolish it. As the wrecking ball leveled their beloved landmark in January 2000, residents and shoppers from near and far mourned the loss of the institution that had become so much a part of their lives. Today, a modern three-story office complex leased by Allentown-based Pennsylvania Power & Light Corporation stands on the site.

In a twist of fate, Max Hess Jr. never witnessed the expansion, closing, and demolition of his beloved store. On September 1, 1968, five months after he sold the store to Berman, Hess died of a brain hemorrhage. He was fifty-seven years old, one year younger than his father at his death.

The same year the Hess’s building came tumbling down, the Lehigh Valley’s PBS television station, WLTY, aired a documentary on the 1950s, which included a five-­minute segment on the store. Viewers’ outpouring of response to that segment convinced the station to make a documentary devoted exclusively to Hess’s. Hollywood on Hamilton: Remembering Hess’s, produced by the station’s Amy Burkett and Jeff Chirico, premiered in March 2002. The film, which had taken a year to produce, uses rare footage the producers uncovered at the Lehigh County Historical Society in Allentown. One segment shows a Patio Restaurant patron digging into an enormous slice of strawberry pie. And anyone who visited Hess’s during its glory days will understand why the customer’s smile is as large as the pie.

For Further Reading

Benson, Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Ferry, John William. A History of the Department Store. New York: The Macmil­lan Company, 1960.

Hellerich, Mahlon H. Allentown, 1762-1987: A 225-Year History. Allentown, Pa.: Lehigh County Historical Society, 1987.

Hess, Max, Jr. Every Dollar Counts: The Story of the American Department Store. New York: Fairchild Publications, 1952.

Mayfield, Frank M. The Department Store Story. New York: Fairchild Publications, 1949.

Zwikl, William R. Taking Pictures. Easton, Pa.: Hugh Moore Historical Park and Muse­ums Center for Canal History and Technology, 1989.

Elizabeth Armstrong Hall, a resident of Manassas, Virginia, is an independent scholar and writer. A native of Allentown, she lived on Hamilton Street, a ten-minute walk from Hess’s. Her favorite meal at the department store’s famous Patio Restaurant was the turkey club sandwich followed by a piece of strawberry pie. Her article entitled “A Centennial of Color for Crayola Crayons!” appeared in the Fall 2003 edition of Pennsyl­vania Heritage. The editor thanks the Lehigh County Histori­cal Society, Allentown,for providing images to illustrate this article.