Reduce Fabric

 Due to the need of fabric for uniforms, in 1942 the US War Production Board issued an order that the amount of textiles used in women’s wear should be reduced by 15 percent. Skirt length and width were restricted and hems could be no wider than two inches (shown below a pre-restriction three inch hem next to a two inch one). Pleats, ruffles, patch pockets, attached hoods and shawls were prohibited. Mending clothes and repurposing fabric became a patriotic duty.

from facebook group America in the 1940s

Join DHAS

  Join Us.  The Delmar Historical and Arts Society (DHAS) is always looking for new members.  We meet at the Delmar Police Department Training room at 7PM the second Thursday of each month.  The cost to be a member is twelve dollars a year.  If you are interested send a check to PO Box 551, Delmar DE 19940.

Membership might also be a good Christmas present for someone.

We are also looking for old family photographs and stories of Delmar families.  If you have any please scan the photo and email them to delmarhas@Yahoo.com

1928 Sunday Dinner at The Glen Haven Tea Room

In 1928 our Delmar family may have had dinner at the Glen Haven Tea Room at the intersection of East Williams street and East Main in Salisbury.  After dinner they may have continued down Mt Herman road to Minksville and Powellville or some equally exciting place for their Sunday drive.

In 1926 the Glen Haven Development Corporation started to develop their subdivision.  It mostly on the north side of the Salisbury park.  Benjamin Johnson and Curtis Long were the owners. 

In 1928 Charles Oland Phillips, his wife and Mrs. Henry E Sweet opened the Glen Haven Filling Station and Glen Haven Tea Room.  The restaurant was located east of the large shirt factory building that today is The Country House. The tea room and gas station set on the point.

1931 Samborn Map - yellow building outline is Glen Haven Tea Room

 

C. Oland Phillips (1889-1948) was a machinist who originally was from Denton, who worked at the Salisbury ship yard and was superintendent of the machinist at the Salisbury shipyard. During WW2 he would be a naval architect for an army base in Brooklyn that built small ships.   His wife was Mollie Marion Steffens Phillips (1894-1979) who was from Chincoteague.  After the tea room she would go to work for E S Adkins as a Bookkeeper in Salisbury.

Mrs Heny Edwin Sweet was Lillian Mae Carter Sweet (1892 - ), the wife of Henry Edwin Sweet (1889-1965).  The couple was from Rhode Island and would winter in Salisbury or stay in Salisbury when Mr. Sweet had work in the area.  Henry Sweet was referred to as Commander as he had a motor ship called the “USMV Siwash” that he leased out to various government entities and he would captain it. The Coast guard used the ship often for law enforcement.

The Sweets were the apple pie of Salisbury society and no doubt the Sweets and the Phillips knew one another from the shipyard connection.    

The Glen Haven was only a mile from the Courthouse in Salisbury but unlike the restaurants by the courthouse the Glen Haven Tea Room had little foot traffic customers.  It was a place you drove to. It main attraction was it had dances. It was also a venue for card parties and receptions.

In the fall of 1929 E. M Willis and his wife bought the gas station and tea room.  Naomi A. Williams ran the Tea room.  First I have no information on Naomi Williams.  Newspaper clippings however says E M Willis and wife came from Jacksonville Florida where they ran a similar operation. 

The closest match I have for E. M Willis is Earl Moore Willis (1907-1963) and his wife Daisy Batson Willis (1908-1984). Even that is questionable.  Mr. Willis was an auto mechanic in 1930 and lived in Miami Florida, the difficulty in making him fit with the E M . Willis in Salisbury is his age of 21 in 1930.  He would not be old enough to have a liquor license.  NOTE: due to a brain freeze I did not consider that prohibition was still in effect so there would be no need for a liquor license. So we are not sure who E M Willis is.  

By December 1929 The Glen Haven had cut back to Saturday and Sunday Dinners.

In 1930 E M Willis ran an advertisement he was selling off his gasoline.  It may not have been just a promotion but a going-out-of-business sale.

After that advertising for the Glen Haven stopped and in 1935 Bill’s Seafood Restaurant (William J Ahtes) moved into the building.

To see the location where the restaurant was - the roof of it is shown in the lower right corner in this aerial photo of the intersection of Williams and East Main.

 

Royce and Irma Hancock

 Royce David Hancock (1893- 1957) was the son of Charles and Mary Jane Brittingham Hancock of Snow Hill Maryland.  He had eight brothers and sisters and was an intelligent hard working young man, who played coronet in Susie”s band and worked at Dr Jones Drug store.

In 1911 Royce Hancock left Snow Hill to take a job in Delmar with a drug store.

 

above April 1911 Snow Hill Democratic Messenger

His brother, John H. Hancock, also moved to Delmar.  John would work for the railroad for 32 years and his wife and family would live over on Pine street.

At this time a young school teacher named Irma deLearsey Boston worked at the Delmar Maryland school.  She was from Quantico, the youngest daughter of Ezra S. Boston and Eliza Emily Phillips Boston.  She had graduated Wicomico Salisbury High School in 1906 and then went to Baltimore to attend Maryland normal school to become a teacher.  In Irma’s high school yearbook her narrative says she is the biggest flirt in school and not only wins all hearts but keeps them too.

Naturally young people will meet and a 16 year on again off again courtship begin between Royce and Irma

From newspaper clippings of the time Irma rarely missed a dance in town.  She was delayed one year in opening her class because she had slipped off a Ferris wheel in Ocean City and hurt her foot. In another article she recalls when she went home to Quantico from Delmar for the weekend she would hire a buggy and horse at the Delmar livery stable drive home and then on Monday return to Delmar.

A month after his sister, Mary Lucile Hancock, had passed away in Baltimore, Royce Hancock was drafted in September of 1917 and sent to Camp Meade for training.  Other Delmar boys sent with him were; Michael R Elliott, Elmer J Davis, and Clarence M Guthrie.

After Camp Meade he went to the School of Military Aeronautics at Princeton University in New Jersey. 

After a couple more training schools he was assigned to the 644 Aero Squadron of the American Expeditionary Forces.

In March of 1918 Lieutenant Royce Hancock boarded the transport ship “Leviathan” to go to France.  The Leviathan was a German Ocean Liner seized by the US Government at the start of WW1.  The ship could carry 2,000 crew members and 9,000 troops.  Later in the war it had an infamous reputation as a plague ship when in September of 1919 with 11,000 men on board the Spanish influenza broke out. By the time she arrived in France there was 2,000 sick from influenza and 80 had died on the way over.  Eventually Lt Hancock made it to Field 8 at Saint Maixent France.  This is where American Chasse pilots received their combat instruction and the finishing touches for being sent to the front.

Insert photo of 644th

In February of 1919 the unit was sent back to the states on board the transport ship “Siboney.”  The “Siboney” had been built in Philadelphia in 1917 by Wm. Cramp and Son.  Lt Hancock caught the Spanish flu and spent several months in the hospital until being discharged in Sept 1919.

above from the Wilmington news Journal Sept 25, 1919

He only spent a brief time in Delmar as by 1920 he was working in Dallas, Texas as a druggist.  It was like the song said “how ya gonna to keep’ em down on the farm (after they have seen Paree)?   About this time Irma Boston left Delmar and started teaching in Atlantic City New Jersey.

In 1927 he was living in Michigan and after years of courting Miss Irma Boston he finally married her in Manhatten New York.  They returned to live in the Midwest until settling in Park Ridge, Illinois.

In 1930 he became a salesman for the fabric division of E I duPont in Illinois. He would stay in that position for 27 years before dying in 1957.  He was buried at Cape Charles. 

Irma would move to live with her niece, Mrs. Roy G Bishop, in Danville, Virginia in the summer and in the winter live in Florida. In 1959 she would return to Delmar to speak to the reunion of classes of 1914-1917.

 

She would die in 1961 and is buried in Cape Charles.  Cape Charles seems to have been picked because it was the home of her only surviving sister, Mrs. Walter Wise.

 

The stock market crash of 1929

 "Once I built a tower up to the sun

Brick and rivet and lime

Once I built a tower, now it's done

Brother, can you spare a dime ?"

The stock market crash of 1929 – considered the worst economic event in world history – began on Thursday, October 24, 1929, with skittish investors trading a record 12.9 million shares. On October 28, dubbed “Black Monday,” the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged nearly 13 percent,

1919 Hoyt Lee Parsons

 MAN'S HEAD SEVERED

Delmar Railroad Yard Brakeman Found Beneath a Car

Special to The Morning News DELMAR, Del., Dec. 14 Hoyt L. Parsons, aged 29 years, a Delaware Railroad yard brakeman, was found dead early this morning beneath a car here, his head having been severed. There were no witnesses to his death, and it is not known how he came to be killed. He leaves a wife and a little daughter. Funeral services will be held on Tuesday morning in the M. E. Church.

Above from The Wilmington Morning News 15 Dec 1919

 

Hoyt Lee Parsons (1890-1919) is buried in St Stephen Cemetery.  He was the son of Washington Irving Parsons and Elizabeth “Lizzie” Ellen Carey Parsons.  Washington Irving Parsons was a farmer in the Delmar area with a large family.  Hoyt had married Mattie Ruark about 1912.  They lived in Delmar Maryland on State Street and had one daughter, Frances J., who was born in 1913.  He worked as a fireman for the railroad.

After the death of her husband something happened to Mattie.  She either could not afford to care for her child or she died, but Frances passed to her Aunt Bessie Parsons Brittingham and Herman Eramrus Brittingham to be raised.  In the newspaper she is described as an adopted foster child of Herman Brittingham.  It is not known if she was legally adopted but she begin to use Brittingham as her last name.

Herman Brittingham ran a successful auto repair shop called Salisbury Auto Body Works.  Bessie was the sister of Hoyt Parsons.  Herman would die in 1939 leaving Bessie to run the business.   Frances would marry John C. Dukes about 1932, have a daughter Norma L Dukes in 1934, and in 1940 get a divorce.  In 1940 she married again this time to Ralph Andrew Chandlee (1905-1994) and they lived in Baltimore.  Both had been married before. In 1944 Frances Chandlee died. 

In 1950, Bessie Brittingham would marry George Hart.

 

 

 

 

 

Cutting Corn From The Cob

 

The above photo  (A. Aubrey Bodine) came from a Baltimore facebook group.  It shows women cutting corn off the cob probably for a canning company.  It looks to be maybe in the 1930s or 1940s.

What is interesting the women seem to be wearing a breastplate with a spike thru it, on which the corn cob is stuck and then she uses a knife to remove the kernels.  Looks like after a full shift of that the woman would be black and blue.  Well no one said life was easy and she no doubt is just happy to earn the small amount of money she would receive.