Something I didn't know about my mother

Mom in 1942 or 1943

On one of my trips to see my mother, back in 2013 while she was still living in Pennsylvania, we were going through her high school yearbook and I noticed that a couple of her friends had mentioned something about modeling in their comments to her. More than one of them said something like, "Good luck with the modeling." This was something I'd never heard Mom talk about. How could I know her for over 60 years and not know about this?

As my mother explained it, she and a couple of other girls from her high school had been selected to model clothing at the company store in the town. A company store is a kind of department store that is run by the mining company - hence the name "company store". It was for the people who lived in the company-supplied housing in the town. Those people could buy things in the company store, including food and other necessities, using non-cash vouchers and it would be deducted from the paycheck of the person working in the mine. My mother had told me that often the workers would go to get their paycheck and find that there was nothing left after they had "purchased" food, clothes and other necessities and after their rent for the company housing had been deducted. You may have heard of the song Sixteen Tons. It's about working in the coal mine and how the person singing the song can't afford to die because he owes his soul to the company store. Here's a link to one performance of the song.

The company store also sold women's clothes and they needed the models to show new items. My mother said she enjoyed doing it and at the end of each show, they got to pick an outfit to keep. That was their pay. Apparently, she must have been somewhat encouraged to keep modeling (judging by the comments in the yearbook) but she didn't pursue it. I never got to ask her why but my guess is that she just didn't have anyone to talk with about it. She knew people did that for a living but she didn't have a path to making it her career. All she knew was what the people around her did for a living. In a poor mining town, there weren't a lot of role models of that type. Yet some people in those conditions did find jobs like that. That's why it's important not to limit yourself to what you know. It's important to look around a bit and seek out people who are outside your own little environment. You never know what you could be capable of.