My father was a marble worker on the Stevens Hotel, now the Hilton. This went up in 1926, ’27, ’28, and when it opened it was the largest hotel in the world.
Josephine said, “Oh, no, Maude. You’ve been out of it too long. There’s no chance that you could ever color again.”
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Now my mother had not worked in 20 years. But she takes herself off to the Furniture Mart and she sat there coloring. This woman who’s working at the next table says, “Don’t you use any alcohol?”
She came home that night, got herself out some alcohol, tried it, saw what it did. And she got ammonia, and she found out what that did.
One summer she had so many pictures to color that she had Rosemarie and her girlfriends help out. She would set them up at card tables. She had three or four card tables between the dining room and living room. She would give them a picture and a little dish of color that she had mixed, and she would ask them to put a gold stick on a lamp or paint a rose on a lamp shade. Lamp shades were real fancy in those days. They had beads and flowers. She just had these girls do one little thing, and they did fine. A simple thing.
