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141 FRANCES LANE AND MATTIE FELKER: TWO LEGENDARY LADIES OF TEXAS by Mike Felker and Liz Brandt  The rags-to-riches fable: Poor young person works hard, pulls himself up by his bootstraps, and becomes unbelievably successful. The stories wouldn’t exist if, every once in a while, they didn’t actually happen. As young girls helping their mother design and sew their clothes in the small farming town of Haskell, Texas, Mattie and Frances Walling dreamed of owning their own fine dress shop. They worked at local department stores on Saturdays and after school, learning the business and winning saleswoman of the month multiple times. Their opportunity arose when sister-in-law Ida opened her beauty salon, and offered Mattie the front twentyby -forty-feet. Frances left her job at the theatre. Mattie left Perkins Timberlake, where she earned $8.00 a week less social security— the manager kindly told her he would hold her job for her until she and Frances were forced to declare bankruptcy. Brother J. E. lent Mattie $400 and Frances’s husband Shady borrowed from their insurance, and the Walling sisters followed their dream. J. E. wouldn’t dream of letting them go to Dallas alone to buy clothes, and, as he drove them, he was horrified to discover they had no name for their store yet. Because they felt it had a more sophisticated ring, they had decided on their last rather than their first names for “the shop” as they always called it. J. E. had them flip a coin, and the name became Lane-Felker, rather than FelkerLane ; there were never any arguments or disagreements about the way the coin toss turned out. Mattie and Frances planned a fine dress shop; at a time when Perkins was selling dresses for $4.95 to $20.00, they planned to stock dresses selling for $50.00 to $75.00. The shop opened on March 1, 1940, stocked in Easter pastels, thirty-seven lovely floral dresses, pink, yellow, and blue suede purses, silk stockings, gloves and, of course, beautiful hats, all bought in Dallas with cash. The shop was as pretty as they could make it. They had had fixtures built for $200, and bought used display cases from a grocery store; they painted the concrete floor because they couldn’t afford carpet . Mattie had turned 28 the day before, and Frances was pregnant and six months away from her 27th birthday. They had a good first day and good days after that. (In 2001, Frances could still remember the names of the customers from that day sixty years earlier.) Frances chose her first daughter’s name at the shop on July 4th, and gave birth to daughter Linda August 11 of that year,1 continuing to work while pregnant to the dismay and anger of J. E., who thought no one would continue to shop with her under those circumstances. They did, even when she left and walked the three blocks home twice a day to nurse. 142 Legends in Their Time––and Ours Still Frances holding daughter Suzanne, about 1943 With the war, the early 1940s were a period of slow growth. Neither Mattie nor Frances took home a salary, and it was the late 1940s before the store was truly in the black. Every penny of profit was poured into shop expenses and more merchandise, and the empty boxes were kept on shelves to make it look as if the shop had more stock than it did. One customer delighted in asking, loudly, why they had all those empty boxes, preferably when there were other customers in the shop to hear her. Frances had a second daughter, Suzanne in 1942, also named at the shop, but after a model in the Brewster hat ads.2 Along with Jantzen Sportswear, Herman Marcus, Serbin, and Lady Bayard dresses—a moderate line which sold for $8.95 to $11.95—they started carrying Vanity Fair lingerie because Frances got tired of running down the street to Perkins whenever someone needed a girdle to go with a dress.3 Yes, Lane-Felker was built on personal service. By 1945, however, the two sisters needed help, and they hired a full-time alterations lady, Dovie Pate, who worked for them for the next forty-plus years. The following year, they hired a full-time salesclerk, Dovie’s daughter Patsy Cobb. (When Mattie was in her 80s, Mattie’s son Michael showed her a photo and asked...

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