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If you grew up in Louisville before about 1970, I don't have to tell you what "meet me under the clock" means. If you didn't, pull
up a chair and let me tell you about Clemons'.
My name is Barbara Thompson. I'm sixty-five years old, a grandmother of four, and for thirty-seven years, from the summer I was seventeen until the doors closed in January of 1988, I worked at Clemons', the department store on the corner downtown. I started at the candy counter, I moved to gloves, I spent most of my life in hats, and at the end I was the millinery buyer, which is a fancy way of saying I went to New York twice a year and came home with more hats than anybody in Kentucky needed. The building was torn down in 1996, and today it's a parking lot. I drive past it every week, and every week I look up for the clock. My granddaughter set up this page for me and taught me to type in the little boxes. She says I'm not to apologize for going on too long. I am going to go on too long. The Clock Old Mr. Howard Clemons opened the store in 1889, a dry goods business that grew and grew until it filled six floors of a stone building on the best corner in town. Over the corner door hung a big bronze clock with two faces, one for each street, and for going on a hundred years, if you were meeting somebody downtown, you met them under the clock at Clemons'. Couples met there for first dates. Mothers met daughters there to shop for wedding dresses. Soldiers met their girls there when they came home in 1945, and I'm told on V-J Day you couldn't get within a block of it. I met my husband, Warren, under that clock for our first date in 1954, and I was twelve minutes late, and he has mentioned it at least once a year for forty-five years. The clock was wound every Monday morning by the building man, and it was never more than a minute off. Mr. Vernon, the founder's grandson, used to say that a store with a slow clock was a store with slow clerks. We didn't have slow clerks. Going Up I went to work on Monday, June 11, 1951. I had a new navy dress, white gloves and my mother's pearls, and Mr. Vernon Clemons interviewed me himself in his office on the sixth floor. He asked me what I'd do if a customer was rude to me, and I said I'd be twice as polite back, and he hired me on the spot for the candy counter at seventy-five cents an hour. The candy counter was run by Miss Hilda Narcisse, who had been there since the twenties and wore her glasses on a chain. She taught me to fill a half-pound box of chocolates by eye and be within a quarter-ounce on the scale, and I still can, though it's not much call for it now. We had bonbons, turtles, nonpareils, divinity at Christmas and bourbon balls all year round, and the whole first floor smelled like chocolate and toilet water from the perfume counter next door. The moving stairs. The year before I came, Mr. Vernon had put in escalators, and he always advertised them as the first ones in Louisville. I'm not going to argue with him. People came downtown just to ride them. Farm families came in on Saturdays and rode up and down with the children for half an hour and never bought a thing, and Mr. Vernon said that was fine, they'd be back for a coat someday, and they were. The elevators. For those who didn't care for the moving stairs, there were four elevators with brass doors and operators in gray uniforms and white gloves, who called out every floor. Mr. Anton Godfrey ran car number two for thirty-one years and never once missed a floor. You'd step in and he'd say, "Fourth floor, tearoom, millinery and bridal," in a voice like a radio announcer, and he knew every regular customer by name and what she was shopping for before she did. The Tearoom The fourth-floor tearoom was the heart of the store, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise. Green carpet, white tablecloths, little vases with a single rose, and waitresses in green uniforms with white aprons and caps. Ladies lunched there in their hats and gloves after shopping, and on Saturdays there was a fashion show at noon, with the models walking between the tables while somebody played the piano. Mrs. Frances Phillips ran the kitchen from 1946 until 1979, and she made the chicken salad every morning herself and wouldn't let anybody watch. The tearoom menu hardly changed in forty years, and nobody wanted it to: the chicken salad plate with a cheese straw and a slice of tomato aspic, chess pie, and the hot fudge sundae in a silver dish. My versions of five of those recipes are on the Tearoom page, as near as I can remember them. I'll say one more thing, because it's true and it ought to be said. For most of the years I worked there, Clemons', like most of the stores downtown then, would sell to anyone but would not seat a Black customer in its tearoom. That didn't change until the spring of 1961, after months of young people demonstrating downtown. I was twenty-six, and I'm ashamed to tell you I didn't think much about it at the time. I've thought about it a good deal since. Christmas The day after Thanksgiving, at nine in the morning, they pulled back the brown paper on the Christmas windows, and half of Louisville was out on the sidewalk to see it. Mr. Johnnie Maddock did the windows from 1950 until the end, and every year it was a whole story told in eight windows down the side of the building, with little moving figures: elves building toys, a bakery full of mice, a skating pond with a real mirror for ice, and in the corner window, always, Santa's sleigh. Children pressed their noses on the glass and we polished the noseprints off every morning at 8:45, all December. Santa was on the fifth floor, in Toyland, at the top of a winding path through a cardboard forest. From 1948 to 1975 he was Mr. George Burdett, who grew his own beard every fall starting in September and shaved it off on New Year's Day, and who could remember a child's name from one year to the next. Grown men in this city still tell me about him. When he retired the newspaper ran his picture. The Hat Department in Its Glory After four years at candy and seven in gloves, in 1962 I was moved up to millinery on the fourth floor, and it was love at first sight. In those days a lady didn't go downtown, to church, to a funeral or to lunch without a hat, and the millinery department was a big bright room with mirrored tables, a little upholstered stool at each one, and hats on stands all around the walls like a garden. There was a workroom in the back where two milliners steamed and blocked felts and trimmed straws to order, and if you wanted the same hat as your sister-in-law but in navy with a shorter veil, we could have it for you by Thursday. Easter was our Christmas. The last two weeks before Easter we'd sell three hundred hats, and there wasn't a seat in the department. Derby was the other big season, of course. This is Louisville. The first Saturday in May, every lady at Churchill Downs who wanted to be seen in the clubhouse wanted a hat nobody else had, and the ladies who went to the infield wanted one too, just bigger. We started taking Derby orders in February. I got to be good. I could look at a woman walking off the elevator and know before she sat down what was going to suit her face, and I was almost never wrong. My best friend in the department, Kathryn Hollander, said I could sell a hat to a fence post, and I told her that was only if the fence post had nice cheekbones. In 1971 they made me the buyer. And then, a little at a time, the hats went away. Hair got big and you couldn't put a hat on top of it. Girls went to college in blue jeans. Churches stopped expecting it. By the end of the seventies the workroom was closed and we were selling mostly rain hats, Derby hats and wedding veils. I kept the department going as long as I could. I still wear a hat to church every Sunday, and I will until they carry me out, in a hat. If you've got your mother's hats in a closet and you wonder whether you could wear them, go read Mrs. Beatrice Lowell's Vintage Hats & How to Wear Them. She owns a hundred and forty-one hats and wears one out every Sunday, and she says you can wear them in 1999 without looking like a costume. She is exactly right. The Long Slide I don't know exactly when it started. People moved out to the suburbs and the shopping centers went up out in the county, with big free parking lots, and they didn't want to drive downtown and feed a meter anymore. One by one the movie palaces closed and the other stores moved out or shut down. Clemons' opened a branch at one of the new centers in 1966, and it did well enough, but it wasn't the same, and downtown got quieter every year. Mr. Vernon held on longer than anybody thought he would, out of pride, I think, and loyalty to the old customers, and to us. In the seventies they closed the fifth floor. In 1979 Mrs. Phillips retired and the tearoom started closing at two. By the eighties some days I'd sell four hats, and I knew every one of those four ladies by name. The Last Day The last day was Saturday, January 30, 1988. It was cold and gray. By then the shelves were mostly bare from the sale, and some of the display cases were sold too, with little tags on them. But a great many people came downtown that day who hadn't been in years, just to walk through one more time. Ladies came up to millinery to tell me about hats I'd sold them in 1964. A man came to the candy counter and asked for a quarter-pound of bourbon balls, and there weren't any, and he stood there and cried. At closing time all of us who were left, about sixty, went out on the sidewalk and stood under the clock, and Mr. Vernon came down from the sixth floor and shook every hand and called every one of us by name. He was seventy-nine years old. Then he went back in and locked the door himself. Mr. Godfrey took the last elevator down. I went home and sat in my car in the driveway for an hour before I went inside. Mr. Vernon died three years later. The building sat empty for eight years, and in the spring of 1996 they took it down. I didn't go to watch. Kathryn did, and she says the clock had already been taken off by then, and nobody seems to know where it went. If anyone reading this knows what became of the big bronze clock from the corner of Clemons', I would give a great deal to hear from you, even if it's only to know it's somewhere safe. That's my store. Thank you for walking through it with me. Please write and tell me your Clemons' memories. I'd love to hear about your first date under the clock, or your Easter hat, or your visit to Mr. Burdett on the fifth floor. |
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