Reporting Always by Lillian Ross

Author:Lillian Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Terrific

The Junior League of the City of New York, Inc., a fifty-three-year-old club for women under forty, gave its third annual Mardi Gras Ball—“a brilliant assemblage of those prominent in society, stage, screen, and television,” the Herald Tribune called it—on Tuesday evening, March 2, 1954, in the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Astor. About eight hundred Junior League members and husbands, and friends of members and friends of husbands, attended, paying fifteen dollars a head for the privilege, and one and all agreed that it was quite a do. Emil Coleman’s twenty-four-piece, two-piano orchestra played for dancing, and the highlights of the evening were the crowning of a Queen of the Mardi Gras by Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., and a parade of fifteen Junior Leaguers and two professional models who wore costumes more or less expressing the spirit of seventeen commercial firms (including Pepsi-Cola and United States Steel) that had sponsored the ball by donating fifteen hundred dollars each to the New York Junior League’s Welfare Trust Fund. The New York League has fifteen hundred members (it is one of 183 chapters, with a total membership of sixty-three thousand), who dedicate themselves, upon joining, to serving the social, economic, educational, cultural, and civic interests of the community, and the League spends the money in its Welfare Trust Fund for the operation of volunteer services it carries on in hospitals, settlement houses, and similar worthy centers. A week after Mardi Gras night, the treasurer of the Junior League Mardi Gras committee reported to her forty-five glinting-eyed co-members that by the time the books were balanced, the ball would net a profit for the Welfare Trust Fund of something over eighteen thousand dollars.

Preparations for the ball began more than a year before it was held. At eleven fifteen on the morning of February 18, 1953, the day after the second annual Mardi Gras Ball, which was also held at the Astor and which, sponsored by only fourteen commercial firms (including Flamingo Orange Juice and Pepperidge Farm Bread), netted $11,517.02, the chairman of the second Mardi Gras committee, Mrs. Thomas D. Luckenbill, turned up at the League’s headquarters and clubhouse—a five-story building, at 130 East Eightieth Street, that was formerly the town house of Vincent Astor. Mrs. Luckenbill immediately set to work writing thank-you notes to sponsors, celebrities, and others who had helped with the second Mardi Gras Ball. She was joined a few minutes later by Mrs. Stirling S. Adams, one of the four vice chairmen of the committee. Mrs. Adams, looking cool and satisfied with everything around her, said she had got to bed at five that morning and had got up again at eight, to go down to the Astor and pick up the Queen’s throne and some trumpets, and return them to a rental company. By noon, more than half the members of Mrs. Luckenbill’s committee were on hand to help write the thank-you notes, many of them coming in after laboring all the morning at volunteer jobs in clinics or day nurseries.

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