Word: daltonics
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...drowsy day in 1895 Catherine Evans, a farm girl from Dalton, Ga., journeyed back into the hills to visit a cousin. There she saw a pair of family-heirloom "candlewick" bedspreads, the handsomest bedspreads she had seen in all her born days. Back she went to Dalton. learned to make them herself. Soon hardly a wedding anywhere around was complete unless the bride got one of Catherine Evans' bedspreads...
...years later a Dalton dentist's wife, Mrs. H. L. Jarvis, who had been to college and knew more about big cities than blue-eyed Catherine Evans, proposed to market the bedspreads for Catherine in department stores. John Wanamaker bought half-a-dozen, then contracted for the entire production for five years. Though she could make two bedspreads a day, Catherine's two hands could not keep up with the demand. She began to trace her designs on cloth, carry the marked cloth and a hank of yarn around to neighboring farm wives who would do the "tufting...
Soon Catherine had competitors. Mrs. Jarvis started a firm of her own. In 1921 Mrs. C. B. Wood, known around Dalton as Sister Kate, made some fancy, fringed spreads for Wanamaker's, by 1929 was producing as many as 600 a day, often had 1,500 at once out in the homes of her tufters. To swank B. Altman in Manhat tan Sister Kate sold $60,000 worth of spreads a year...
...women to handle. After 1921 they began to take over the industry. One of the first was a young Georgian named Burl ("Chickenhawk'') Judson Bandy, now a 52-year-old, bullet-headed bedspread tycoon who flies his own cabin plane. When Real Silk bought out a Dalton hosiery mill, the displaced executives scraped together $13,000, started a spread house called Cabin Crafts Co. which now does the industry's largest single business - about $1,000,000 a year. These men brought professional designers into the industry, and even installed a few tufting machines - locally made...
...Wage-&-Hour law, and the Georgia tufters, whose working hours no time clock had ever measured, were out of luck. Rather than pay their tufters the law's wages, the bedspread makers bought tufting machines and moved production into factories. Most of the new factories sprang up around Dalton. The industry, now mechanized, grew faster than ever...