RED CROSS PEARLS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 229, 26 September 1940, Page 5

RED CROSS PEARLS

AND A SHARK STORY.

WHY COLUMBIA KEEPS WHITE

j (By CHARLES ESTCOURT.) NEW YORK, August 22. In a couple of weeks now, anybody who is willing will be able to drop around to the World's Fair here and buy a dress that has been insured for 250,000 dollars. The chances are it can be bought for less, but 75,000 dollars is the minimum. Warning: The girl who buys the dress is likely to have a hot time. There will be from 75,000 to 100,000 pearls on it and they weigh plenty. The dress is a contribution of the Imperial Pearl Syndicate—or more particularly of its president, Joe Goldstone —to the Red Cross. Joe is asking Norma Shearer and Ilka Chase to model it in New York, but he is pretty sure nobody will buy it.

Uncle Charlie told him helpfully of a woman he knew (a customer of Gloria Vanderbilt's) who used to get his missus sore every time the missus commented on a new drees she was wearing. "Oh," said the missus' pal, "It's nothing really, just a little rag I bought to wear around the house for 175 dollars." But Joe wouldn't even take down the ■woman's name. He said there were quite a few pretzels separating 175 dollars from 75,000 dollars. After that, Uncle Charlie, still trying to be helpful, told him about the dozen women in New York who bought chinchilla coats for 60,000 dollars and up last winter. To Take Dress on Tour. Joe kept right on shaking his head. He said the pearl dress might be just as warm as a chinchilla coat, but it couldn't be oiled to take the squeaks out of it. The oil would spoil the colour of the pearls and make them look li.v€ a beautiful woman who has just eaten huckleberry pie. So, he said, the

woman who walked along inside the| dress was lfrcely to sound like a glass | chandelier falling downstairs. • j

However, Joe x .s a merchandising idea for the dress all his own. He is going to tour it around the country— Lnicapro, ludianapoli-, St. Louis, Omaha and Minneapolis have been booked so far —and sell tickets for one dollar each, entitling the holier to one pearl off the dress. After the tour the dress will be disassembled and the pearls mailed out. "This is quite a bargain price," he said, "because there are pearls on that dress —not many, of course, but some—worth 50 dollars apiece." This kind of sale will net more for the Red Cross than an outright sale. The dress was supposed to be ready for inspection right now. But MMe. ijyolene, the commanding officer in charge of operations at Hattie Carnegie's place where the dress is being put together, decided the pearls had been put on all wrong and ripped them off. The dress will be ready August 31. The girls making it are the regular employees, but they work in a room apart from the rest of the staff. The pearls are delivered every day in three envelopes, graded according to size, and those not stitched on are taken back at night and locked in the pearl syndiIcate's vaults.

No Gem of the Ocean. We met Joe through a girl who calls herself Columbia Riland and wears a bathing suit to work at the world's fair. We were watching Miss Riland smile when we noticed something in our way, and it proved to be Joe, who is Miss Riland's boss. Miss Riland is one of the few, perhaps the only, American pearl diver in the business. She is a Baltimore belle, 22, a graduate of the Latin school down there and of the Maryland Institute. She went to the Celebes Islands to paint, and wound up working for Joe's syndicate. * We asked her whether she called herself Columbia to give the boys a chance to think of her as the gem of the ocean, but she yawned and said no; she called herself Columbia' because that was her name.

Joe himself grew up in Davenport, lowa. This gave him a South Seas complex, and he went into the pearl-diving business to have an excuse to remain in the South Seas. . He owns 63,000 sea acres filled with pearl-bearing oystere-

iand hires 400 women divers. The women j were not picked as competition for Billy Rose, but because they're better than men at the work.

"I can't understand it, either," he said. "Men are better swimmers and better divers, but women are better pearl divers. Don't ask me why."

Joe also gave us advice to hand on to all the people we know who order oyster® in restaurants because they expect to find pearls. "Edible oysters don't bear pearls," he said. "There are pearlbearing oysters in the Mississippi River, I but of very inferior quality."

Afraid of the Girls. And Columbia told us a little about her work as a pearl diver. She said there are plenty of sharks in the Celebes Islands, but' they -don't bother the girls. Because, we; asked, they're man-eating sharks ? Columbia yawned again and said no, because they were afraid of the girls. Sharks, she said, are afraid of anything white in the water that moves. The girls are supposed to wear a white bathing suit to work. It looks like the one mother used to wear, only worse, and all it leaves revealed —to make the wild waves wilder, no doubt—is the face and toes. Columbia said she usually didn't wear the suit, but went": in without it or anything else. "I try to keep from getting sunburned so my skin will stay white." One time she was a little more sunburned than ; she'.realised, and she saw a shark gazing at her speculatively. Before she , had time to become frightened, a girl in' a bathing suit swam near by and the shark did not stay for dinner.—N.A.N.A.