In Manhattan, 2,500 butlers, chauffeurs, chefs, valets, cooks, footmen ladies maids, parlor maids, chambermaids and scullery maids abandoned the houses of their socialite employers to attend the first Butlers” Ball at the Commodore Hotel. Its sponsor was Mrs. Marshall Field. Proceeds ($4 per couple) were earmarked for Bellevue Hospital charity. Beforehand, newshawks had cut loose with patronizing ribaldry about the “servants’ night off,” “Must the butler dance with the parlor maid?” and “We ‘Awkinses and our gels.” Hence newshawks were barred from the ball. Said Mrs. Combs, wife of Banker James Speyer’s butler: “Because you’re in service they think you don’t know anything.”
The Butlers’ Ball was like any other ball except that the men rarely put their hands in their pockets. Old friends who had not seen one another since they were last in service in the same house, met for the first time in years. But butlers had a chance to get off their favorite trade pun: “Whose burglar are you?”
Lords of their backstairs world, they lorded it over the party. In the boxes most of Manhattan’s great butlers sat among the servants they had hired and trained, while below them on the floor their footmen and maids danced. Some of them unbent to the point of dancing with a pretty parlor maid. Those who were British-born and trained reminisced fondly on Britain’s great pre-War entertaining when 20 maids and 20 valets would accompany their masters and mistresses to a great house for the weekend, bringing outside gossip. Some of the footmen and chauffeurs were also British but the rest of the butlers’ underlings were Irish. German and Scandinavian, more rawboned and clumsy than a good butler likes.
Since only water was served free, the party was a little stiff until midnight. Then Mrs. Marshall Field arrived from a party she had given for patronesses to keep them out of their servants’ party. She made a little speech ignoring the guests’ servant status and from the boxes the British butlers bayed, like the House of Lords, “Hear! Hear!” Soon thereafter guests stopped watching each other. The hotel was serving drinks in two dining rooms whence presently came impromptu chorus singing. A delegation of White Star Line stewards arrived from the S. S. Majestic to scrape acquaintance with the maids.
Watching augustly were the members of the floor committee: Mrs. Field’s butler, buck-toothed Hider, chairman and Big Man of the evening; her Chauffeur Haslam; Leonard K. Elmhirst’s Butler Grove; Dr. Milton A. Bridge’s May, who was once with Reginald Vanderbilt; Banker Winthrop W. Aldrich’s handsome affable Wetherall, Charles Morgan’s Butler White, Ogden Phipps’ big red-faced Parr, who used to work for Lady Astor, a great distinction because Lady Astor entertains a great deal.
On hand to represent the Vanderbilts was old Mrs. Cornelius’s Anderson. There too were Otto Kahn’s Butler Forbes, William K. Vanderbilt’s Chauffeur Leconte, Sherman Fairchild’s Butler Temple, Governor Herbert Lehman’s portly Marshall, William V. Thorne’s Peter Gillies, Charles B. Alexander’s Butler Shuff, William A. M. Burden’s Valet Brown, Cornelius Bliss’s Superintendent McClellen. Sitting up in a box and looking his part better than anyone else at the party was Wyngate, who before his retirement was butler for the late great Senator
William Andrews Clark of Montana. Absent was Banker J. Pierpont Morgan’s famed Butler Physic. Said Banker Aldrich’s Wetherall, “Curious, about the Morgan household. They don’t get out much. No one seems to know them.”
For this night when most of Manhattan’s great houses were empty of servants, the mistresses asked the police department for special protection and got it. At 3 a. m. Hider called the first Butlers’ Ball “successful beyond all expectations.” Mrs. Field who when she was London s Mrs. Dudley Coats in 1927 started London’s famed Butlers’ Balls, promised to make Manhattan’s first an annual event.
Sleuth
Away from Duryea, Pa. ran Aurelia Chessick and Mildred Ostowski. Aunt Pauline Pawloski, Wilkes-Barre school teacher, asked herself where two fugitive schoolgirls would be most likely to go. She went by bus to Manhattan, where she dined in a restaurant at Broadway and 50th St. Then she walked to the corner on Broadway and waited. Within two minutes Aunt Pauline found herself face to face with Runaways Aurelia & Mildred.
Liars
In Burlington, Wis. O. C. Hulett, president of the Burlington Liars’ Club, announced that the club’s rubber medal for stretching the truth would be worn in 1934 by B. Ceresa of Langeloth, Pa. Out of more than 2,500 contestants B. Ceresa won the lying championship with a report that his grandfather’s clock was so old that the shadow cast by the pendulum as it swung back & forth had worn a hole through the back of the clock. Runner-up was Schuyler Wiltfang, of South Bend (Ind.) who said that a fog which blanketed his home one day while he was shingling the roof was so thick that he laid shingles on the fog ten feet beyond the roof’s edge without knowing it. Harold P. Cole, 30, remembered the winter of 1863 when, he said, San Francisco Bay froze over so fast all the frogs were caught in the ice with their legs up. He purchased a lawn mower, mowed off the frogs’ legs in two hours, shipped 75 shiploads to France, made a net profit of $137,465,720.17.
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