USD Magazine Fall 2007

N ow, all these years later, Hart lays out that summer’s adven- tures — using an almost impossibly innocent tone — in her newly published memoir, Summer at Tiffany . She takes the reader back to her days as an impressed college-aged ingénue liv- ing in the heart of the action. (“If I had to do another edition, I’d take out some of the exclamation points,” she says.) But it was her college roommate, Marty Garrett, who had all the “moxie,” as Hart puts it. When the girls presented a job recommendation from Carl Byoir, an alumnus of their own school, the University of Iowa, Hart describes the Tiffany manager asking if she knew what he did for a living. “Mr. Byoir told us. He works for you.” Later, when she found out he’d been President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s public relations man and when Byoir repeated his jest about working for Tiffany for years, Hart saw his wife’s diamond necklace and was finally in on the joke. “I felt like slinking under the table,” she writes. With the kind of detail that wholly transports the reader to the New York of 1945, Hart’s book has hit a certain chord, garnering stories on National Public Radio and in USA Today , among others. Within four months of its April 2007 publishing date, it was in its sixth printing, with more than 40,000 copies in print. “It’s been a surprise to me,”Hart says. “I’m hearing from people I haven’t seen or heard from in 60 years. Just today, I got an e-mail from a college friend. I had no idea that people beyond my friends would buy it.” A longtime member of the University of San Diego’s music faculty, Hart chaired what was then known as the Fine Arts Department for about five years beginning in 1978. She retired from the university in 1993. Three of her four children and one grandchild attended USD. “I’ve always been very, very proud of the school and what they’ve been able to accomplish,” Hart says. “It’s been very rewarding to see how beautifully it has grown.” Now, Hart’s sitting in her living room high above La Mesa in San Diego, where she lives with her second husband. Her first husband of some 35 years died in 1981. Hart’s blonde hair is coiffed, and her blue eyes gleam as she relates her memories of that special summer. Summer at Tiffany helps the reader see what it was like when being a country at war meant everyday sacrifices for everyone. Going to a mid- shipmen’s dance wasn’t just a fun evening out; it was the patriotic thing to do. There was gas rationing. Nylon stockings had been invented, but now the material was needed for a higher priority — parachutes.

“It was such a sacrifice to see a brother, husband, cousin, boyfriend, father go off to war. There weren’t many guys around. Everybody left (at home) felt they needed to contribute. You gave up doing a lot of pleas- ure things,” she says. Her father’s clothing store collected record albums for the USO to have on-hand for events. This was long before the recycling movement, Hart points out, but she and her friends would take their gum wrappers and “make huge balls of tin foil and turn them in because they were needed for ammunition. There were lists of things you would be doing that you would feel like you were contributing.” As for the lack of nylons, the girls made do with rayon stockings (“The minute you sat down, they were baggy,”) or they painted their legs with a product called Stocking Stick. “If you weren’t tan, it made your legs look tan. If you wanted to go farther, you took an eyebrow pencil and made a seam.” But Stocking Stick wasn’t without its issues. “When we went to the beach, we laughed so hard because we saw this gal go into the water in her bathing suit, but the Stocking Stick only went up to right above the knees.” And the girls learned to avoid Stocking Stick if they would be dancing with a guy dressed in Navy whites, as there was a danger of transfer. “They did not appreciate that,” she remembers. She’d learned about the wonders of nylons in high school, when her home economics teacher demonstrated them. “They showed us how quickly they would dry. They would dry overnight. You could wash them out, and they’d be ready the next day. And they made your legs look wonderful, especially in the Midwest where you had a hard time getting your legs tan.” But with nylons unavailable and Stocking Stick only used for more casual settings, the rayon stockings — despite the bagginess that came with them — were de rigueur for Hart’s job at Tiffany. “We wouldn’t dare paint our legs there,” she says The book is informed not just by little details like those, but by her letters home, pictures of ephemera and line drawings of old NewYork. She kept her W-2 form, which shows she made $220 that summer at Tiffany. After rent, the girls’salary left little room in their budget for frills. Hart remembers laughing with Garrett in recent years about the visit of a friend who came to their apartment back then:“She said,‘I didn’t know you were so poor.’ She just supposed since we were working at Tiffany—she figured we had it made.” Hart and Garrett were the first women to ever work on the sales floor at

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