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Summer at Tiffany
Marjorie Hart
#UB4452
Hardcover, 258 pages; 2007
$14.95
 Members' Price: $12.71
You'll be hard-pressed to find a more charming little book than octogenarian Marjorie Hart's memoir of the summer of 1945, when she and a friend from the University of Iowa boldly ventured to New York City to work for a few months. Writing some sixty years later, she describes how they found summer employment at Tiffany & Co. as the company's first female "pages," whose job it was to run merchandise between the sales floor and the less glamorous departments (repair, gift-wrapping). With so many young men in the service, Tiffany decided to give these two fresh-faced Midwesterner coeds a try. On salaries of $20 a week, the girls pinched every penny to pay the rent and see an occasional show. They ate at the Automat, dated servicemen on leave in New York, sipped cocktails at Sardi's, danced the occasional night away, and jubilantly crowded into Times Square on VJ Day. (It's not all sweetness and light: there were friends and family members lost in the war. Hart's description of walking into her aunt and uncle's home after the news came that they had lost their son, an Air Force pilot, will chill your heart.) Summer at Tiffany is a little gem worthy of the Tiffany name.
(EE)
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