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Herb Benham: 87-year-old makes just about everything, including five successful kids
| Monday, May 5 2008 11:31 AM
Last Updated: Monday, May 5 2008 1:56 PM
This isn’t about what was, but what is.
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Jeannette Townsend is an 87-year-old mother of five very successful kids. She spends some of her time tending to her plants in her greenhouse.
Jeannette Townsend finished a cornice box for her daughter's home. This is one of many projects Townsend said keeps her going.
Jeannette Townsend is an 87-year-old mother of five very successful kids. She makes all of her own clothes, cushions and drapes.
Pictured in her sewing room, Jeannette Townsend is an 87-year-old mother of five very successful kids.
Jeannette Townsend’s best days aren’t behind her, they’re here now. Behind was good. Now’s rich too.
Her home doesn’t look as if it belongs to someone 87. The kind of house where the lights are off, the shades are drawn and there is a stillness that has settled in through the years.
Her walls are bright red, sunlight streams in through the windows, and her handiwork is visible everywhere in the red, black and white plaid upholstery on the couch, white cotton drapes, bright red apples made of plaster of Paris mounted on the wall, shutters in her bathroom that she made from PVC fencing and the shower curtain she embroidered with cattails and dragon flies.
Townsend makes it all, including her own clothes. If we were a generation of Townsends, China wouldn’t exist. At least not the China that clothes us, keeps us warm at night and covers our feet in the morning.
Townsend once made cabinets for her house in Oildale. Her five children remember her as being part mother, part role model and part cyclone.
“She was always remodeling our house on Woodrow,” said her son, Jeff. “She added a dining room, family room, two bedrooms and a bath. She even made our bunk beds.”
Townsend learned to sew when she was a year old. By 41⁄2, she had made her first dress (she wore it all day before it fell apart) and has made her own clothes since she was 11.
“I can hardly wear store-bought clothes,” she said. “They just don’t feel right.”
Townsend, who lives near I-5 in a mobile home on the farm of her daughter, Jennifer, and son-in-law, Keith Gardiner, also had something to do with making five successful children.
Son Earnest, 62, who lives in Tustin, with homes in Arizona and Sun Valley, helped develop Budget Gourmet. Stuart, 58, works for his younger brother, Jeff, who has Townsend Design, maker of the internationally famous Townsend knee brace. Barry owns VIPO and makes artificial feet. Daughter Jennifer was the resident artist at Valley Baptist for years and she and her husband own an almond ranch. “When they were young, they helped in the upholstery shop by knocking down furniture, (stripping the old fabric before it was reupholstered) and they got to keep whatever money they found,” Townsend said. “When they were older, they helped me hang drapes.”
The children learned how to work from their mom and their grandmother, Clara Stuart (Wegis).
“My grandmother used to spit tacks,” Barry said of the woman who once chased him two blocks with a broom because he smart-mouthed her. “She’d have a hammer in one hand, and a mouthful of tacks that she would spit as she needed them.”
Townsend and her mom had an upholstery shop in Oildale called Ace Upholstery. She handled the drapes, her mom the upholstery.
“My Grandmother Stuart was still picking up couches by herself when she was 70,” Barry said. “She had massive hands. They were like sewing machines.”
Townsend made some of the first drapes for the Guild House. There are still many houses in old Stockdale where Townsend drapes proudly hang.
Townsend grew up in Monrovia. After high school, she took fashion design courses at Woodbury’s in L.A. and worked for a while with Howard Greer, a fashion designer on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Townsend said she made Gloria Vanderbilt’s first wedding dress and “street clothes” for actress Irene Dunne.
At one point, she learned to fly and would have ferried airplanes during World War II had she not failed the eye exam because commercial pilots were not allowed to wear glasses.
Townsend moved to Bakersfield in 1952. The family lived in Oildale at 1234 Woodrow. Life was simple. She and her mother operated the upholstery shop. The children worked and swam competitively.
“I had them swim because it kept them clean and tired,” she said.
•••
Townsend sews almost every day for several hours. She has a drawerful of hundreds of spools of thread and a closet full of fabric knits, polys and prints. She can’t pass up a bargain and her car pulls over by itself at F & M Fabrics, Jo-Ann Fabrics And Crafts, Beverly Fabrics and Hancock Fabrics.
Townsend just finished sewing a summer pantsuit with blue cotton pants and a white jacket. Recently, she made a friend drapes. She’s also knitting a sweater that would make Bill Cosby throw out his sweater collection.
“I have to keep my hands busy,” Townsend said. “That keeps me going.”
Almost two years ago, at the age of 86, she quit smoking. That was one of the hardest things she’s ever done and she’s done some hard things.
Awhile back, her daughter was working on an art project late into the evening.
There was a knock at the door at 1:30 a.m. It was Townsend bringing her daughter milk and cookies.
Still a mother. Even more impressive, still up. Up and up to the job.