The Fort Ball Antique Club celebrated its 45th anniversary May 9 at The Hermitage, the home of Elke and Dieter Schneppat. Three former members and 16 members attended the dinner meeting, along with a few guests.
Past presidents who have moved away came to the meeting. They included Shirley Forrest, Bellaire Beach, Fla.; Margaret Mann, Lakeside; and Marnie Jones, Charlotte, N.C. Jones and Forrest also were charter members. Charter members who still belong to the club are Janet Beisner, Edwina Miller and Elke Schneppat.
"I was 27 years old when we started this," Schneppat said.
Having grown up with vintage objects, she was able to continue and expand her interest through the club. Schneppat said she still enjoys shopping for antiques.
For the anniversary celebration, members enjoyed appetizers and a time of reminiscing on the outdoor patio. Jones has been away from Tiffin for 24 years, but she has fond memories of the friends she has made through the club. She met Dieter and Elke Schneppat when both couples were living in the same apartment complex in Tiffin.
The two women and eight other women had a common interest in antiques, so they formed a chapter of Questers, a national organization for people who collect and restore antiques. The founders decided to limit the number of members to 20 so meetings could take place in homes. They always had a waiting list of women wanting to join.
"It was a group that everybody wanted to be in. It was a vibrant, wonderful group. In fact, it's the best club I've ever been in," Jones said. "I still love it."
Following her mother's example, one of Jones' daughters used Fort Ball as a model to start a similar club in her town. It has been active for 36 years.
Jones has moved a few times and reduced her antique collection, which consisted mostly of family heirlooms and items from the colonial period.
"When we left Tiffin, we had to downsize and gave the girls a lot of things. Then when I moved to a retirement home, I had to downsize, so the girls got a lot more then," Jones said.
After her husband died nine years ago, Jones moved to a condominium in Charlotte to be near her middle daughter. The antiques she still owns are electronically catalogued with the date each item was acquired, a description, its family history (if applicable) and the daughter who is to inherit it.
Another past president, Forrest, has been away from Tiffin for 33 years, but she traveled from Florida to attend the anniversary celebration.
The first time she entered The Hermitage, she was 13 years old and part of a group of students who helped to serve a catered meal hosted by George Kalbfleisch.
She remembered the antique club met once a month, as members still do. After about five years, the group broke away from Questers and changed its name to Fort Ball Antique Club.
Two of the programs Forrest presented were about pewter ice cream molds and blue and white Wedgewood Jasperware.
"We always had speakers. Usually, it was ourselves. Each person chose a subject. If they had a collection, they'd bring part of it and talk about the collection. We all learned a lot about the other collections," Forrest said. "We did a lot of field trips. Every month, we did a field trip. That was a lot of fun."
Forrest said she joined a club in Florida and worked at a few antique shops, but the business has suffered with the rest of the economy in recent years.
"Antiques have gone up in price. When we used to go, we'd find items for $20. Now it's more like $220," Forrest said.
Secretary Janet Beisner presented a brief history and overview of the first 20 years of the club's programs and field trips. Schneppat assisted by reading the news release about the first meeting and listed the 10 women who started the club. Members enjoyed a scrapbook of former programs and picture albums from the early years.
At the formal dinner, catered by Aramark, a charter member sat at each of the tables to guide the conversation. After the meal, members adjourned to the music room, where the quilt the club made for the bicentennial celebration in 1976 was on display. Beisner guided the discussion by mentioning events of the last 25 years, and many members added their own comments.
From a cinder block building in Mason, the Dart family built an industrial monolith from humble beginnings and a humble product: the foam cup that lets a person hold hot coffee.
But while that ever-reliable cup, made from expandable polystyrene foam, has served Dart Container Corp. well over the past 50 years, a question mark looms large as the company begins the next 50.
Recently, scores of U.S. communities have banned the use of foam cups and dinnerware because the very thing that makes them great for food service -- their refusal to become soggy -- also makes them a bane when they aren’t disposed of properly. It takes decades for an ordinary foam cup to decompose in a highway ditch or at the water’s edge.
To hedge its bets, Dart this month completed the acquisition of its Midwestern competitor Solo Cup Co. for about $1 billion to widen its offerings and gain access to technology and markets for food service disposables made of paper.
“What’s of greatest interest to us about Solo is they are very strong, not just in plastic but also in paper,” said James Lammers, Dart’s general counsel and vice president of administration. “They have a broad line of paper-based food service products. We do not make anything out of paper.”
The fit between Dart and Lake Forest, Ill.-based Solo is good for another reason: Solo’s strong retail presence among consumers.
“We are both in that space,” Lammers said. “You could go into a Meijer or Kroger supermarket and buy either Solo or Dart products, but they have a much stronger brand face with a consumer.”
As the world’s largest supplier of foam cups, Dart has competed primarily on the superior function of foam food service disposables as well as quality and price, Lammers said.
After all, paper cups for hot beverages fell out of favor more than 50 years ago with the advent of foam cups. William F. Dart and his son, William A., shipped their first order of foam cups in 1960 to customers who were dissatisfied with the shortcomings of paper cups, which didn’t retain shape and insulate well.
“W.A.” Dart, who died last December at age 84, is credited with coming up with the first reliable process of making high-quality foam cups. But today’s customers are demanding more, Lammers said.
“In the past, our customers focused primarily on function and price, but now there is a third leg to that stool: environmental profile,” he said. “Consumers weigh many different things as they consider their purchases, and increasingly, environmental profile is part of that purchasing process.”
Not to say that Dart is abandoning either foam cups or the idea that foam-based packaging can be recycled properly. All of the corporation’s 20 production facilities worldwide are public drop-off points for food service disposables and packaging, such as foam inserts used to protect items in boxes during shipment. Two Dart operations in
Michigan and one in Corona, Calif., process and re-extrude the plastic to turn it into pellets.
Dart engineers developed a process for washing and drying used food service disposables such as cups and school lunch trays so the polystyrene could be sold and reused as protective foam packaging, egg cartons, building insulation, videocassettes, toys and office desk products. In January, the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery recognized Dart as a winner in the state’s Waste Reduction Awards Program.
Only a few things remain on the racks now. Signs posted in the shop's windows that promise deals to passing shoppers have done their work. These final items hanging from the racks are reminders that this shop offered something different from what most department stores do these days.
The tags are one clue. Then there's a wooden mannequin of a woman with a 1920s hairstyle.
Wright's Quality Shop was opened in 1920 by two sisters, Bertie and Zuella Wright, and has passed down through two more generations of the Hunter family.
Bertie and Zuella were born in the 1880s. Their father was a local preacher, N.G. "Uncle Bud" Wright. They were raised in Belton, and for most of their lives, they lived in a house near where the Belton Town Hall is now.
Neither of them ever married. When they reached their mid-30s, they became businesswomen instead.
"Bertie and Zuella, they were prim and proper," said W. Clifton Hunter, the third generation of Hunters to own the shop. "They were so meticulous. Their home was always immaculately clean. And they loved fashion."
Zuella Wright had studied how to make hats, and the shop was a place to sell them, he said. Some of the hat molds she used still sit on a large shelf behind the store's checkout counter.
"At that time, millinery was a big deal," Clifton Hunter said. "When mother took over the shop, hats were a large portion of what she did."
The shop also sold scarves, jewelry, blouses, dresses, women's hosiery, lingerie and, eventually, women's slacks. Most of what women found here was made in America - often in their home state.
The Wrights and the Hunters led the business to success as the town boomed with textile mills and nearly a half dozen women's clothing stores. One of the Wright sisters' old cash registers with its metal keys is still here.
As the sisters reached their 60s, they decided it was time to turn the store keys over to someone else.
The perfect candidate: Azilee Fagg Hunter, their second cousin, and veteran of the local fashion industry.
Azilee, also a Belton native, had worked for the Myers Arnold department store in Greenville and Gene Anderson's in downtown Anderson. Like Bertie and Zuella, she had an eye for fashion.
A black-and-white photograph shows her in the store wearing an elegant dark dress that falls just at the knee. She has on heels and a long necklace.
"They knew she would be a good fit," Clifton Hunter said. "And at that time, it was just thriving here. Belton had so many textile mills. All of the shops on the square were very busy. That was before the days of the malls."
Azilee was a natural at running the shop. Clifton Hunter still has index cards on file on which she described fashion shows she'd hold to promote the store's latest line of merchandise.
Clifton's wife, Connie, said that her mother-in-law had an eye for fashion that a lot of the ladies in town came to rely on.
"She loved this shop," Connie said. "She put together an outfit that was an ensemble. She just had a knack for coordinating things."
Clifton was 8 years old when his mother, divorced by then, took over the shop. For a while, he would go by the shop and help with chores until it was time for his mother to lock up for the day. Sometimes he had the chance, once he finished building hat boxes, to slip next door to the movie theater.
"Edith Robinson, who worked the ticket counter, would let me go in and watch whatever movie was showing until mom was ready to go home," Clifton said. "I would always sit in the very back row so mom could find me. That was so much fun."
A picture of Roy Rogers and his horse, Trigger, that once hung in that theater now hangs in his office. Clifton also kept many of his mother's things from when she ran the place.
A small sign that she kept in the store read, "The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten."
"That was mom's," Clifton said. "And she really believed that. We've just tried to keep that going."
That's why most of the products sold in this store have always been made in America. One of the labels they still carry is Vinci Clothiers, a family-owned clothing operation based in McBee, S.C.
Ninety percent of the store's goods were made in America during the 1970s, Clifton said.
"We earned a gold-star label because so much of our clothing was made in America," he said.
