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Woman’s Club restores 150 vintage hats for theater company By Donna Williams Lewis The GFWC Stone Mountain on display after ART Station Woman’s Club has been a reopens, said the center’s costaunch supporter of Stone founder, David Thomas. Mountain’s ART Station since it “We’ve used them in so launched 37 years ago. many shows,” Thomas said, So the club’s members adding that the center has could not sit idly by when the pandemic cancelled ART Station’s theater productions, education programs and a huge fundraiser last spring. After learning that staff is working through the organization’s continuing shutdown on SPECIAL a variety of Carole Roddenberry, left; Jane Brown, projects, the center; and Beverly McConnell, right, model women asked how hats from ART Station’s collection. they could help. ART Station told them about loaned some of the hats to local some long-standing to-dos, and theater companies over the the women went to work. years. “They’re so beneficial. Over the summer, Woman’s They make productions more Club members cleaned a garden authentic.” at ART Station and organized Organizing the collection and cataloged a library began with a scavenger hunt. containing about 3,500 to 4,000 The hats were scattered in a plays. costume storage room full of They also cleaned, restored crammed shelves and boxes and repaired about 150 hats piled to the ceiling, said Jane estimated to be between 60 and Brown, chair of the Woman’s 80 years old. Club’s Art & Culture Community The hats were donated to Service Program. “You could see ART Station over the past couple little hats here and there. … They of decades by the families were squished flat as pancakes, of four women — including many of them,” she said. three GFWC Stone Mountain The volunteers unearthed Woman’s Club members — who cloche hats and floppy sun hats, have passed away. turbans and beanies, pillboxes Once restored, the hats and fascinators, applejacks and were photographed, cataloged derbies. Some of them were and carefully preserved in damaged years ago when a tree labeled boxes, and they will go fell on ART Station’s roof during
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NOVEMBER 2020 | AtlantaSeniorLife.com
10/9/20 9:45 AM
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