To Sing of Isaac Singer: A.M. Foley

To Sing of Isaac Singer

by A.M. Foley

In case you missed the news, the PFAFF division of SVP Worldwide of La Vergne, Tennessee (of all places!), won the prestigious Red Dot Award for “Best of the Best” product design, an award bestowed annually at Essen, Germany. To the uninitiated, that means Singer Sewing Machine’s parent company is still gittin’ ’er done at 170 years of age ~ and getting it done internationally.

Such a global triumph left me gobsmacked because Singer was woven into the fabric of my youth, when a sewing machine occupied one quarter of our dining room table. My maternal grandmother, Ma, spent nearly every day at the table, diligently sewing while listening to soap opera broadcasts. Neither occupation took root with me, with my abiding lack of manual dexterity and my early surfeit of “Stella Dallas, Backstage Wife.” But I may have picked up a dab of frugality by watching Ma as she renewed dress shirts by turning frayed collars and cuffs, transformed old clothes into quilts or braided rugs and salvaged portions of my mother’s old clothes by downsizing them to fit a daughter.

Ma’s sewing machine was a portable electric, a model introduced in 1921. Having lost her husband in World War I to mustard gas poisoning, she was receiving a War Department pension and thus had no need to buy her Singer on time. Isaac Singer owed much of his success to selling machines on installment plans, a buying method he pioneered in the mid-1800s. In any case, I doubt my grandmother ever purchased any merchandise on installments. I imagine whenever she wanted something, Ma saved the cost from her widow’s pension. Had she been able to google up Isaac Merritt Singer (1811–1875), Ma might have refused to buy one of his machines under any terms. He was what Ma would have called