Why I Love the Internet

I posted this great cover last month, as some of you will remember.  Earlier this week I got an email from a nice woman in California who had been looking for this particular issue of Charm.  As it happens, her mother worked for the magazine in the early 1950s, and in some correspondence she mentioned this particular issue.  She was an editorial assistant, and she helped write the articles that appeared.   In particular she mentioned ghost-writing a “beauty bath article by Kay Torrey.”

Well, I got the magazine and quickly found the article in question:

The assistant’s name was Lois Isde.  According to her daughter:

“After graduating from Valparaiso University (Indiana) in the early 1950s (with a degree in geography), my mother moved to NYC to pursue a career in publishing. She had brief stints at Charm magazine and Women’s Wear Daily, before meeting my father who was a graduate student at Columbia University. They eventually moved to Madison, Wis., and then Chicago and she stopped working to raise my 2 brothers and me. After we were grown, she worked for a medical publishing company in St. Louis. She always loved those years in the 1950s when she wrote about  fashion, beauty, women’s issues, etc, in New York City.”

Rarely am I persuaded to sell things that I post about here, but this was just too special not to pass along to Lois’s daughter.  The internet has been with us for quite a few years now, and sometimes we take it for granted.  But when I’m able to connect with a reader in this way, I remember just how great the power of google is.