August 28, 1915, was Lillian Anthony’s last day of work as a bookkeeper at the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, in Beverly, -Massachusetts. She was leaving, her daughter-in-law, Shirley N. Boothroyd, explains, to marry Frank Boothroyd, an electrician for United Shoe, and her co-workers had prepared a party for her. Lillian bears a dusting of confetti, and the workaday oak desk is festive with gifts, among them a most prescient one, a pair of identical china dolls.

 

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August 28, 1915, was Lillian Anthony’s last day of work as a bookkeeper at the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, in Beverly, -Massachusetts. She was leaving, her daughter-in-law, Shirley N. Boothroyd, explains, to marry Frank Boothroyd, an electrician for United Shoe, and her co-workers had prepared a party for her. Lillian bears a dusting of confetti, and the workaday oak desk is festive with gifts, among them a most prescient one, a pair of identical china dolls. “In 1922 Lillian gave birth to twin sons, Harold and Howard,” Mrs. Boothroyd reports. The boys graduated from college in mechanical engineering, and both worked, as their father and grandfather had, for United Shoe. The china set survives to this day; it was used only for special occasions, as it still is. The dolls are gone, as, of course, is the emblematic battered shoe dangling there before all that nuptial splendor—and the factory itself, which, Mrs. Boothroyd writes, “employed three generations of Boothroyds and is now only a memory.”

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