vintage wedding album
Incentive for this book came in the form of a client directive to do something nice for his nieces as a gift.
First, some project background. I was asked to sort through 25-30 boxes of old photographs that had been in a stored for about 40 years. They belonged to my client’s long deceased parents, Thomas B. and Jeannette L. McCabe.
Mr. McCabe had been president and chief executive officer of Scott Paper Company from 1927-1966, as well as serving 5 different positions in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration throughout WWII. From 1948-1951 he served in President Harry S. Truman’s administration as the 8th Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. This history suggests the breadth of material being sorted, including more than 100 awards and citations from Mr. McCabe’s lengthy careers in business and government.
Discovered in the boxes, among the many beautiful professionally photographed portraits, were photo proofs taken at the 1949 wedding of Thomas B. McCabe, Jr and Yvonne Motley. (Tom Jr was my client’s oldest brother.) The couple had been married for 28 years when they died tragically in 1977, both at age 50, from an electrical fire that destroyed their home in suburban Philadelphia. They had 1 son and 2 daughters.
The recipients of the gift I was to create are the 2 daughters of Tom and Yvonne (their son died several years ago). I assumed that if a wedding album existed, it would’ve been destroyed when the family home burned, so out of the many binders of materials I’d organized, I honed in on using wedding photos and related newspaper clippings to create a commemorative gift.
Another note of historical interest, Yvonne Motley McCabe’s father (Above, top, left) Arthur Harrison Motley (known as “Red”), was at one time president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and chairman of the board of Parade magazine, founded in 1941. In 1946 Red Motley was hired as president and publisher and held the position for almost 30 years, during which time circulation increased from 2 million to more than 19 million by the time he retired in 1978. (Above, top, right) The engagement announcement of Yvonne Motley to Thomas B. McCabe Jr. (Above, bottom, left) The bride shares an intimate moment with her sister, Marcia, the maid of honor. (Above, bottom, right) The groom toasting his bride. (Below) The invitation, and the bride arriving at the church.
This book is a 7” x 7” format, printed on thick high quality paper stock. The photos, which were scanned from old hard copies printed in the late 1940s, were no more than 4” tall or wide, as they were originally intended just for review and never intended for use in an album or for framing, so they were grainy and printed on lightweight paper. In some cases they had been marked up or written on, so I did my best to improve the quality and optimize them for printing. You can still see the grain, but it adds to the vintage look.
(Below, left page) The bridal party. (Below, right page, left to right) The groom’s parents, Thomas B. McCabe Sr. and Jeannette Laws McCabe; and the bride’s parents, Arthur (Red) and Helene Motley.
