Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Lynda Swift sits in front of a large picture window with sagging Venetian blinds and sews.
“Bulldog Cleaners” and “Alteration Shop,” reads the sign on the window. The storefront, near the roundabout south of the MSU campus, is a pickup station for the cleaners. Swift does the alterations. She works alone.
Thursday afternoon near the end of the workday, Swift was cutting the loose threads on the sleeves of a sky blue men’s suit jacket she had just hemmed. Barely audible rhythm and blues came from a small radio partially buried under piles of clothing.
She works from a wheelchair given to her by a customer after his mother died.
“It makes a perfect sewing chair,” she says. “I used chairs with (smaller) wheels and thread kept getting caught up in it.”
The voice is soft, un-modulated. If there is an accent, it is Midwestern — Swift, 61, grew up in Kansas City, Kansas.
At first glance, you wouldn’t suspect this quiet woman once made costumes for theater productions, got a personal sewing lesson from Yves Saint Laurent or ran a juke joint in White’s Station, Mississippi, the birthplace of bluesman Howlin’ Wolf.
She has been sewing since she was in junior high.
“I have always been a big girl,” Swift said. “After a size 12, everything was black, straight lines or navy blue.
“I had three sisters that weighed 99 pounds and I wanted to dress like them.”
Swift had a high school home ec teacher who loved to sew. “By the time I graduated from high school, I had fallen in love with sewing,” she says.
Encouraged by her high school teacher, Swift enrolled at a fashion design school in Kansas City, Missouri. She studied garment construction.
“I’m a flat pattern designer. Somebody can bring a picture, and I can make it,” she says.
She still does this at her home near Old Waverly Country Club where she takes in custom sewing.
After design school, Swift worked for a theater company, but found the work too chaotic. She then sewed for a tailor in Kansas City and in factories, before taking a job in the alterations department of Swanson’s, a posh women’s store in Kansas City.
Swift was one of 20 in the store’s alterations department. Each year the store put on a fashion show called “Cream of the Crop.” It was a big deal, so much so designers came with their collections.
Swift was working during one of the shows when a model wearing a Yves Saint Laurent gown showed up in the alterations department. A shoulder strap had come loose.
“None of us wanted to touch it,” said Swift.
Suddenly, Saint Laurent walked in. He called Swift and her co-workers — all girls in their 20s — around and explained to them what he was doing as he stitched the strap back in place.
“He did it while it was on the model,” said Swift, “and then sent her out on the runway.”
“I still use that chain stitch,” she says. “He was so very nice.”
Even today, 40 years later, Swift gets a little dreamy telling the story.
In 1979 Swift, nee Gladney, moved to West Point to take care of her mother after the death of her father. Her parents had moved south five years earlier; her father’s family lived in the Vinton community in Clay County.
Lynda met and married Leroy Swift, who owned a juke joint in White’s Station, the L&M Cafe. (Personal note: I knew the late Leroy Swift and photographed his juke joint on numerous occasions.) When Leroy got sick in 1990, Linda ran the club while continuing to take in sewing.
“I never was fond of the club,” said Swift. She rented the L&M and in 1993 returned to work as a seamstress in Columbus, first at The Needle and then for seven years, until the store closed, at Ruth’s.
For a time — until she learned otherwise on the Internet — Swift felt she was working at a dying trade. She attributes that, in part, to the removal of home ec from the high school curriculum.
“I had college students who didn’t know how to sew on a button,” she said.
“Everything is imported now,” she says. “You have throwaway clothing.”
I think people are going back to sewing so you can have a quality garment.”
As for that high school girl who fell in love with sewing, is that still the case?
“Oh yeah,” Swift says without hesitation. “I love to sew. It’s my job; it’s my hobby; I love to do it.”
Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. Email him at [email protected].
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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