By Stephen Smoot
This is the third and final installment in the series of articles based on the remembrances of Idelta Lambert of Circleville who will soon enjoy her 100th birthday.
“I graduated from high school and started going with Keith Lambert down the road,” said Lambert. “Going with,” in parlance that lasted almost to the end of the 20th century, meant dating exclusively. Keith Lambert would marry Idelta and build a family with her after World War II, like so many other young men who served their country.
Not long after, the world changed for everyone in the United States when the Empire of Japan attacked the United States Pacific Fleet to launch the Second World War. “He volunteered for the Navy,” she remembered, “because he didn’t want to crawl around in the mud.”
He ended up serving on a ship called the Murray, operating a gun on board. Occasionally, she would get to see him when his ship came into Norfolk, Virginia, and he would get leave.
After the war, her husband remained in the Navy for a time and the family resided in Washington, D,C. “It was a beautiful city then. There was no crime. You could walk down to Union Station,” she said. Around this time, the city had its peak population of about 800,000, 150,000 more than today. Yet the crime rate was far lower and the city significantly safer than today.
He worked at the Navy Yard. Although streetcars provided comfortable transportation, she recalled that “to save a dime, he’d walk a mile down the river to the Navy Yard.”
Ever the entrepreneurs, the family purchased real estate in the DC area to rent out for extra money. “We did that for several years,” she recalled. As he “worked all the time,” she would help to take care of the rental properties. They had a daughter, Charlotte. Lambert shared that when doing her cleaning, she’d let the baby sleep peacefully in a drawer.
As time passed, they moved out of the city proper and into the nearby Maryland suburbs. She stated that the distance made caring for the properties in the city too challenging and they hired an agent to handle the properties.
She never let her hands run idle for too long. As she now had time on her hands, she put them to work in a local school’s cafeteria. Through this work, she met another lady who baked and decorated large and elaborate wedding cakes.
“Why don’t you help me,” she asked her one day, “I’ll tell you what to do.”
Lambert remembered that “she had me do the wedding cake” to be delivered to a wedding. What the cakemakers did not reckon on, however, was a typical Washington, D.C. summer’s day.
The nation’s capital and surrounding areas rose from a swamp. James Madison proposed to put the national capital somewhere between modern Harpers Ferry and Hancock, Maryland. Washington, D.C. ended up on land purchased in part from its original owner, the man whose name is on the city.
Not until the age of air conditioning did Congress meet in the sweltering summer heat of D.C.
On such a day, however, she transported the massive three-tier cake to its destination. “I delivered the cake, set it up, everything was fine.”
She smiled and said that in an hour the phone rang. The voice at the other end shrieked “the cake looks like it’s sliding!” Lambert called the lady who ran the bakery, who told her, “Let’s go and buy some cake icing.” The two then performed emergency surgery on the cake and restored its condition to the point that “no one knew anything about it.”
After that, she dove into baking, saying, “I did a lot of wedding cakes for people.”
Her entrepreneurial artistry found another channel after a drive to Clinton, Maryland, to go grocery shopping. There she saw a sign that read “seamstress wanted” and off she went again to establish another successful livelihood. “I can start tomorrow,” she called and told them.
Over 15 years, she developed mastery in crafting fine custom draperies. Life would start to draw the family back to their North Fork roots, however. Her husband suffered a heart attack that left him unable to work. At the same time, the family had commissioned the remodeling of the farmhouse her father had constructed for the family as she was growing up.
As the family returned home in 1982, Lambert had a question on her mind. Would there be a market for custom made draperies in Pendleton County? She ignored the “torpedoes,” said “that’s what I’ll do,” and went full speed ahead. Friends helped her to accumulate needed supplies and she was set to work.
But would anyone buy?
The answer came soon enough. A friend reached out and said, “I’m so happy you make draperies! I’ll be the first one in Circleville with custom draperies!”
Word traveled quickly and she found her services engaged by notable clients. Lambert started her drapery business in the basement of her home “right after the ’85 flood.” Summit Bank in Moorefield, now Burke and Herbert, engaged her to craft draperies for their board room. A Nationwide insurance agent in the same town also purchased her high quality work.
For a time her custom draperies, using fabric textures and colors painstakingly chosen by an interior designer, graced the windows of the historic Pendleton County Courthouse. She completed the project in 1996, but a subsequent commission chose to replace them with plain white treatments.
One of the great traditions of her family and others on the North Fork and throughout the county is large extended family picnics that often include the community at large as well.
After all, so many of Pendleton County’s historical families have lived and loved these lands since the Seven Years’ War. Over time, they intertwine over and over again, leaving a community tighter knit than most because so many neighbors share the same family blood. “We have picnics here,” noted Mrs. Lambert.
“We’re still here, every year . . . we always have a party,” she said.
This November the party will not only celebrate the love and joy that family and friends feel when they gather, the family picnic and party will celebrate a full century of a full life well-lived, including growing up on the farm, years spent living, loving, and raising children with her husband in the city, and a career of work whose products were pure artistry.
That is the story of Idelta Lambert and her family, but it is also the legacy of so many others living the good life on the North Fork River in Pendleton County West, by God, Virginia.
