“Fifties Finery Junior Style”

“Fifties Finery Junior Style”
By Kate MacInnes-Adams

In 1950, the theme for the seventeenth Apple Blossom Festival was “Get aboard, we’ll go far off.” Princess Middleton was Elizabeth Anderson, and Queen Annapolisa was Olive Lewis of Digby. A six year old Carolyn Clark donned this dress as the Junior Attendant for Princess Middleton. In June of 2016, Carolyn Pope took the time to share her story and the story of the dress with the Kings County Museum in her own words:

“The girls in the back are Virginia Cone on the left and June Bowlby on the top right. Bottom left is Nancy Cone, me (Carolyn Pope) in the middle, and on the right, Nancy Bowlby: sisters on the left, sisters on the right. There is a princess in the middle behind me but I do not remember who that was (Princess Middleton that year was Elizabeth Anderson). I am the one standing in the front.

The float was a Church of the Nazarene Float from Middleton. My parents were original members of that congregation. The Cone girls were daughters of the minister, Andrew Cone. The Bowlby girls are my cousins. The dress was put in my mother’s hope chest where it has remained all these years until I took it out of there last month. I think I was about six years old, and I am now 72!

My maiden name was Clark, and I grew up in Wilmot in the Annapolis Valley. I graduated from Middleton Regional High School in 1961 and went to Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts for a year, then returned to Middleton and took the commercial class. Upon graduation, I went back to Massachusetts and worked for Tracerlab in Waltham, Mass., and got married to my childhood friend Jack Pope in 1965, who I have been married to now for 51 years! (2016). We met when he came to NS with my aunt and uncle, Tib and Mildred Boates, to their farm, when his mother died. He would spend summers there at the farm for several years. We met again after his sister Barbara married my cousin Tom Boates when I was at Eastern Nazarene College, and he was in the US Navy. We moved to Florida to be near his dad and stepmother in 1973 (they continue to live here with their extended family).”