Hi Judy,
I'll gladly tell you what I know of the Eames chair and family, who are apparently unrelated. The chair is now trademarked and fairly expensive, but at one time it was among the first ergonomic furniture designs (think: earth shoes--remember them?). It's not impossible that the chair was designed by one of the Eameses, as their patriarch (Mad Jack) had his fingers in a lot of local pies and, like the Wards, included inventors and dickerers.
As for the family, I don't remember how Mad Jack made his fortune in Littlleton, NH (pop. 6000), but he had two sons known as Brother John and Jeremiah, and it was the latter I worked for as an adolescent when the Eames family restored and refurbished the whole town (or so it seemed). I worked for Jere on renovating Thayers Hotel, one of the family's landmark businesses, and--typically for Jere--he put up my mother's out-of-town mourners, including me, free of charge when she died a couple of years ago. The Eames family also owned the "Jax Junior," a two-movie cineplex where, according to lore, _Gone with the Wind_ was showing for the first time. There, I made popcorn and, later, when Jere decided that what Littleton needed was a disco, where I also made popcorn. We had close relations with the Eameses because we had camps next to each other at Partridge Lake. (Aside: my father came upon a tourist dumping his waste products into
the lake and accosted the campers, saying that if they wanted to see an Irishman get mad, they should keep right on polluting the lake.
Well, that's probably way more than you wanted to know, but I enjoyed telling the tale. (Did the man own the town or the other way aound?)
Candice (aka the popcorn girl)
The Eameses were wonderful neighbors, and I miss them, living so far away myself now. There is one other claim to fame of the family: the woman who wrote _Pollyanna_ and the movie of the same name (filmed on site in Littleton and in Springfield, Vermont). When the Eameses learned about the real life of the real Pollyanna, they tried to get Hayley Mills to come to the celebration unveiling the statue of Pollyanna they donated a few years ago, but she was "otherwise engaged." Every year since then the town has celebrated the event in some way or other--and every year rumors had it that _this_ year Hayley Mills would be there.
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