Hi, Popcorn Girl, I enjoyed so much your information about the Eames folk!
Of course I'd love to know more, but will request it of you for
back-channel, if that's ok, as my delight with the subject may not match
other petc folks' delights.
BTW, am on Monday moving into a home on New Hampshire Avenue.  Though I've
been to the state of NH, I don't remember it in the swirl of northeastern
cities and states we visited years ago.

Incidentally, I googled 'Pollyanna'.  Here's a URL for info on the author,
Eleanor H. Porter, born in Littleton NH:
http://www.golittleton.com/eleanor_porter.php

Best,

joodles who cracked a tooth on a popcorn kernel and daren't eat more of the
lovely stuff!

2008/9/11 MC Ward <[log in to unmask]>

> 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.
>
>
>
>