Real Pearls and Darned Stockings: Tales of the Hudson Valley

"Real Pearls and Darned Stockings" consists of a series of amusing, revealing vignettes relating to the inexorable changing of The Old Guard in the Roosevelt/Livingston Hudson Valley. During the last half of the twentieth century, Edith Wharton's marvelous world of elegant society, good and proper manners, indoor swimming pools, private golf clubs -- real pearls and darned stockings -- became transformed by an upwardly mobile generation, the environmentally aware New Guard.

Having lived in the Hudson Valley off and on all her life Allene Hatch considers herself part of its fabric. Raised in a beautiful Dutch Colonial house built in 1762 on a 350-acre farm in the village of Clermont, she grew up in the center of the Valley itself. She attended sculptor, Harvey Fite’s life class in nearby Bard College at age 13 and the next year won a place in Victor d’Amico’s experimental class in modern painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Graduating from Fashion Academy, she was working in the art department of a New York advertising agency when she married historian/biographer Alden Hatch in 1950. By then, ten of Alden’s thirty-four biographies had already been published and after their marriage Allene helped him research his books, illustrating four of them. In the 1960’s Allene started writing and illustrating articles for the Barrytown Explorer a newspaper owned by Chanler Chapman, one of the ＂mad Chanlers＂ in Lately Thomas’s Pride of Lions. In 1973 Allene wrote and illustrated her first book, Menopause can Be Fun, which was published in Holland and Germany but not America, where the subject was taboo in those days. When Alden Hatch died in 1975 she finished writing his just-started biography of Marjorie Merriweather Post which was published in Palm Beach Life. Her third book, The Best of Times was published by Writers Club Press. It is a memoir about the Hatches’ adventures with princes, popes and presidents. When not writing, Allene keeps busy painting portraits and murals. She is a long-time resident of New York City; she now divides her time between the city and Kinderhook, N.Y.