If you have been reading this blog for any amount of time, you will know my fascination with half sizes, a no longer existing size range invented in the 1920s and killed off by the 1980s. The real-life inventors of half sizes are obscure, since many different dress companies claimed credit. However, that did not stop popular entertainer Gertrude Berg from writing a play in which her alter ego, radio and TV character Molly Goldberg, invented the size range all by herself. The play premiered on Broadway in 1948 and played for over four months to decent reviews. It even had a revival in 1980.
In the play, Molly comes up with the new system by measuring the women in her Bronx apartment building. “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Bloom—you’re not a forty-four anymore; you’re a twenty-two and a half,” she proclaims to one of her neighbors. She enlists the help of a pattern maker, and soon her acquaintances have dresses that fit perfectly. By the end of the play, the Goldbergs start their own manufacturing company.
Did life imitate art? Perhaps the play is what inspired Gertrude Berg to start her own clothing line.
There’s a Gertrude Berg revival now. I remember that my mother enjoyed the TV show “The Goldbergs.” I only recently found out that’s because the radio show was wildly popular when she was a child.