It's a place setting, sterling silver, "Diamond" pattern," manufactured by Reed & Barton of Taunton, Massachusetts in 1958. I own nine such place settings as well as a few miscellaneous serving pieces. I like them now but I didn't back then.
In the 1950s, dear grandchildren, it was considered ideal for respectable middle-class women to marry at a young age; if possible right after university. Or even sooner -- when Althea graduated from high school, her Uncle Mendy, who was never the absolute epitome of tact, said to her, "Don't worry, you'll meet someone in college."
Despite her intelligence and experience, Althea was at heart a conventional small-town girl, and she wanted a wedding with all the trappings -- and the trappings included not just a cheese tray and a fondue pot, but a long white dress and bridesmaids and a bridal registry and china and especially silver.
Althea chose "Diamond." If I was consulted -- I don't remember -- it wouldn't have mattered. It was her decision. All I knew was that Althea and I were moving from Ithaca to Massachusetts, I to graduate school and she to a teaching position at Warren JHS in Newton -- and that if I wanted to wake up in the same bed as my beloved, I had to be married (remember, grandchildren, this was the retrogressive Eisenhower era, and men and women did not live together without legal sanction). Apparently, in order to get married, it was necessary to go through a series of utterly mystifying rites, all of which were arranged by Althea and her mother. I was completely indifferent and oblivious to formal wedding invitations and to seating charts and to the choice of music (a piano player I believe) and most especially to the rabbi (who drowned himself in a local lake a month after officiating at our ceremony). Honestly, I felt as though I was just an extra who was trundled onto the set to stand next to the bride and, when called upon, to say "I do."
But I console myself by remembering that I was not alone --that I was one of an entire generation of bewildered half-grown gawky 1950s bridegrooms in tortoiseshell glasses and borrowed suits.
Once I got my adult legs, I could admit to Althea and to myself that I resented the "Diamond" silver. For 1970s me, it embodied and symbolized everything that I disliked about the conservative prudish postwar culture into which both of us had been indoctrinated. With the advent of the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the series of ghastly assassinations, the silver became, to me, an index of bourgeois conformity and pretense. It offended me, deeply. And therefore the silver utensils went into the closet and remained there for 35 or 40 years.
When we shifted to this new address, in 2009, I took the silver out of its banishment. I looked with new apolitical eyes. "Wow -- these things are beautiful." The utensils were not elaborate, or fancy, or pseudo-baroque like most such tableware, but clean, modest, spare, understated, and not at bit pretentious. In retrospect, Althea had astonishing judgment and extraordinary taste.
Upon investigation, I discovered that Diamond silverware is highly regarded and much prized. It is, in the language of enthusiasts of mid-century modernism, "important." It was created by Gio Ponti, who was, one might say, the Frank Lloyd Wright of twentieth-century Italian designers. Among his other achievements, Gio Ponti was the architect of the celebrated Denver Art Museum.
So now, at long last, I've restored the Diamond silverware to a place of honor, and I enjoy setting the table with these sleek utensils. And I'm as pleased as punch that none of my guests realize that when they spear that last fragment of barbecued chicken, they do so with a fork of distinction.
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