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Four Generations of Brides Share Legacy of Lace, Love

If a dress could tell a story, it would tell a tale of four weddings and four generations of women, starting with Mildred Marie Momberg Eggerding in 1934 and ending – for now – with her great-granddaughter, Katy Gallaher Wakim, who was married in Wheeling on Sept. 5.

It has come out of the box every couple of decades since it was first worn 71 years ago. Each time, it has been altered to fit the bride and the fashion of the day, large sections added and taken away, necklines and hemlines heightened and lowered, while much of the original lace was preserved. Just like the unions whose beginnings it graced, the lace has stood the test of time.

“I was always sort of fascinated with the story,” said Katy, who learned the dress’ legacy at a young age from her grandmother, Muriel Marie Eggerding Pohl, a.k.a. Grammy-Grams – Gram for short. A picture frame at her Gram’s house in Cincinnati held photos of her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother wearing incarnations of the dress in 1934, 1958 and 1982, respectively.

So when she got engaged, Katy naturally wondered if she could continue the tradition for a fourth generation. But she hesitated mentioning it to her mother, Tami Gallaher of Wheeling. She didn’t want to disappoint her if it didn’t work out.

“Her dress was really ’80s, so I was really nervous about it. So, kind of walking on eggshells, I said let’s look at it,” Katy said.

Her mom was equally nervous that Katy wouldn’t like it.

“She said, ‘Mom, I’d like to look at your dress,’ and I said, ‘Really?’ I was kind of surprised, but I didn’t get my hopes up,” Tami said.

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When Mildred, a farmer’s daughter, married George Eggerding, a carpenter, in Cincinnati during the Great Depression, she wore a white satin sheath with an elaborate lace coat that had long sleeves and a train. No one in the family knows where the dress was purchased.

When her daughter, Muriel, was about to be married to Norman Ray Pohl in 1958, Mildred, who was deft with a needle, contacted her nephew, Howard Eggerding, a professional dressmaker in Cincinnati.

“He offered to make my dress, and Mother thought it would be a neat idea to have me wear her lace. So he designed my dress using mother’s lace,” Muriel said.

“Uncle” Howard crafted Muriel’s dress of new material, a satin silk shantung (a heavy, premium silk with a pebbled surface), with a V-neck and a full skirt. He then overlaid the lace from Mildred’s long coat on the new bodice and fashioned long sleeves with it. Finally, he painstakingly sewed the entire original lace train over top of Muriel’s train, a tricky bit of needlework on which he remarked years later.

In 1982, it was Tami’s turn to be married- to Jim Gallaher of Wheeling, whom she met while attending Wheeling College, where she was a member of the second graduating class of nurses. Tami’s grandmother Mildred and mother Muriel, both proficient seamstresses worked together to transform Muriel’s dress into something resembling a dress Tami picked out of a magazine. They sewed a high collar and a large V-shaped lace ruffle on the bodice. They also opened the back to add tiny buttons and loops up its length.

Because Tami was a larger size than her mother, they also had to drop the shoulders and remove the lace sleeves, which they turned into gauntlets Tami wore on her forearms. Muriel’s sister, Karen Carpenter, also a seamstress, remembers their mother calling up Uncle Howard at least once to consult.

“It turned out beautifully, and I loved it. I still love it,” Tami said.

Earlier this year, when she saw it again for the first time in almost three decades, it looked dated, wrinkled and had a large stain on the front of the skirt.

“I thought, ‘Gee, can we really make that Katy’s?’ I really didn’t know,” Tami said.

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Katy and Michael Wakim, son of Joe and Amanda Wakim of Wheeling, got engaged two years ago in Charlottesville,?Va. They met at Wheeling Park High School but didn’t start dating until their class trip to the beach after graduation. Then he went to Notre Dame, and she to West Virginia University. He eventually joined her at WVU where he studied medicine while she got her master’s degree in speech pathology. They now live in Virginia while he finishes his last year of medical residency at the UVA.

When she first tried on her mom’s wrinkled and stained wedding dress earlier this year, she was like a little girl playing dress-up; it was way too big. But she had fun with it, and she wasn’t deterred – although she still wasn’t 100 percent sure it was THE dress. She and her mom went shopping for dresses after that, and she tried on one at David’s Bridal that she really liked. It was strapless with an illusion neckline … nothing like her mother’s.

A few months later, after her Gram took Tami’s dress to be cleaned, the three generations of women, including Katy’s Aunt Karen, went to see the dress guru, Uncle Howard, now 95 and residing in an assisted living facility in Cincinnati.

“He tweaked it about two inches around the waist, and I was like, ‘I love this dress. Let’s go with this!'” Katy said. She showed pictures of the David’s dress to her Gram and Aunt Karen. Could they transform the dress again?

Tami and Katy hoped so.

It was early May. Aunt Karen set to work.

Asked if it was a difficult job, Karen replied: “Very.”

She spent more than 80 hours altering the dress, including several hours trying to remove the stain that remained on the silk skirt and subsequently shopping for new satin shantung material for the front of the skirt, using the original silk skirt as the lining.

She removed the ruffle and the top of the bodice to make it strapless, then added the illusion neckline using lace she found that worked well with Mildred’s original lace. She added a zipper down the back for ease of taking it on and off, and, at Katy’s request, added pockets, a modern element that the David’s dress had.

“As I told Kate, I felt I had my mother (Mildred) sitting on my shoulder more than once, saying ‘If you just turn this here …,'” Karen said.

She brought the work-in-progress to Katy’s bridal shower in July. It was the moment of truth.

“It was my size. It fit me. When I tried it on, that was the first time I felt like a bride, (after) being engaged for two years,” Katy said.

“Karen and Muriel took the dress to show Uncle Howard before returning to Wheeling with the finished product in August, three weeks before the wedding. She had created the whole dress based on only two fittings. “I did it all from measurements and telephone conversations,” she said.

“She saw me in the dress two total times, and she was able to build this absolutely gorgeous, incredible creation. I just felt like a princess,” Katy said.

“She looked stunning,” Tami said.

Tami also had her hands in the creation, doing a little stitching and hemming for a perfect fit.

The dress even fulfilled all requirements of the adage, “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”

The “blue” took the form of the four family wedding dates Karen embroidered on the inside of one of the pockets, in blue thread.

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At weddings, the dress reveal is almost always one of the most anticipated moments of the day, later becoming the most talked-about part of the ceremony, an indelible memory.

In Katy’s case, it meant so much more. The family framed the story of the dress and shared it with guests, titling it “The Dress: A Legacy of Lace and Love.”

Although no one knows the origin of Mildred’s lace, Karen noted “it’s really sturdy stuff.” Katy felt honored to be the fourth generation to wear it.

“It was just so neat knowing not just that this (dress) is part of my family and these traditions, but that it is part of these really strong and wonderful marriages. Just imagine, starting off on Day One with this piece of history that his been in my family so long. It was just really neat,” Katy said.

Muriel has difficulty describing what she felt when she saw Katy in the dress on Sept. 5. She said she had goosebumps on the inside that felt like they were going to explode.

“I don’t think there’s a word for that in English,” she said.

As for whether a fifth generation will carry on the legacy, Katy said: “I hope so. … Maybe it will be used again in 20 or 30 years. …”

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