BLOOMINGTON - In August 1948, The Pantagraph ran a prize-winning photograph of former Bloomington resident Grace Jewett Austin. Taken by her daughter Elizabeth, the photo won a "best smiles" contest in Dallas, Texas, where the 76-year-old Austin had moved two years earlier. | From Our Past page

Austin was always smiling.

During her 40-plus years in Bloomington, she made a name for herself as an amateur playwright and poet, society scribe and fashion maven. She also was known for having what was said to be the second largest collection of elephant figurines in America (see accompanying photograph).

"Her world was not one of atomic bombs, of international assassinations, of Berlin crises," remembered Pantagraph Editor H. Clay Tate at the time of her death. "Hers was a world of smiles."

Born in 1872 in New Hampshire, Grace Jewett married Francis Marion Austin, a professor at the Wesleyan academy in Wilbraham, Mass. In the fall of 1901, Francis accepted a position at Illinois Wesleyan University, where he would spend 20 years teaching Latin.

The Austins raised three daughters at 1002 N. East St., calling their residence "Three Elms" (today it's a stretch of parking lot north of the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts).

Although tirelessly cheerful in public, Austin was well acquainted with grief. Her daughter Lois died in July 1919 at the age of 23, one month after completing a University of Illinois master's degree in romance languages. Two-and-a-half years later, Francis Austin died of pneumonia at the age of 60.

Grace Austin carried on. Months after her husband's death, she took charge of the society page - or what was called the "social department" - for The Daily Bulletin, a once-thriving Bloomington newspaper. Already a writer of local note, the 50-year-old Austin enjoyed the hurly-burly culture of an early 20th century newsroom. At a time when many of her social peers were settling into the staid role of prim-and-proper matriarch, Austin embarked on a full-time career in journalism.

When The Pantagraph absorbed The Bulletin five years later, she found work at the city's last remaining daily paper. Austin served as The Pantagraph's society page editor until 1940, after which she continued to write part time.

During much of Austin's tenure, The Pantagraph devoted one full page a day to society news, with three pages on Sunday. Coverage included weddings, teas, out-of-town visitors, women's clubs and charity work.

As society editor, Austin said her job was to relate "happy experiences" and leave the reader with a "cheerful feeling." Much of the coverage was confined to Bloomington's upper crust east side. The west side working class, blacks and Catholics were generally ignored. Yet Austin's domesticity was expansive enough to put forward the idea that women deserved a wider role in the public sphere.

In addition to her duties with The Pantagraph, Austin wrote a nationally syndicated column called "Dame Fashion Smiles" that appeared in several hundred small town newspapers coast to coast. Written in the practical, discerning, pedantic and occasionally irreverent voice of Austin's alter ego "Dame Fashion," the column consisted of brief observations on a life lived well and fashionable.

Austin was more open to "modern" ideas of dress and romance than one might suppose. "If women had been intended to be shaped with hoop and bustle forms they would have been made so," she once wrote, adding that "women are dressed more now like Greek goddesses than they have ever been since Helen's and Sappho's time. And if that is not getting back beauty, I don't know what is."

In 1946, Dame Fashion and her 2,645 elephants moved to Dallas to live with her daughter, Elizabeth. It was in Rosebud, Texas that Austin met Miss Vera Warrock, whose champion elephant collection numbered some 11,000.

Grace Jewett Austin passed away on Sept. 27, 1948 in Dallas. Her body was brought back on the Alton Railroad and she is buried at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery in Bloomington.

"Mrs. Austin somehow managed to cast aside the unpleasant things of life," wrote Tate, The Pantagraph editor. "At least outwardly, nothing was ever ordinary, or sordid or ugly. She dealt in superlatives. Whether it was society, politics, literature, the weather or her beloved elephant collection, everything was magnificent."