Joining the World War II workers flooding into Mobile

Ella Lee Carley joined the workers flooding into Mobile from the rural areas of Mississippi and Alabama during World War II. The demand for workers at the city's shipyards and Brookley Army Air Corps Base was so great that the city's population doubled almost overnight.

Ella Lee, as she was always called, moved from Electric Mills, Mississippi, and counted herself lucky because she had friends in Mobile who gave her a place to live. Housing was very scarce. So scarce  in fact that many places rented beds for 8-hour shifts.

Ella Lee met, and later married, Raymond Lamont Pierce (1923-1981) when the two of them were working at Gulf Shipbuilding Corp. in Chickasaw, Alabama, during World War II. The above photo is of Ella Lee's worker identification badge.

Photos for a modeling career

For a time Velma Moree Pierce (1913-1993) tried her hand at modeling and the above photo appears to have been from that time. This photo was probably taken when Velma lived in Chicago in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

Written in the lower right corner of the photo is the photographer's name and location, “Maurice, Chicago.” This name offers a bit of a mystery. The photo is in the style of the well-known Maurice Seymour, billed in Hollywood's golden age as “the photographer to the celebrities.”

According to ChicagoMag.com, “Maurice Seymour was actually two brothers: Maurice (1900-93) and Seymour (1902-95) Zeldman. Born in Russia, the pair came to Chicago in 1920, and nine years later opened their own studio, Maurice Seymour, atop the St. Clair Hotel. Bestowing a dramatically highlighted glamour on the city, they photographed film, theater, and radio stars, judges and politicians, and the international luminaries of ballet, beginning, in 1934, with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. When Seymour Zeldman moved to New York in the 1950s, both men legally changed their names to Maurice Seymour and continued to photograph into the 1970s.”

The only problem with attributing the photo to Maurice Seymour is that the signature in the corner doesn't match any of the other Maurice Seymour signatures among the images found on the Web. The photo of Velma also doesn't have the studio's customary stamp on the back. So this photo may be from a different studio than that of Maurice Seymour.

In the left photo Velma is the second woman from the left in the above photo. The other women are not identified.

This photo was probably taken when Velma lived in Chicago. It is obviously staged and was probably intended to publicize some event. The barely visible sign on the wall behind the woman on the right says something about "fashion." This may have been during the time Velma modeled.

The women's hats really make the photo interesting. Generally, wearing hats went out of fashion after World War II, so this photo may have been taken some time during the 1940s.