![]() Lucy Graves Mayo, a Gibbs instructor and author of the 1965 advice manual You Can Be an Executive Secretary, preached that achievement in the field required recognizing that the “boss is KING.”Ĭolumbia University Press, 312 pp., $35.00 They prepared coffee in silver-plated urns, and from the 1940s to the mid-1960s were required to wear white gloves. “Katie Gibbs girls,” as they eventually came to be known, were fined for chewing gum in class. The Gibbs School did much more than make its founder fabulously wealthy: It helped establish the image of the secretary as an unfailingly professional, naturally demure, and resolutely feminine helpmate. Equal parts finishing school and vocational academy, the venture was so successful that, by 1918, Gibbs had satellite campuses in Boston and New York, and, by 1930, she was living on Park Avenue with her family and three full-time servants, pulling in what would be the equivalent of $1.4 million a year today. ![]() With startup capital funded by the sale of her jewelry and help from family friends, in 1911 Katharine bought the Providence School for Secretaries, soon changing the name to the Katharine Gibbs School. But her circumstances did not remain straitened for long. The accident widowed his wife, Katharine, then 46, leaving her to support their two sons as well as an unmarried sister. ![]() ![]() In 1909, a horologist and sailing enthusiast named William Gibbs died at the Edgewood Yacht Club in Cranston, Rhode Island, after falling from the mast of his boat.
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