Biographies

Dorothy N. Timberlake | William S. Stallings Jr.

Dorothy N. Timberlake Biography

            Dorothy Winifred Noon was born in 1916 at Eaton Center, NH, on a small farm and inn on the carriage route from the railhead at Ossippee to the White Mountains. She spent her early years there on Robertson’s pond, now Crystal Lake, at Robertson’s Corner on route 153 with her three brothers.
            Her father was professor of Latin at Northeastern University in Boston and brought the family to live in a long narrow rambling house and cottage at 10 Appian Way in Cambridge where her mother rented rooms to students. Next door lived Walter Cronkite and his wife, dean of Radcliffe college. Dorothy attended Cambridge schools and graduated from Lesley College. She taught first and second grades at the the Lesley-Ellis school on Concord Ave. and later at the Cambridge Friend’s School.
            The family usually came back to Eaton Center for the summers. Her mother owned the large Crystal Lake House, next door, with an attached barn, and a beach on the lake. From 1936 to 1958 Dorothy ran a summer camp for 20, 5-10 year old girls from Cambridge and Boston with a cook, a nurse and 4 councilors. The hayloft of the barn was used for crafts Two swings and a trapeze hung from the rafters. They kept a small pony “Dolly” for the campers to ride.
            In 1936 she met a student from Harvard whom she married when he graduated from medical school. They moved around Newton and Belmont for a few years finally settling at 194 Common St.Belmont They had a boy and four girls who married and produced twenty-two grand children and six great grand children.
            In 1970 she remembered as a child often visiting down the street, the home of a girl friend whose mother made barley candy lollypops for candy shops in Cambridge. She remembered the taste, shapes and colors and long lasting quality, and asked for a set of the moulds for her birthday. Three cast iron moulds and a recipe were found at Oranger’s in Quincy. She took them back to New Hampshire and found a ready market in the surrounding villages of the valley. So on her return to Boston she tried Brigham’s and Bailey’s and other local candy shops and found not only buyers but also old candy makers now managers, who were glad to share advice with her. She became known as the “Lollypop Lady”.
            She started looking for more moulds and found a few. Mr. Green, a Boston Dealer, gave her an ice cream mould of two billing doves. She drilled two holes in the bottom to make a “courting pop”, her first innovation.
            She read and experimented and modified the recipe so that while it was too thick to pour into the narrowest of the boiled sugar moulds, it would work in chocolate and other moulds, greatly increasing the variety of her pops . Moreover these pops did not melt down to a puddle in warm weather as sugar-water-and-cream-of-tartar pops did.
            Big trucks on a narrow, dead end suburban side street did not go over well with some neighbors and so the candy business soon had to move to the first floor of our Eaton summer home, the former Robertson’s Inn which had been the home of her grandparents.
            In 1998, two days after Christmas, she awoke feeling faint and died quietly of a heart attack in the room next to the room where she had been born.
            Her daughter Faith is a former art teacher, who has been making candy with Dorothy full time since 1981. She continues running the business. She has drawn the illustration for the catalogues, made moulds, and recently made our beautiful and efficient candies computer web site.

William S. Stallings Jr. Biography

William S.Stallings Jr. 1933

            Mr. William Sidney (Sid) Stallings, Jr., b.1910 d. 1989, archaeologist, anthropologist, Taylor Museum curator, cavalry officer, intelligence officer, CIA analyst and Renaissance man, was the principal investigator and source of information about ice cream moulds. He earned degrees in archaeology, ethnology and anthropology before his Ph.D. from Harvard. His work with dendrochronology was important to the calibration of radioactive carbon dating. I have been told that his unit of the CIA discovered the Cuban missiles of that crisis.
            Always interested in art, while he was studying in Cambridge, MA a flood of Japanese prints to Boston attracted his attention to collecting. Eight years later he was collecting silver and pewter. Four years later in London at Portobello road he was collecting pewter measures and his first pewter ice cream moulds. The beautiful detail of the interior led him to devote the next 23 years to collecting and studying these moulds, setting up a museum of over 3,000 moulds in his wife's name, the Alice Stallings Memorial Foundation. He studied these moulds and those of all the collectors that he could locate, finding distinctive features of the external marks, handles and hinges to identify makers and manufacturing clues. He went to factories and discussed features with workmen. Where the factories had closed, he visited relatives.
            He bought the master moulds and books of the Eppelsheimer Co. in New York City to study. He searched the files of the dairy and confectionary journals at the Library of Congress, and all over the world. His paper "Early Hinged Metal Moulds for Dessert Ices" is the most thorough study of these moulds and their makers; it was written about 1978 but unfortunately still awaits publication.
            In the late 1970's Mr. Stallings came to check over the small collection of moulds I had. He showed me his moulds and shared information and catalogues. After his death, his son allowed me to photocopy his work papers and it was only then that I began to realize the full extent of his exhaustive work not apparent in my brief visits to Bethesda.

This web site is a partial expression of my gratitude to William S. Stallings Jr.