Valley Girl Views: Milton Silk Mill Worker Seeking $10,000 Husband

In February of 1928, newspapers around the nation were talking about Charles Lindbergh & Amelia Earhart. And right on the front page beside those headlines, ran a photo of a 20 year old silk mill worker in Milton Pa. She made national news by advertising in the Harrisburg newspaper for a husband, and stipulating that he must be "30 or under, white, and must have $10,000 in cash.".

Pearl Elmyra Locke lived at 51 Filbert street in Milton Pa with her mother Emma. Her father William had deserted them a few years prior. They attended church at Grace Lutheran, and Emma worked as a candy mixer.

Pearl worked as a warper at the Milton silk mill, but had decided she would rather keep house than labor all day.

"I want to have the fine clothes that women love to wear" Pearl told a news reporter. "I don't want to have to count my pennies to make ends meet all of my life. I am about fed up punching time clocks and and figuring whether to buy silk stockings or coal out of my weekly salary."

"And I'm tired of fellows that never make anything of themselves. I have had three beaus in the last three years, but quit all of them because they were too frivolous and too poor."

Pearl gave interviews to several local newspapers, including the Shamokin News Dispatch, where the reporter was particularly smitten with the young woman.

"Miss Locke, charming to the extreme, and the answer for a fairy princess when you were a boy in your teens... She looks like a Ziegfeld.. "

"Five feet two inches in height, 112 pounds, dark brown curly hair, blue eyes, curving lips and throat, and a shape that would rival and artists model. She has personality in abundance,can carry on a conversation on any important question of today, cook like mother and doesn't mind washing dishes at all."

"Scan this description put down here in black an white, form a picture of her in your mind, and well, if you don't agree, speaking in plain words, your taste is horrible."

When the Shamokin reporter asked if her prospective suitor really had to be worth $10,000, Pearl replied

"Naturally so. Who doesn't want a husband who is worth a little bit of money?"

When asked how she would choose if she were to receive several hundred replies to her advertisement, Pearl answered

"The one with the most money of course!"

In various interviews, Pearl insisted she would not be too particular about the mans looks, only his bank balance. "Of course he must be presentable, and have some brains too."

Pittston Gazette

Feb 8 1928

Apparently men across the country were just as smitten as the Shamokin reporter. Pearl received thousands of letters in response to her ad. Including one from the former mayor of Vermont, who promised her not $10,000, but $50,000.

She told the Shamokin reporter that the girls at the silk mill "all think they know that I am the one who inserted the advertisement in the paper. Yesterday afternoon I noticed them talking and snickering about me, but I don't think it's anything to laugh about, for I am really serious."

Pearl agreed to give her photograph to the newspapers, but did not want any of the local papers to run the photos. "I believe it is only justice that these men who are considering the advertisement should know what I look like. But for goodness sake, don't let it get in any of the papers around here, for I don't like the idea of it, that's all."

At least three different photos were published in newspapers across the country, often on the front page.

Pearl's mother Emma gave an interview in response to her daughters advertisement.

"I am sorry that she took this step, but it's all right. You can't hate her from wanting to get away from drudgery, can you? She will have my consent to marry if she finds a man i think worthy of the girl, but I am not going to see her doing anything foolish.

We pay $24.50 a month in rent here. We have coal, milk, and grocery bills, and we have to dress respectably The only income we have is the little money I make as a candy mixer and what Pearl brings in as a twister at the Susquehanna Silk Mill."

"Pearl is a good girl" Emma told reporters. "She is intelligent and sweet tempered and completed her first two years of high school."

"She wants luxury and love and a type of Lindbergh, and I hope she gets it."

It wasn't until a later interview that Emma admitted Pearl had run away a few years earlier. In 1924, at age 15, Pearl ran off to Harrisburg. In 1928 her mother insisted the girl was a good girl, she just wanted to earn more money than she could make in Milton.

But in September of 1924, the Miltonian reported that "On complaint of her mother, who alleged that she is wayward and has been living a life of shame at Harrisburg, Pearl Locke of Milton was yesterday sent to the Muncy Industrial Home for women by Judge Albert Lloyd."

Emma later clarified that Pearl had been picked on in school, for not having clothes as nice as the other girls. She became tired of it, and ran off. Relatives told Emma she had to have Pearl sent to the Muncy Home.

In that same interview, Emma said she had broken her ankle a year earlier, and could now only work four days a week, and with much pain. She claims that Pearl did not like seeing her mother in pain and needing to work so hard.

Less than a week after Emma had first been interviewed, she herself filed for divorce, stating that her husband had deserted her some years ago for Harrisburg, the same city that Pearl had run away to. One may wonder why Emma waited until now, when her family was in the news all over the nation, to seek a divorce, but it's possible she wanted to be free to travel with her daughter when a marriage proposal was accepted. Her divorce was granted a short time later.

A photo of Charles Lindbergh, clipped from a newspaper, was displayed among other photos in the Locke home. Pearl frequently mentioned that she thought Lindbergh was an example of the ideal man. She hoped that her husband could be pattered after America's "Air Idol."

"I want love. I want a good husband. I want a home, and I want those lovely silk and lacy things that as woman's heart craved for, and above all I want a husband who will treat me kindly and make my life such that I won't have to save my pennies. That's about what every woman's heart craves."

And apparently she was not wrong. In the following month, the Harrisburg paper received ads from more women searching for a husband. None of them were so brazen as to stipulate what the men must be worth, but they did request that the men be gainfully employed, or able to support a wife.. One woman went to great lengths to say she was not a flapper, and did not have "one of those bobbed haircuts", which may have been a jab at Pearl, who sports a flapper look complete with bobbed hair, in her photos.

The Danville Morning News, as well as other papers across the state, reported in June that "Pearl Locke Will Marry $10,000 Mate". The wedding was set for Thursday June 7, in Lowell Massachusetts, but the prospective husband was not named.

I can find no records of the Locke family in the census, not before, nor after, the made headlines. There's no word on who Pearl married, nor if he was kind, nor is there a mention of his worth. Just a few lines ran in various papers, stating that she had found her hubby, and then she disappears from the news, and I can find no trace of her in ancestry.com records.

But as I read about her today, I found myself rooting for her, and I do hope she found all that she was looking for.

UPDATE - We still don't know what happened with the man she was supposed to marry in Massachusetts, but she married Lee Moyer in Lebanon PA in 1931. They had 5 children, and 23 grandchildren

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