Textile designer and trendsetter, Dorothy Liebes was born on October 14 - or maybe the 15th - in 1897. Her birth certificate reads October 15, but she celebrated on the 14th throughout her life. A clerical error may explain the discrepancy as the original document was lost in the 1906 earthquake. Liebes was born two months premature – a precarious start in the days before NICUs – and it was common not to name a baby whose viability was uncertain. The line for the name she wou

In her unpublished autobiography, Liebes interspersed memories of historic events of the early 20th Century with more intimate details of family life: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, watching the spectacle of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet steaming through the Golden Gate in 1908 (30 years before the iconic bridge was built); and riding to her grandparents’ ranch in the family’s bright red Rambler with its enormous whitewalled tires. The Great White Fleet The Fami

Liebes assumed she would attend the University of California at Berkeley right after high school, but her father’s unsuccessful hops growing venture meant postponing her dream. The free tuition offered at San Jose Normal School (now San José State University) allowed Liebes to get a teaching certificate, an “anchor to windward,” as her parents called it. She became president of the senior class and active in several clubs. In 1918, Liebes got her first job as an 8th grade tea

A part time job at the Esther Hellman Settlement House on San Bruno Avenue in San Francisco took up three nights a week during Liebes’s last year at Berkeley. Her job was to “Americanize” recent Eastern European immigrants who accessed the house’s resources. Liebes took the trolley from campus to the Oakland terminal known as “The Mole," ferried across the bay to San Francisco, then hopped another trolley to the Club. The entire trip took an hour each way. The notorious Howar