A Style That Stands Test of Time

Josephine Elizabeth Fitts left a history of memories in a turquoise evening gown.  

The wife of one of builders  of Massachusetts'  Quabbin Reservoir, Fitts most likely wore the handmade dress to a ball held for the four towns that were decommissioned in order to create the Quabbin Reservoir.

That was in April of 1938. On Friday, the gown will make its second appearance       in about 73 years -- at Towson High School’s senior prom. 

“It is nice that it’s a part of my family that I’m taking with me,” Towson High junior Diana Reighart said. “It already has a story, and now I’m making my own.” 

Diana, 17, is Fitts’ great-granddaughter. Elizabeth Reighart, her mother, acquired the dress before her daughter was born. Elizabeth Reighart’s father was taking his mother, Fitts, to an assisted-living home shortly before her death in 1988 when Elizabeth unearthed the empire waist gown and took it home as a fun future outfit.

“I felt like it was something important to her, and that had meaning,” Elizabeth Reighart said. 

And the dress was used as a costume about three years ago, Diana Reighart said, when she wore it as a Prom Queen on Halloween.  When her boyfriend of seven months, Justin Thau, a Towson High School senior, asked her to the actual prom, Diana Reighart said her great-grandmother’s dress just popped into her head. 

“One day she just said ‘Would it be OK if I wore that dress, that turquoise dress with the silver thread?’” Elizabeth Reighart recalled. 

For a teenage girl who hates shopping, a dress that would only need slight alterations was cost effective and convenient. The flashy animal print patterns and revealing cuts in the prom dresses Diana Reighart saw in magazines didn't appeal to her but  because vintage is always in style, her great-grandmother’s gown was a perfect fit. 

“It is slim and long and narrow and a little bit more what you might wear today,” Elizabeth Reighart said. “It would be a little more of a stretch if it were a big, poofy, princessy thing. But she’s not a poofy kind of girl.” 

The junior spends more time studying than dreaming about a perfect prom. She was enrolled in five Advanced Placement classes at Towson High last year, including advanced biology and calculus courses. She is also active in the Towson Presbyterian Church, plays badminton (where she met Thau) and the cello, and is a member of the National Art Honors Society.  

Fitts and Diana Reighart apparently share a love of art—Fitts painted and did needlework. Her great-granddaughter paints through Towson High’s studio art course and crochets. 

Diana Reighart will also soon become a published scientist, as she recently worked on the Rutgers and Johns Hopkins University-sponsored HiGene duckweed genome project, which attempted to study the aquatic plant as a potential energy source. 

While she is a year away from graduation, Diana Reighart is looking into local schools such as the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Goucher College. But she said her sights are set on Yale, where she hopes to study biology at the soon-to-be-launched Center for High Throughput Cell Biology.  

And on Friday, her grandfather will be coming to Towson from Lancaster, PA to see his granddaughter in his mother’s dress.

While Diana Reighart is only attending a prom as a junior, her outlook on the high school rite of passage is as mature as the dress she will wear.  

“Whenever Justin and I are together, things are hilarious and fun,” Diana Reighart said. “It’s really about sharing an evening together.”