Childhood Memories ...
At the age of five, Eleanor and her family moved to Forest Hills Gardens on Long Island, New York. It was a gated community where many theater people lived including famous names like Will Rogers. In those days, movies were filmed in Brooklyn.
Eleanor traveled with her family a good deal during her early years. She recalls a trip through the Panama Canal and many trips to California beginning at the age of 2 years. She and her family spent four to five months of each year in California and the rest of the time in New York.
She attended fourteen different schools over the course of her education. She attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, which was listed as one of the top five art schools in the nation until it closed in 1972. The faculty of the school consisted of professional artists such as Phil Paradise, Stanton Mcdonald-Wright, Millard Sheets, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Some of its students became noted artists in their own right such as Rex Brandt (painting), Edith Head (costume design), Chuck Jones (animation), and Bob Mackie (costume design). With the goal of writing professionally about fashion, Eleanor went on to study fashion design at the Traphagen School of Fashion (now the Fashion Institute of Technology) in New York.
