Date with a Career by Jan Nickerson

Like many of the books I enjoyed growing up, Date with a Career is about a girl starting school in a new place but it is also about her determination to become a fashion designer. Saphronia Adams has spent most of her life in Manhattan with her mother, a successful actress, but now her mother is performing in Australia, so Saphronia has is spending her senior year with the grandmother for whom she was named. 

Her mother’s marriage to a gifted concert pianist had caused a rift in the family but both he and her grandfather are now deceased. Saphronia is determined to get the most out of her new Massachusetts high school:

It’s funny about school, she thought. The first day everything is new and special. The second day you are into routine so fast that it seems as though you had been there for years. This might be a small school compared with those in the cities, but Saphronia realized at once that it had high standards. “After all,” she told herself, as she took out her United States history, “that is why we go to school, to get a good education. The fun is incidental, though awfully nice.”

She is welcomed by her new classmates and firmly called by her middle name Lee, which she appreciates because she knows she could appear stuck up – being from NYC and getting driven to school every day in a 1931 Packard by a chauffeur. The author subverts the genre a bit by making Lee’s new beau a proud member of Fairmeadows High Schools marching band, not a football player. Grandmother approves of Jock and his family (his sister goes to Mount Holyoke) but Lee is no snob: “He was nice, and that was all that mattered.” Jock’s parents are friendly and his mother loves to sew like Lee.

In addition to her new, enjoyable social life, Lee is taking piano lessons because Grandmother erroneously assumes Lee has inherited her father’s talent and is trying to make up for her resistance to Lee’s parents’ marriage. Lee bides her time, determined to show her grandmother that designing clothes is her special talent. Her first design is upstaged by a girl jealous of Jock’s interest but subsequent projects are successful and prove to all concerned that Lee has the talent for the creative career she wants. Next step is beginning an apprenticeship to a noted designer in New York, and Jock has been accepted to Columbia so will be in the same city!

These young adult career novels can be a lot of fun and what sets this book apart is the vivid descriptions of Lee’s high school experience and the way she throws herself into activities. She is part of a lively crowd of friends, although they are not without controversy – Lee’s rival destroys her future, not by getting pregnant but by impulsively marrying someone from the wrong side of the tracks. 

Jan Nickerson

I acquired this book in May 2021 but I don’t remember where, possibly from my friend Deb Thomas. It has a lovely dust jacket with mylar cover. Until I read it, I was confusing the author with Jean Nielsen, another author of the era who wrote Green Eyes, Halfpenny Linda, and a handful of others. In fact, Jan Nickerson was from Somerville, MA and earned her AB at Radcliffe College where she was the class poet. I was planning to donate this copy to Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library but, to my surprise, they already seem to own most of her books.

Title: Date with a Career
Author: Jan Nickerson
Publication: Funk & Wagnalls Co., hardcover, 1958
Genre: Young Adult
Source: Personal copy