Vintage 1950s Shirley Jones 🎬 Pin Up Pocket Mirror Made in Japan Hollywood Red Rim Dime-Store Lithograph Collectible

Remember Shirley Jones in Your Pocket? 🎬 Vintage 1950s Pin-Up Pocket Mirror, Made in Japan

Size: 2"

New old stock. These never went out the door of whatever store they sat in — never sold, never carried in a pocket, never used to check a hat. The portraits are still bright and the red rims still glossy. The one in the photos is on the rougher end of the stack, so most are better than what you see there.

Shirley Jones in Your Pocket: a 1950s Dime-Store Mirror of Oklahoma!'s Laurey, From the Brewery Family of Smithton 🎬

Before the Academy Award, before she was Shirley Partridge, Shirley Jones was a brewer's daughter from western Pennsylvania who walked into an open casting call at nineteen and came out the only singer Rodgers and Hammerstein ever put under personal contract. By 1955 she was Laurey in the film of Oklahoma!, and her smile was small enough to carry in a purse. This is that smile: a 2-inch round pocket mirror with a full-color portrait of Shirley Jones on one side, a red rim, and the word JAPAN stamped across her shoulder.

🪞 What Is on the Mirror

The mirror is 2 inches across. A glossy red rim frames a color-printed portrait on a bright green ground: blonde curls swept back from her face, dark arched brows, rosy cheeks and a wide red-lipped smile, with a blue-gray top at her shoulders. Across her neckline, in dark uneven capitals, is JAPAN. That's an ink stamp, put on by hand after the picture was printed, so it wanders from mirror to mirror: at the neckline on some, running up beside her hair on others, now and then left off altogether. The other side is the mirror glass.

No name is printed anywhere on it; JAPAN is the only word, and the face does the rest. This same portrait of her, same pose, same hair, same green ground, came in red rims like this one and in pink and green.

🌏 The JAPAN Stamp and the Occupation Years

The rule that Japanese exports be marked "Made in Occupied Japan" or "Occupied Japan" ran from February 1947 to December 1949, a shorter stretch than the occupation itself, which lasted until April 28, 1952. What dates this mirror is the face: Shirley Jones was unknown to moviegoers until Oklahoma! reached theaters in 1955, so it comes from 1955 on, the years her face was everywhere.

🏭 Charleroi and Smithton, Pennsylvania

Shirley Jones was born on March 31, 1934, in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, a Monongahela River town 21 miles south of Pittsburgh. Charleroi had been settled only in 1890 and was named for Charleroi in Belgium; many of the area's Belgian immigrants were glassmakers, and the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company ran a plant there that at one point employed up to a thousand people. Her parents, Paul and Marjorie Jones, later moved the family to the small nearby town of Smithton, and they named their daughter after the child star Shirley Temple.

🍺 Stoney's Beer: the Poker Game Behind the Family Name

Her father owned the Jones Brewing Company, and the family story behind it is the best kind of Pennsylvania lore. As the brewery tells it, in 1907 her grandfather, William B. "Stoney" Jones, sat down to a friendly game of poker and walked away with the deed to the Eureka Gold Crown Brewery in Sutersville. He moved the operation to Smithton, and the story goes that the immigrant workers who drank it had trouble saying "Eureka," so they simply asked for one of Stoney's beers. After Prohibition the business became the Jones Brewing Company and its best seller officially took the name people had been using all along: Stoney's. The brewery calls Shirley, Stoney's granddaughter, Smithton's most famous native daughter, and Stoney's is still brewed today, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

⭐ From Miss Pittsburgh to Laurey

Jones started singing as a small child and won the Miss Pittsburgh contest in 1952. In 1953 she went to an open casting call for South Pacific, and casting director John Fearnley was impressed enough to fetch Richard Rodgers on the spot; Rodgers then telephoned Oscar Hammerstein II at home to tell him about her. Rodgers and Hammerstein signed her to a personal contract, the first and only singer they ever did, gave her a small role in South Pacific to start, and then cast her as the female lead, Laurey, in the 1955 film of Oklahoma!. She followed it with Carousel in 1956 and April Love in 1957. Those were the years a face like hers went from movie screens onto the novelty racks of drugstores and five-and-dimes.

🏆 After the Mirror: an Oscar and the Partridge Family

On August 5, 1956, Jones married the actor Jack Cassidy, and they had three sons, Shaun, Patrick and Ryan. Then she changed everyone's idea of her. Her performance in Elmer Gantry, a role worlds away from Laurey, won her the 1960 Academy Award. In 1962 she was Marian Paroo, the librarian, in The Music Man. And from 1970 to 1974 she played Shirley Partridge, the widowed mother of five on The Partridge Family, singing alongside her real-life stepson, David Cassidy. The girl on this mirror is the Shirley Jones who came before all of that.

🏪 The Five-and-Dime Mirror

Inexpensive pocket mirrors were sold at drugstores and five-and-dimes like the F. W. Woolworth Company, and movie and recording stars were among the most popular subjects. Woolworth's was already a giant long before Shirley Jones's day, with some 2,100 stores across the United States by 1929. They were made to be used, dropped into a purse and pulled out for a quick check before the picture show. That's what I love about these little mirrors: nobody bought one to keep, and here they are, the colors still bright.