The queen of proper manners authority Marjabelle Young Stewart who also authored more than 20 books has died. She was 82. Stewart is survived by her husband, two children, three grandchildren and also a great-grandchild. She died on the Saturday night of pneumonia at a nursing home in Kewanee, said her daughter, Jacqueline Ramont, of Danville.
Stewart was also famous for the yearly list of best-mannered cities. She began issuing it in 1977. Stewart had lived in Kewanee since 1962, after she moved in there from Washington, D.C. Stewart’s career also took her to the White House to instruct manners to the daughters of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Ramont said, ‘She was a self-made woman, she always said a good handshake and good table manners would get you anywhere.” Stewart was one of the four daughters born to Marie and Clarence Cullen Bryant, a great-grandson of poet William Cullen Bryant, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The couple, however, separated while the girls were young. They were kept in an orphanage called Children’s Square, where she suffered the loss of one of her sister.
She reunited with her mother and graduated from high school in Council Bluffs. In 1941, at the small age of 17, she married scientist Jack Davison Young and moved with him to wartime Washington, where she worked in a naval yard. She was given a modeling offer and she soon became one of Washington’s top models. She was then introduced to Washington society and was also a friend to John F. Kennedy. The late humor columnist Art Buchwald, one of her acquaintances, persuaded her to team up with his wife, Ann, on a light-toned etiquette book. “White Gloves and Party Manners,” was the result and it became a best-seller too. Before writing solo, she collaborated on two other books with Ann Buchwald.
Stewart and Young got divorced, and in 1962 she married attorney William E. Stewart. Overwhelmed with the sensation about his wife’s books, William Stewart and his friends founded a business based on the etiquette training. The outcome was etiquette classes for children, “White Gloves” for girls and “Blue Blazers” for boys.
Source: USA Today
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