Lillian Louise (Lidman) Greneker, 1895-1990

Lillian Louise (Lidman) Greneker, inventor, sculptor, and writer, was born on August 27, 1895, in Savannah, Georgia. Her parents, Louise (Anderson) and William Lidman, were Swedish immigrants. When LLG was seven her family moved to Chicago to join relatives. She attended school there and sang in the church choir. Upon her return from boarding school (Swedenborgian Theological University in Ohio), where she took piano lessons, LLG joined a theater stock company (ca. 1918). She danced, sang, and acted well enough to receive good reviews and to land a part with a touring company, which brought her to New York City in 1919. There she met Claude Pritchard Greneker, public relations director for theater owners Lee and Jacob J. Shubert; they were married in 1921. CPG did not want his wife to continue in the theater, so LLG devoted herself to supervising the renovation of their first house, in Mt. Kisco, N.Y.--a task she so enjoyed that she subsequently designed, renovated, and helped build several more houses--and to an active social life.

Sometime in the 1930s CPG consulted LLG about putting up mannequins in the lobby of one of the Shubert theaters. Mannequins were then made of plaster and were extremely heavy. LLG experimented with cellophane and papier maché. The latter material proved highly successful. She founded the Greneker Corporation to produce mannequins; it was soon selling them to leading department stores all over the world. Also in the 30s she invented FNG-R-TIP, thimbles that with various attachments can be used to paint, write, erase, manicure, crochet, and so on. During World War II, LLG invented the "Pullcord," a disposable gas tank for warplanes and submarines, and the mannequin factory near Mt. Kisco was converted to defense work for the U.S. Navy.

After the war LLG took up sculpture, creating plaster and bronze portraits of many famous people and copying antiquities in Vatican stone. In 1952 she opened a workshop and gallery in an old stable (the gift of Lee Shubert) on 7th Avenue in New York.

CPG died in 1949. LLG outlived him by 41 years. She continued to improve her FNG-R-TIP invention, and apparently devoted some of this time to writing. She died at the Actors' Fund nursing home, in Englewood, N.J., on Jan. 28, 1990.

From the guide to the Papers, 1890-1990, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)