'They were IKEA before IKEA'

Jan. 4—Seventy-five years ago, Rochester native Jody Kingrey was at the forefront of a revolution in interior design in Middle America.

Kingrey, who was known as Joanne at Rochester High School in the 1930s, was co-founder of Baldwin Kingrey, a highly influential home furnishing store in downtown Chicago in the '40s and '50s. The store specialized in imported Nordic design and decor. It was, in some ways, a precursor of IKEA before that Swedish retail giant arrived on these shores.

"That's exactly it," says Kingrey's son, John Albergo. "Baldwin Kingrey started the whole Scandinavian design craze in this country. They were IKEA before IKEA."

According to the Chicago Tribune, Baldwin Kingrey was "one of the first stores in America to sell furniture and objects designed by architects. Baldwin Kingrey championed the notion that good design could be had at prices that anyone, particularly returning veterans and their new brides, could afford."

Kingrey herself fit that description of the typical customer. She had served with the American Red Cross in Hawaii during World War II, and was married to a Navy veteran. Now, the woman who had once worked in the interior design department of the C.F. Massey Company in Rochester was offering something fresh and exciting to shoppers in America's second-largest city.

The store was founded by Kingrey, her friend Kitty Baldwin Weese, and Kitty's husband, architect Harry Weese.

Kingrey had, according to her son Patrick Albergo Jr., "bounced around a bit" after the war, working first in Minneapolis and then Chicago. But at a party in Chicago, she met the Weeses, who invited her to join them in establishing a new kind of interior design firm.

Kingrey was the only member of the trio with retail experience. Harry Weese, however, had an important contact: He was acquainted with Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, and was able to secure the exclusive rights to sell Aalto's furniture designs in the Midwest.

With that ace in hand, the three partners borrowed money from their parents—$3,000 each—and opened the Baldwin Kingrey store on Chicago's Michigan Avenue in 1947. Kingrey was just 29 years old. They immediately placed orders for imported furniture, much of which arrived in pieces and had to be assembled in the store.

Before long, the store was stocking furnishings, objects, and artwork from some of Europe's major design houses, as well as from Chicago's Institute of Design. The store also hosted gallery exhibitions. It became a hangout for Chicago's design-conscious cognoscenti.

"It was like a salon," says John Albergo. "People would stop by with brown-bag lunches and sit in the store and talk about design."

From the start, the store was a financial success. Customers arrived to view and purchase pieces not previously available to local shoppers, at prices that were considered to be reasonable. "It was available to everybody," Kitty Weese later said. "That was a part of our real cause."

"The gallery served as an informal meeting place for students and faculty from the Institute of Design (ID), Chicago architects, and interior designers," wrote Marcia Weese, the daughter of Kitty and Harry. "The inventory included furniture by leading modernist designers such as Alvar Aalto, Bruno Mathsson, Charles Eames, and Eero Saarinen [who would later design the St. Louis Gateway Arch and, in 1956, Rochester's 'Big Blue' IBM facility]."

Furniture from Baldwin Kingrey decorated everything from celebrity living rooms to modernist landmarks like the Edith Farnsworth House, the "1,500-square-foot structure that is widely recognized as an exemplar of International Style of architecture."

For Kingrey, who had reportedly been disappointed with her previous job at another Chicago design store, the success of Baldwin Kingrey was a long time in the making.

Mary Joanne "Jody" Kingrey was born July 26, 1918 in Rochester, the first child of Ray and Frances Kingrey. Her father owned a popular clothing store, Kingrey's Men's Wear, and was a noted Rochester civic leader. During World War II, Ray served as head of the city's salvage committee during a city-wide scrap metal drive.

The Kingreys, who lived at 221 Seventh Ave. SW, went on to have four more children, all boys—Jack, William, Connall, and Kevin. The children were well known in Rochester- -they served as everything from captain of the Lourdes High School basketball team to the president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce and worked at Kingrey's Men's Wear.

Joanne attended St. John's grade school, and then Rochester High School, where she was a member of the National Honor Society and one of the school's top swimmers and divers. She graduated in 1936, and went on to the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul.

By the time Joanne graduated from college, World War II was on the horizon, and it would not be long before the war touched the Kingrey family in the most tragic way.

On Dec. 17, 1942, 2nd Lt. John "Jack" Kingrey, Joanne's brother, was killed in the crash of a military plane near Everett, Wash. He was 22 years old. Kingrey, reported to be the first person from Rochester to die in World War II, was one of the nation's first P-38 pilots.

Three months later, on March 4, 1943, the following notice appeared in the military news column of the Post-Bulletin:

"Miss Joanne Kingrey left last night for Chicago where she will enter six weeks training in an army school for aviation traffic control."

Kingrey completed the course, and according to a later report in the Post-Bulletin, she worked as an air traffic controller at airports in Detroit and Columbus, Ohio.

Then, on May 1, 1944, Kingrey was appointed as an American Red Cross officer in Hawaii.

She was assigned to Fort Shafter, on the island of Oahu, where she managed the enlisted men's center. A photo of Kingrey on the job there, distributed to the media by the military, refers to her by her nickname of "Jody."

"She built a recreation center at Fort Shafter," says John Albergo. "She was given a quonset hut but no furniture."

So Kingrey salvaged tables and chairs from other bases, and before long was hosting shows and dances.

For one dance, she booked a young musician in the Navy, Lt. Patrick Albergo of Chicago, to play in a combo. Albergo and Kingrey dated a few times, but eventually lost touch when he was transferred to Okinawa.

Fast forward to 1951 and a scene fit for a romantic comedy: Albergo, back home in Chicago, was walking down the street and noticed the large sign on the Baldwin Kingrey store. "He saw the name and wondered if that was her," John Albergo says. "He went in and there she was."

The Kingrey-Albergo engagement was announced at a cocktail party at the Rochester Golf & Country Club. The marriage took place on Oct. 25, 1952, at St. Clement Catholic Church in Chicago.

Through the mid-1950s, the Baldwin Kingrey store was hugely successful. But the co-owners were soon raising young children, and in 1957 they decided to sell the business. The store was making too many demands on the time they wanted to devote to parenting.

Jody had three children—Lisa, Patrick Jr., and John—in the 1950s.

"She was a one-woman shop, but she still made sure we were taken care of," her youngest son John would tell the Chicago Tribune. "She quietly went about and did her work. Later on, she would talk about these big jobs she had gotten, but she would never brag about it."

"Jody was very efficient and had a wonderful sense of humor that carried through everything we did," Kitty Weese later remembered. "We never had an argument."

After selling the store, Kingrey launched her own design firm, Jody Kingrey Inc., which she operated for 45 years. She and Albergo divorced in 1966.

Through her design company, Kingrey had several prominent clients in Chicago. "You could look at the Chicago skyline and count the buildings where she did work," says son John.

"She did it while raising three kids," says Lisa Albergo, Kingrey's daughter. And Kingrey, always independent, did it largely on her own. "I worked for her for a time," Lisa says. "I helped her with bookkeeping, paying vendor bills. Oftentimes, she'd still be in her bathrobe talking to customers on the phone."

Word-of-mouth helped Kingrey gain more customers. "There were a lot of spinoffs," says Patrick Albergo Jr. Her expertise extended beyond furniture to include fabrics, wallpaper and color schemes. "She really knew her textiles," he says.

She also loved tending to her garden, listening to classical music and attending theater and symphony performances, according to a Chicago Tribune story.

By the early 2000s, Kingrey was ill with cancer.

Right around that time, Kingrey and Baldwin were interviewed for a soon-to-be-published book focusing on the historical importance of the Baldwin Kingrey store.

"They had a great time sitting around and chatting," recalls Patrick.

Written by John Brunetti and Tom Fredrickson, "Baldwin Kingrey: Midcentury Modern Design in Chicago 1947-1957" was published in 2004.

"Chicago's Baldwin Kingrey department store offered modern design at a reasonable price, an unstoppable formula for sales as well as the beginning of trend-setting salon for the titans of mid-century modern," reads the book's dust jacket. "With wares by Aalto, Bertoia and Eames, the store quickly acquired status as a laboratory for talent."

By that time, with the soon-to-be published book and a related exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, the legacy of Baldwin Kingrey was firmly established. "She was well aware of it" before her death, John Albergo says.

Jody Kingrey died at age 84 in 2003. She is buried in a family plot in Rochester's Calvary Cemetery.

Baldwin and Kingrey would probably be gratified to know that their instincts about design have been validated by the current popularity of mid-century modern styling in furnishings and homes.

Meanwhile, IKEA opened its first store in the Midwest in 1998 in suburban Chicago—50 years after Baldwin Kingrey pioneered the idea of Scandinavian design for American living.