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(Continued) fabrics. They began hiring her for historical restoration projects and to design exhibits, and she always delivered the goods. This escalated even further when she received a call from the White House. “They were completely redoing the inside, every last room.” She recalls. “The US Historical people and the First Lady wanted me to work on it. And what a lot of people don’t understand about historical restorations is that you can’t come in and change things because you don’t like the style, or the color, or the scale… and you can’t fancy things up. It must be exact, or as close to exact as possible.” So she set out to replicate all of the fabrics in every room, and after a lot of hard work and determination, the restoration was complete and Apfel was hailed. “I guess they liked what we did because other Presidents call us back.” She smirks. And indeed they did. From 1950 to 1992, Apfel went on to work on projects in the
White House for nine different
Presidents which included Harry S.
Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F.
Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard
Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald