Santaland secrets

My sister Dianne was photographed with Santa at Miller & Rhoads in 1950. She, like all of the kids, was surprised that Santa knew her name.

I ran into the Snow Queen yesterday.

I was at the Library of Virginia for a tour of an exhibition with my friend Barbara. When the tour ended we dropped by the gift shop. There, in her attractive white gown, was the Snow Queen, autographing copies of her book "Christmas at Miller & Rhoads: Memoirs of a Snow Queen."

Last year, Donna Deekens wrote about her years working with Santa from 1971 until the store closed in 1990.

Business was slow in the bookstore, so Barbara and I introduced ourselves. Donna reminded me that we had met before, in the early 1970s, when I was working on a Christmas story for WTVR TV News. I told her that my family's connection with Miller & Rhoads went way back. My sister and I visited Santa at Miller & Rhoads in the late 1940s and early 50s. My mom worked at Miller & Rhoads beginning in about 1955. I worked at the downtown store for a year when I was in college, and my niece Terry later worked at the Willow Lawn branch.

Donna is too young to have been the Snow Queen when I was a kid. She was still in college when she heard about the opening for a new Snow Queen at Miller & Rhoads. She told me one fascinating tidbit I had never known. The Miller & Rhoads Santa on whose knee my sister Dianne and I had sat, was William C. Strother, a former Hollywood stuntman who had retired to Petersburg and answered a Miller & Rhoads help-wanted ad in 1942, the year I was born.

Strother used his Hollywood background to make the Miller & Rhoads Santa Claus into a legend. Max Factor designed his makeup, which took about two hours to apply. Strother turned the store's seventh-floor Santaland into a holiday fantasy. He came up with an act in which he arrived in Santaland by appearing out of a chimney.

The Snow Queen was an integral part of the Santa magic. Santa listened through an earpiece as she greeted each child in line using a concealed microphone. When the children got to Santa's lap, he already knew their names. Strother became so famous as Santa that he was featured in an article in the Saturday Evening Post.

Donna, who was from Portsmouth, told me she had come to Richmond as a child to visit the Miller & Rhoads Santa in 1956 when she was 5. It was to be Strother's last season on Santa's throne at Miller & Rhoads.

Donna urged Barbara and me to read her book, and we told her we would. A few more people came into the gift shop, and Barbara and I said our goodbyes. We walked out into the blustery cold on a sunny December morning on Broad Street. It felt even more like Christmas.