Granddaughter of real life ‘Hello Girl’ helps Syracuse Stage bring WWI uniforms to life

Syracuse Stage Costume Shop Manager Gretchen Darrow-Crotty has a favorite line she likes to repeat while working on period pieces: “We aren’t doing the BBC production.”

She’s not throwing shade at the British Broadcasting Company’s famed historical dramas (and their painstaking attention to detail) as much as she’s acknowledging the limitations of live theatre.

“There is a very fine line between accurately recreating something historical and creating something that is user friendly to actors on stage,” Darrow-Crotty said.

That consideration — constructing costumes that look period appropriate yet allow actors to fully express themselves physically — was on Darrow-Crotty’s mind as she and her team began work on “The Hello Girls,” the WWI-era musical now playing at Syracuse Stage. The show tells of America’s first female soldiers who ran switchboard operations overseas, and features a cast of 14 actors who are, for the majority of the show, dressed in full military uniforms.

Darrow-Crotty was able to rent the men’s costumes from a company in California, but while Doughboy recreations are plentiful, the women’s uniforms provided a unique challenge: The true story of the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit is one that has been infrequently told, meaning that Darrow-Crotty, alongside costume designer Jen Caprio, was tasked with building the Hello Girls’ signature blue uniforms from the ground up.

Fortunately, the team had access to an actual Hello Girl uniform by way of Carolyn Timbie, granddaughter of Grace Banker, the show’s lead character who heads up the first unit of women requested by Gen. John J. Pershing. Banker was working at AT&T as a switchboard instructor in New York City when she answered an ad to join the U.S. Army Signal Corp, sailing for France in March of 1918. She died in 1960, almost two decades before the Hello Girls were officially recognized as veterans. In 2024, with help from Timbie fighting on her grandmother’s behalf, the Hello Girls were awarded a Congressional gold medal.

The Hello Girls Grace Banker, second from right, and her fellow Hello Girls from the Army’s Signal Corps. (Photo Courtesy of Carolyn Timbie/Photo Courtesy of Carolyn Timbie)

Timbie had worked with the musical’s creators—composer, lyricist and co-bookwriter Peter Mills and co-bookwriter Cara Reichel, who also directed the Syracuse Stage production—when they first mounted the show in 2018, and was eager to lend her unique insight again.

“There’s so much pride,” Darrow-Crotty said. “She’s really, really proud of her grandmother.”

Describing her grandmother’s collection of World War I items to New Hampshire’s Eagle-Tribune in 2021, Timbie recalled stumbling upon “an amazing treasure trove, including Banker’s armistice uniform given to her after the Allied victory.

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