LIFE IS TAILOR MADE FOR LONGTIME SEAMSTRESS.

Byline: Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard

The wedding season just winding down has been a whopper - "I've been up to my armpits in crocodiles for weeks," Ruth Dunlap says - but it's nothing the longtime professional seamstressandtailor can't handle.

Longtime is right, because Dunlap, owner of Ruth E Couture, turns 90 years old on Aug.3 (but to most eyes probably doesn't look a day over 70) and still puts in many a 12-hour day at her lifelong profession.

All her life is virtually true, too, because Dunlap, born Ruth Ellen Owsley in Blue Springs, Mo., sewed her first dress to wear to her first day of school in first grade.

"It was a `butterfly dress,' a kimono-type, white with a little red print," Dunlap says. "It had a low neck bound in white bias tape - people used to do that back then - and I had to make two belt loops, because my mother insisted it should have some `fit.' I made a white organdy sash, and I'll never forget how I felt that morning when my mother tied the sash and fanned out the loops of the bow. I felt like a butterfly - it was a great experience."

The little girl already had found the passion - and the motif - that have shaped and enrichedher life. She began sewing for hire at the age of 9, when she de constructed a mother's winter coat and remade it into a coat for the woman's young daughter.

"From there, it just went boom, boom, boom, and it's never stopped," she says.

The butterflies also have endured. Each of the fitting rooms in her workshop in the Eugene Professional Building at 132 E. Broadway has a large butterfly on the wall, and the fabric for the dress she's planning to make for her 90th birthday party is a sheer, bright pink sprinkled with sparkling butterfly appliqus.

No one else will have one like it, and that's one of the ideas that motivated Dunlap from the beginning.

"I didn't want clothes like everyone else has - I can't stand the idea of multiples," she says. "I made most of the clothes I wore to school as a child. When I was in the fourth grade, I made my first dress pattern. Everyone wanted to know about that dress."

Then disaster struck. A classmate's mother went to Dunlap's mother and said her daughter, Marguerite, just loved Ruth's dress and wondered if there was a pattern.

"My mother went and found my pattern and gave it to her, and she made a dress," Dunlap says. "I know it's snobbish - I had loved that dress - but I hardly ever wanted to wear it again."

She did create many more patterns though, mostly using newspaper - "the Kansas City Star, as a matter of fact" - as she honed her design and sewing skills.

Dunlap graduated from high school at 14 and desperately wanted to attend a school in fashion design.

"There weren't many schools for fashion like there are now, and being 14 and female, I wasn't welcome on most university campuses - I felt quite defeated," she recalls. "But we kept on looking, and through a magazine we learned there had been a Parisian woman from Winnipeg (Manitoba) who went to Minnesota and established a fashion academy, the Ppin Academy of Fashion."

Her father sold his trucking business, moved to Minnesota and became a wheat grower.

By then, Dunlap had done an apprenticeship with a high-end clothier, where she eagerly soaked up the skills of an English dressmaker, a Swedish tailor and a German furrier.

"The Swedish tailor was really something else," she says with a twinkle. "There wasn't a widow in town who wouldn't have given anything to (land) him, but he was wily."

When she got to the academy, she was so well prepared that she challenged many classes and finished the four-year curriculum in 2' years, coming out with credentials as a designer, dressmaker, certified men's tailor and furrier. Along the way, she also earned a degree in interior design.

"I also was qualified as a clothing engineer - I could have gone anywhere in the world and set up a clothing factory," Dunlap says.

Not that she likes that idea as it has evolved through the decades. "I would like to go out and bring all that stuff back to this country," she says. "It's a disgrace that we have sent all those jobs overseas. Everybody wants cheap, cheap, cheap, and that's the main reason all of our clothing is made in other places.

She had become engaged just before starting the academy, with the understanding that she would finish her education before marrying. Moving to Los Angeles with her first husband, an engineer with Douglas Aircraft, Dunlap found work for her skills in Hollywood at Paramount Studios.

"I just happened to be lucky - my neighbor in Santa Monica was Dorothy Lamour's hairdresser, and I designed her sarongs for her `road movies' with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope," she says. "It was just another chapter in my life, but it was probably the most fantastic thing I've done."

After World War II, the young couple decided Los Angeles "was not the place to raise children." They moved to Oregon, where the younger of their two sons was born. Two years later, her husband died of pneumonia.

In 1957, she married R. Louis Dunlap, "a wonderful guy with no bad habits," she says affectionately. The couple celebrated their 51st anniversary in May.

At one point in her career, she had four shops, including one in the early Fifth Street Public Market and another across from the Bon March at Broadway and Charnelton streets. "I did tailoring for Sears, the Bon and all the men's stores," she says.

Dunlap says the secret to her success is "anatomy and passion for quality," while the key to her longevity is "passion and nutrition."

"The work I do is totally based on anatomy - it's the first class you take at a fashion academy," she says. "I've had people come in for a fitting, and I could tell immediately just by touch that they'd broken a collarbone. You really have to know about the body and movement to shape clothing that's going to fit right when it's worn."

As far as nutrition goes, "I eat very little beef," Dunlap says, although very rarely she treats herself to a Reuben sandwich. "I'm fussy about the fats, and I eat lots of fruit and vegetables. I drink lots of water - and lots of coffee - and I watch the sugars."

Ironically, she no longer makes many of her own clothes.

"I have to buy them; I just don't have time unless it's something really special," Dunlap says. "I spend my time doing clothes for other people."

Ruth Dunlap

Age: Turns 90 on Aug. 3. "I appreciate my age; I consider it an accomplishment."

Claim to Fame: Expert professional seamstress, certified men's tailor and trained fashion designer; still works five long days a week "because it makes me happy."

Favorite color: Red

Pet peeve: Sloppy dressing - "I hate it, but I've learned to accept it."

Little secret: "I sit in church and (mentally) alter everybody's clothes."

Goal: Live to be 100. "I'd better look both ways when I cross the street."