Living together at 206-1/2 West Main Street, Denison, Texas, in April 1910, was Agnes [Orviss] Riddle, 27, a masseuse in a beauty parlor, and her eight-year-old daughter Gladys Riddle. The U.S. Census classed both as "mulatto."

Part Native American, Gladys Riddle (1902–1971) was born on a reservation in Lehigh, Coal County, Oklahoma. Gladys became an expert seamstress at a young age. She left Denison sometime before 1920 to attend Fisk University in Nashville.

Between 1910 and 1920 many people moved from Denison to Southern California.  After graduation from Fisk, Gladys Riddle joined her mother, Agnes, in Los Angeles, where Agnes was running a boarding house, predominantly for railroad workers.

Gladys became a noted costumier (dress designer) for MGM Studios in Hollywood during the 1920s. Among her clients were Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, Norma Shearer, Lord Mountbatten, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Crawford. Crawford later retained Gladys as her exclusive dressmaker, and the two of them remained friends for years. 

Gladys Riddle 1902 - 1971

Lionel Hampton 1903 - 2002

Gladys met the famous musician Lionel Hampton in 1932 in California; she was already a successful businesswoman, although she sometimes referred to herself a "just a little dressmaker."  She married Lionel in 1936 at Yuma, Arizona, while the two were traveling to New York, where he was to join the Benny Goodman Trio. Gladys gave up her own career and later moved with Hampton to New York. She became his business manager and sometime booking agent.

Gladys's aptitude for business was no less remarkable than her talent for dressmaking. In the early 1940s, Malcolm X's boss in Harlem was a numbers runner. In a 1964 interview he said, "My boss's wife and Gladys Hampton were the only two women I ever met in Harlem whose business ability I really respected."

Gladys died in 1971 at the age of 69; Lionel died in 2002 at the age of 94.

It is interesting to imagine the child Gladys in 1910 exploring the steep wooden stairway next door to her and Agnes's rooms on Main Street and perhaps watching photographer George W. Moore, who lived and worked nearby at 210-1/2 West Main Street, arrange people and backdrops for portraits. What influence might such an early experience with photography have had on her imagination and her future life in Hollywood?

Oakland Tribune 18 September 1972  "According to Mlle. Spanier, Lionel Hampton, the jazz musician, has given his wife enough mink to outfit an Antarctic expedition. Gladys Hampton once brought to Paris five long mink coats, three mink stoles, and four jackets in every possible color of mink. Also a sable jacket, a sable coat, a chinchilla jacket. The morning after she arrived, Mrs. Hampton sailed out of her hotel to inspect more mink at Revillon. Members of the Animals Protective Association would like a few words with Gladys Hampton."