Before Teflon : Antioch Collector’s Cloak Offers Thin Thread of Presidential Lore

It is the question everyone is asking these days: What did the President wear, and when did he wear it?

And Greg Wooldridge has the answer hanging right in his closet: Ronald Reagan’s very own black wool and silk two-button dinner jacket, from June of 1965.

Wooldridge was a boy of 4 on June 21, 1965, when the custom-tailored jacket for Reagan--by then a retired movie actor but not yet governor of California--was cut by Albert Mariani’s exclusive shop in Beverly Hills, for a price of at least $300.

Twenty years later, Wooldridge, now a sports editor in Antioch, Calif., east of San Francisco, picked up the same bespoke jacket--with its inside breast-pocket label reading “Mr. Ronald Reagan, 6-21-65, No. 7669”--in an Antioch thrift shop, for a much-depreciated $4.70.

For months, he said, it was a great conversational gambit: “Hey, I’ve got this jacket that belonged to Ronald Reagan.”

But now, with the holidays coming on, and “my Visa at the limit, and I don’t have any Christmas money,” Wooldridge is advertising to find the man--or woman--who wants to fill Ronald Reagan’s shoulders, and buy a piece of Americana, size 42-long.

So far, all he’s gotten are the $60 bill for the classified ad he ran in a San Francisco newspaper, one halfhearted offer of $200, and telephone calls from reporters.

Sort of Attached

“It’s kind of like a pet to me. It’s not free to a good home or anything, but I’d like to know the reasons why somebody wanted it,” he said.

It’s not as though the tuxedo jacket had belonged to Humphrey Bogart-- that he would never part with. But “I’m kind of attached to it, in a way. I do feel kind of bad about the timing of this--it looks like I’m being a robber baron or something.”

Assistant White House press secretary Mark Weinberg said Wednesday that there are no hard feelings. “The President believes in free enterprise.” Moreover, Reagan “has been giving clothes away for as far back as he can remember” to charitable organizations.

But for Wooldridge, the puzzle is still unsolved: “How could the President’s jacket end up in a thrift store in Antioch, California?”

His usual finds on thrift-store outings are additions to his collection of 300 vintage silk ties and 500 hardback books.

Signs of Quality

On this occasion, he was running a practiced finger along the rows of cast-off jackets when this one emerged out of the polyester morass. “You could tell right away it was pretty finely made,” with “gorgeous satin lining” and in “really nice shape.” One inner breast pocket--the left--was still stitched shut, unused. “It probably should have been higher (priced)--it’s at least a $7 jacket.”

But even for $4.70, it was too big--”or maybe it feels big just because of whose it was,” said Wooldridge later. He was about to put it back on the rack when he checked the right inside wallet pocket and saw the label, and the owner’s name, and promptly handed over a $5 bill.

“I had it dry cleaned--I thought it was the least I could do.”

He also investigated its provenance, calling clothier Albert Mariani’s son, Frank, “a pretty ritzy guy,” who confirmed the jacket was indeed Reagan’s. The Mariani shop still makes the President’s clothes.

Good for a Lifetime

“I looked it up and it’s the right number and date and everything,” said Mariani, whose family has owned the business for more than 60 years and has stylishly suited up celebrities ranging from actors Reagan and Bogart to mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen.

Mariani was not surprised that the jacket was still around--merely at where it had been found. “They last a lifetime, these clothes we make.

“We usually advise our customers to take the names out of them, and if they don’t, we’re more than happy to do it for them,” he said. “You never know where a thing like that is going to turn up.”

Like in Antioch.

Now, Wooldridge has decided to sell it--with luck, to a Republican. “Being conservative, they have more money.”

The $200 offer, telephoned to him Wednesday, was “not quite what I wanted. . . . You can go down to Saks and buy a jacket for $200,” and a coat like this, he said Mariani assured him, would cost at least $1,000 nowadays.

“Only in America could this happen,” marveled Wooldridge, in a sentiment Reagan would echo. “Can you imagine finding Gorbachev’s jacket in a thrift store?”