Woolly Bully

When he was a teenager, Jeff Kumer spent winter vacations at the Pittsburgh Wool Co., plunging his bare right arm into icy water and dragging out clean lambskins to be stripped of wool, a process called “pulling.”

“It was so bitter cold, it felt like somebody was rolling your fingernails back,” remembered Kumer, now 53 and part-owner of the firm. “It’s a cold, wet, dirty, hard business.”

It’s also so difficult and unprofitable that its practitioners gave it up for fear they too would be fleeced.

Until late 1995, Pittsburgh Wool pulled every available fleece east of the Mississippi. But almost two years have passed since the company last operated as a pullery, where wool is chemically removed from lambskins. In the West, Southern Wool and Skin Co. in San Antonio, Texas, stopped pulling around the same time.

This tiny, tough industry has faded gently from the American scene, but Pittsburgh Wool holds out hope that it may return.

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Pulling doesn’t pay, said Patrick Wheeler, co-owner of Southern Wool. For one thing, wool prices are low. And lamb pelts with the wool attached fetch a good price. The commodity, called double-face, is used to make shearling, much of which is sold to the animal-skin trade in Turkey, which makes coats for the Russian market.

Southern Wool still exists as a tannery and pelt dealer, and Pittsburgh Wool Co. concentrates on lamb pelts.

Slaughterhouses and butchers sell the pelts to Pittsburgh Wool, which dries them on vast, salted floors, bales them and sells them to tanneries overseas.

But even the fashion market can swing abruptly. “It might be an escalator up, but it might be an elevator down,” Kumer said.

Now, for instance, Kumer says his double-face pelts aren’t fetching good prices because pelts from the East are smaller than pelts from the West. He declined to talk prices.

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Even while worldwide demand for lamb pelts goes up and down, the American supply has been falling steadily. In 1942, the sheep and lamb population peaked at 56 million, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In January, it was only 8 million.

The reason for the decline is that many Americans continue to lose their taste for lamb. Wheeler believes that’s because lamb is expensive and U.S. soldiers were served too much greasy mutton during World War II and the Korean War.

Kumer has another explanation: “It’s hard to get young men to stay up in their mountains with their sheep,” he said.

Kumer’s father, Roy, 88, who co-owns the company with his son, still keeps the account books on paper, shunning computers and calculators, and adds the columns in his head.

Inside Pittsburgh Wool’s big, old building on the Allegheny River, the smell of lamb pervades, and the third and fourth floors are covered with salt turned tan from lamb blood. Lambskins--gray, black, brown and white, all pale from salt--lie scattered in one layer on the 25,000-square-foot floors.

Below, on the second floor, the tools for pulling are still in place.

Here, a puller takes a hide already soaked in ice water and dons rubber gloves, sleeves and apron for protection against the chemical that loosened the wool. Then, he drapes skins on slanted tables and scrapes off handfuls of wool. He sorts the handfuls of wool according to quality, and the wool is graded, dried in a railcar-size dryer and baled in 1,000-pound bales.

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The finest wool comes from the middle of the lamb’s back, a fact that pulling can exploit, Roy Kumer said.

“In fleece wool, the whole fleece is shorn off and it’s wrapped up in a ball, and you have everything in there. But when you have pulled wool, the mills could buy what they wanted. If they wanted fine wool, well, they could have it,” the senior Kumer said.

Pulling is still done overseas; Mazamet, France, is known for it.

The best years for Pittsburgh Wool were the late ‘60s, when it pulled more than 400,000 pelts a year. In 1995, it pulled only 20,000. But Jeff Kumer holds out hope that demand -- and prices -- for pulled wool will rise.