A Kingdom of Rags

Speak to me, Santee and Los Angeles streets! Of a world of color flying by on a metal rack. Skeletons of dress patterns shivering on a shoulder. I am listening. For the sound of buttons jumping in a box, men groaning under bolts of cloth. I was the man, or a boy, flying by with color, shaking the buttons like the dice of my future, groaning with the men under worsted. And now more than half my life is gone, and Santee Street is silent. I put my ear to the wind.

*

Somehow, I was drafted to ride with my father in his pale blue T-bird to the factory downtown in the summers of 1959 to 1964, my 10th through 14th years. I don’t think it was an order. It just happened. It was as natural as the feel of good woolen. We were a schmate family, a brood familiar with rags. A century ago, my father’s Syrian father was the original linen merchant in Cleveland. My eye for beauty, both natural and false, must owe something to the display window, on Colorado Boulevard, of Awad of Pasadena, my maternal grandfather’s Corday handbag place. It was as automatic for us children to work in a garment factory as it is today for kids to jigger the joystick of a computer game.

In 1951, my father, with “outside” man Earl Racine, began his first dress firm, LeGreg of California, a stylish conjoining of the names of his two children, Leslie and Greg. Dad’s first “make” was an orange sleeveless dickey. And we weren’t alone. There were dozens of women’s garment factories in the lofts and along the streets. They were named as we were named, for wives and children: Jan Sue, Nancy B., Patty Woodard, Young Edwardian, Edith Flagg, Jody Tootique. And they all were selling the sun in a garment: Forget vacation. Slip this on.

LeGreg had some real hits: a striped tent dress that coyly hid baby-making of the ‘50s, sleeveless blouses and full bouffant skirts ($6 retail for a set!), something a Texas chain called Margo’s named, in ads, “a pleat treat.” A Maine boutique enlisted Women’s Wear Daily as an agent, asking the publisher to call LeGreg’s to order the “hot item,” a sailor-collared chemise.

But the rag trade was always precarious, and by 1963, the business had capsized. As my father once said, “I’m not in one business, I’m in five,” meaning that for each of the four seasons, plus “holiday,” a manufacturer had to restyle his dress line. In this garment pentathlon, if you slipped during one season--if, for example, one hot style was made poorly by the contractor, had a bad “fit,” or was undersold--the garments all flooded back and your kingdom was in a heap. You and yours were unstitched.

But rag people came back. That was the meaning of rags; you were used to reuse.

Dad named the new company “Mr. Aref,” as if afraid to entrust his luck to anyone but himself. He took no partners. It worked. The company was the first to style and make “the granny,” soon de rigueur for every protesting coed. It landed him in Time magazine. His designer, George Wilner, recently revealed the genesis of that number: “A small retailer from Glendale brought me something in calico he said his daughter’s friends had made, and that the kids liked it. We found some leftover calico print fabric, some ruffle, and in two hours I had it styled empire, with cuffs, like Empress Josephine, cut and stitched. Marty Bogash, our head of sales, took it to the Broadway, to Walt Dixon, the buyer, and we sold $10,000 of the granny in one day. It took off like a rocket!”

By the end of the ‘60s, Mr. Aref was a $1-million operation with 70 employees. The company bought out another venerable firm, Ro-Nel, and started two other labels, By George! and Madison 7.

*

Ah, the first sacrament of the day: Howard’s coffee stand, a little nook at the entrance to the Cooper Building at 9th and Los Angeles streets.

“Cream uhn shoogar, Aref?”

“Yes, Howard. As always.”

“As always. Donut?”

“Donut, as always.”

“As always, donut.”

I liked the way Howard’s baritone pronounced “shoogaar,” as if he were giving the manufacturer his last sweetness of the day.

Then Dad and I strode down the gauntlet of showcases that lined the hallway entry to the Cooper Building. Dad would whistle at his, call the mannequin “Doll,” and I would thrill at how prominent was our tent-dressed temptress.

Once the “goods” (anything made was good) were clipped of threads, I took them to shipping. I tried to first fill the orders of my Aunt Vinny (Circle Fashions on Pico Boulevard) and Aunt Jeannette (Jeanie’s Casuals on Reseda Boulevard). The family was in rags from start to finish: father creating the styles, grandfather stitching the cloth and my aunts vending it.

Time for lunch. Speak to me, Sam’s, of franks grilled, sliced, basted with mustard! Sam’s, on 9th, just around the corner from Manufacturer’s Bank, was always crammed. There was something about my father in these few moments of wild ease, jawing easily with the waitress, the vein along his temple relaxing for the first (and last) time in the day, his fork cutting the franks without bun as cleanly as he would cut cloth, that made me know I would never know anyone like him. The sheer life of him! The irreplaceable style!

After lunch, I might pick up a pattern from the pattern maker on Spring Street, inhaling the acrid ink and dyes. I might wheeze a bit and sense a writing life in ink. Everything on the streets was in motion: dresses, racks, bolts, models’ posteriors, the thighs of shippers. More than once I picked up a skeletal original pattern thrown off the rack by a pothole onto a crosswalk, a casualty of beauty.

After I had bagged or boxed our shipments for the day, I’d peer in on my father. I might see Cy Harris, the piece goods salesman, running the latest swatches through Aref’s fingers. My father had the hands of a pianist. He knew cloth. He lived by feel. Same here.

At Christmas parties, Dad liked to dance between the racks with Janine, head of his Cal Mart showroom, a stunning, tall brunette with blue eyes. He also liked to twirl the sample-makers’ mannequin, riddled with pins. Or churn it with George Wilner himself!

“We enthused each other,” Wilner, a former professional dancer, remembered. “A big order made an explosion of joy. And it spread through the whole factory.”

If we ran out of A & B bags, or a certain box size, I was sent to the 11th floor of the Cooper Building, where Charm of Hollywood, the well-established rag business of my uncles Albert and Victor Orfalea, had the whole floor. Al and Vic and Aref were good to each other, rose together and sank together. Uncle Al’s son would go on to start, with savings of his father from the ailing rag trade, Kinko’s Copies.

By 1977, Mr. Aref and associated labels had come undone. It was part of a cloth cataclysm that left few garment houses downtown intact. How did a world die in so short a time? There are so many reasons, it is like trying to finger one termite for a collapsed foundation. Most relevant perhaps: Few children, and almost none of the grandchildren, of the rag owners grasped the baton of the life of a sweatshop. My father was plain worn out, and let me know that I was meant for better.

Was I? Is it? This writer’s life? And did I retreat to a large bureaucracy out of fear of the roller-coaster fate of rags?

None of us kept the cloth faith. My cousin did pretty well starting Kinko’s. Huge profits and employment created, yes, but--something you can wear? Can feel? My Uncle Gary, youngest son of my contractor grandfather, went to work for Unocal. There’s something made there, to be sure, but it’s no more yours than it is the creation of hundreds of thousands of other stockholders. And how do you get your hands on a tank of gas?

And me? Could I hold this article over my head and call it a rain cap?

Yet, in the dark hours after making nothing but meetings all day, I stitch a book. It is made, it has weight. And it makes no money. Just like all the beauty my father fabricated, finally. Do I want the reader to pull a book on like a good sweater? Yes! I want it to wear well. To comfort. To awaken. Even, like a good burlap, to itch.

*

Loft by loft, floor by floor, I ascend the Cooper Building. Only one manufacturer is left in the cavernous place of ghosts and jobbers. When I tell her who I am, her breath goes out. She remembers immediately my father’s violent death a few years after he closed Mr. Aref.

Back East, my wife won’t take the brass buttoned, turquoise denim pants suit the last manufacturer gave me. It has an elastic waist, she says; it’s for seniors. I put it up for auction at our church’s fund-raiser in the spring. Nobody bids.

I seem to have lost that outfit, as I did my father, without saying how beautiful everything he made was. Maybe the errant pants suit is dancing in a closet with my father’s granny dress. Maybe some widowed grandmother pulled it out of a pile, put it on, and is now prowling the corridors of Congress.

It was a kingdom, not Congress. A kingdom of color, of feel, of voice, of tags. It was a kingdom of rags.