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July 21, 2003
New Baseball Book
Sean Kirst, a columnist with the Post-Standard in Syracuse, NY, has written a book of baseball essays entitled, The Ashes of Lou Gehrig. He sent me a sample essay on patch jackets, which I just loved. When it's published, I'm looking forward to reading the whole thing. Here's an excerpt: It does not start as a quest. It starts out as a quick drive to the mall, where you figure you will find it in the first children's store. Time after time, the clerks hear your question and walk straight to a rack. Then they stand there, hands on hips, puzzled and surprised. "We just had them," each clerk says. "I was sure we did." So were you. That is the problem. From the malls, you roam to the thrift stores. You struggle to believe no one sells what you want. This is something every kid used to have! Frustrated, you start making phone calls to collectors and historians. In the end you find Bill Perskin, the one guy with the answer. You want a patch jacket. You want it for your kids, who are now in school. You grew up in the '50s or '60s. Your big brother had the jacket. When he outgrew the thing, it came down to you. It was made of soft blue cotton, cotton that smelled good when baked by the hot sun. It was covered by little round patches, patches for all the major-league baseball teams. Most of your friends had those jackets. It was not a fashion statement, made of gleaming silk. No one hollered at you if you spilled jelly on it. It was the jacket you wore home from school, the jacket your mom threw in the machine when it got dirty, the jacket you loved until your arms just grew too long. You remember that jacket. You remember the way you could fold it into a ball, like a pillow. You could sprawl on the ground and stare up at the sky on a beautiful June day, your head buried in the soft give of the jacket. You remember sitting on your porch steps, studying the logos. A Cub or a Tiger or that Yankee hat and bat, logos that led you to a favorite lifetime team. Your own kids walk to school now, and you want them to understand. You want the patch jacket. You want it so bad for them you drive all the way to Cooperstown, where you go through every specialty shop in the village, the shops where they treat baseball like some fine imported wine. They show you sleek and expensive children's jackets, made in the style of whatever team you want. They don't understand. You want the patch jacket. Nobody has it. You can't even find a snapshot to show the clerks, because your mother never took your picture in the jacket. You never wore it on the kind of days when she got out the camera. It was a walk-home-from-school jacket, a play-in-the-yard jacket, a throw-it-on-the-floor jacket. It bothers you enough that you start making calls. You telephone the corporate headquarters of Sears. The public relations people dig into the archives. One day - Eureka! - they find evidence. It is a catalog ad from 1963, the year Kennedy was shot, the year Sandy Koufax and his Dodgers blanked the Yankees in four straight. The jacket sold for $4.87. Exactly. "Perfect for young baseball fans," reads the catalog. "Each jacket has 10 emblems of the American League and National League teams. Cotton poplin body is lined with cotton flannel. Two slash pockets. Knit collar, cuffs and waistband." You read that, and it's like you slid your arms into the jacket, like school has just ended and you can't wait to zip it up. The jacket came in red for the AL, blue for the NL. Sears sends the catalog page by facsimile. The guy waiting behind you at the fax machine happens to get a look. "Hey!" he says. "I had that jacket!" You keep making calls. You reach Starter, maker of chic sports jackets in the '90s. They never heard of any patch jacket. You call Major League Baseball, where you get transferred and put on hold too many times to count. Finally, a decent guy in licensing spends some time with you. He digs out a folder, and that is where he finds it. Genuine Sportswear made the patch jackets. It is a Brooklyn company. It still is listed in the directory. When you call, the phone is answered by this man named Bill Perskin. His father, he tells you, invented the patch jacket. Hy Perskin was a sales rep with many clothing firms after World War II. In 1954, the year the New York Giants won the World Series, young Bill asked his father for a "real Giants jacket." Hy went looking and could not find one for kids. Baseball at the time ruled the sporting world. Hy started thinking about this untapped market. He wanted to put little baseball patches on cheap cotton jackets, jackets a working family could afford. He pitched the concept to Genuine Sportswear. The jackets took off. "We used to sell 12 of them to a store for $22," says Bill Perskin, who went into his dad's business. "We'd sell 400,000 or 500,000 of them a year." The jackets sold from the 1950s into the late '70s. They became a springtime ritual amid the Baby Boom. "Times changed," Perskin says. Kids wanted designer clothes, and costs were going up. At the beginning, his company paid nothing for licensing rights. Pretty soon, the major leagues wanted big fees. Today, he would pay at least a buck for every patch on every jacket. By 1980, the patch jacket was gone. It is a hard thing to hear. You wanted your kids to have their own patch jackets, just in case they needed pillows to watch clouds in the sky. And you wanted the jackets for some deeper reason, for all those times when your kids have a rough or rocky day. Because the jacket is warm and giving, and today that's hard to find. "Sometimes," Perskin tells you, "simple things are the best." He wishes it made sense for him to bring the jackets back. But it costs a buck a patch, and they don't make them anymore. |
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