New Orleans Installment Four: Higgins and Haspel

Here’s Andrew Higgins and Harry S. Truman. I’d like to think that Truman is wearing a Haspel suit. Lore says that he preferred them and God knows, summers in Washington D.C. can be as Haspel requisite as almost anywhere in the world. Except New Orleans…Haspel’s hometown.

My hometown haberdashery—my Trad Instructional Dojo, sold Haspel seersucker, pin cord and poplin suits. I’m not certain where they were made by the time I began working there but assuredly, since my hometown Trad shop opened in 1927, most of their Haspel receipts originated from the old Haspel plant in New Orleans. Speaking of the Haspel plant, John Kennedy Toole worked part time there at some point and it’s said that the Levy Pants factory in Confederacy of Dunces is loosely based on his brief Haspel plant experience.

As clothes crazy as I’ve always been, my college cache of rags was predictably, for a college boy with no money, a bit limited. But I did have a few Haspels. Three actually…olive poplin, blue seersucker and a blue pin cord. And my summer internship in Washington D.C. affirmed why men like Harry Truman would prefer a Haspel or three in their wardrobe.  D.C. can be a dreadful place during some summer weeks. Not quite as challenging as New Orleans but close. To quote Eugene Morris Jerome in Biloxi Blues… “It was hot. Africa hot. Tarzan couldn't take this kind of hot.” Haspel’s unstated strategy, I think, from the beginning was something like…cotton clothes for when it’s too hot to wanna wear ‘em.

After college I drifted away for a while from the ultra Trad flat front three button sack suit…trousers hemmed slightly too short…Weejuns on the rig’s south end. You see, I’d fallen under the influence of a book…Clothes and the Man written by a guy named Alan Flusser. While I couldn't yet afford his clothes, I began to order Corbin suits with pleated trousers and would pick up a Polo suit on sale from time to time with more shape and drape than what Haspel would allow. My Weejuns were reserved for the weekends and my shoddings began leaning fuzzily towards brown suede wing tips and cap toe lace ups. By this time I’d seen photos of the Prince of Wales wearing them and Tom Wolfe allowed Tommy Killian to sport them in Bonfire of the Vanities so why not? 

But Cary Grant proved that Haspel and elegance weren't necessarily bi-polar. Grant was wearing Haspel in Charade. On the other hand, Cary Grant looked elegant in anything.

But then I moved to New Orleans. My poplins and seersuckers were long ago lateralled off to someone or simply lost in one of my moves. And by the end of my first May in the Crescent City, I found myself miserably swathed. Surely, if I had to be in Baton Rouge at the legislature for something or at a meeting with the Louisiana Healthcare Authority, I’d wear my tropical weight navy blue suit. But I was still miserable. By the way, whatever one would wear back then, to a meeting with any stakeholders in the above two Louisiana deliberative or administrative bodies, would be covered in graft and taint by the time you got home and “smelled something kinda funny” on yourself. I think I mentioned in my long ago  and best to have been lost, post on moving to New Orleans, that one of the reasons I resigned and left was that I couldn't shower enough to rid myself of that taint.

Ok, so I digress. What's your point? Shut up. I needed cotton suits and I needed them fast. So I went immediately to Perlis…the Uptown go-to haberdashery for all things cotton and Trad. “One tan and one olive poplin please.” In an instant, I was as cool (temperature…NOT style wise) as one could be when having to dress for work. Flat front trousers hemmed with no break…Alden tassels on the south end. What comes around goes around or whatever. Sort of a Haspel Saṃsāra I reckon.

So Haspel is to warm, humid weather like Andrew Higgins is to D-Day. An essential ingredient. Ike was a bit more enthusiastic in his characterization of Higgins... "Andrew Higgins ... is the man who won the war for us. ... If Higgins had not designed and built those LCVPs, we never could have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different." Even that maniacal bastard Hitler had something to say about Higgins. “Hitler recognized his heroic war efforts in ship production and bitterly called him the "New Noah.””

And I assume that Higgins was a Haspel man as well. It’s obvious from photos that even though he probably ambled around boatyards and production lines with regularity, he always seemed to have dapper flair. Bottom line is that this shallow-draft watercraft genius…a man who struggled to get the Pentagon to take a serious look at his craft and his crafts…played a vital role in the success of D-Day. Or should I more accurately say that the thousands of workers who built Higgins boats at a frenetic pace in New Orleans, played a vital role.

I’ve always known about Andrew Higgins but I’d never seen a Higgins boat. And until my visit to the WWII Museum in New Orleans the other week, I hadn’t known the Higgins was also one of the manufacturers of PT boats. 

Peering into the Higgins LCVP conjured chilling thoughts of all the boys who stepped off of these vessels, never to return. More than twenty five hundred of the boys who plopped into the Omaha beach water once the bow front opened, died before sundown.

My mentor, another surrogate father to me and love interest of LFG, landed, courtesy of Higgins, on Omaha Beach D-Day plus one…June 7^th 1944…sixty seven years ago today. Here he is after making it all the way to Paris. God only knows what kind of carnage he stepped over as he made his way beyond the surf. And he made it home...forever shaped by what he saw and did after being dropped off by Higgins. He only spoke about it during the last few months of his life and surely, I got the highly edited version of events. 

More on that later but for now, I’ll end this little ramble on a happy note. He and LFG genuinely loved each other. And I feel so fortunate that they were able to revel in each other’s company for her first and his last six years of life.

Onward. Haspelating in the heat. I said in THE heat. Not IN heat. Shut up.

ADG, II  

The Mouse Fart Chronicles…And Cordovan

It still seems like a good idea…a reasonable compromise. Then there’s always theory versus practice…a twain within which I actually earn my living so you would think I’d know better. But my loden green cordovan shod self practiced it a moment ago and my first pass at actualization didn't go well. In my haste to embrace—my hurry to scriven (scriven probably was but definitely is a word now. Shut up) the old fashioned way…pen to paper…I ordered a Five Year Journal.

Butcept I didn’t take the time to assess the dimensions. It’s a tiny little book and there’s about enough room to write half an ADG’s thumb worth of profundity at best. My handwriting is kinda reflective of the ADD man I am…I can’t write tiny. I don’t think, feel or imagine tiny so this ain’t gonna cut it. I can’t chronicle a mouse fart on the lines provided much less anything else. I suppose an upside to this little vehicle is that I’d never be able to write anything with enough flourish to worry about my mama reading it and then vapor locking on me.

Here’s proof. But I’m not gonna give up on the Five Year Journal idea…It suits me. I just ordered a larger one and we’ll see if its spatialosity is such that I can profundicate suitably. Stay tuned.

Oh, and someone reminded me that this used to be a blog about clothes and shit. So here. Have another take on cordovan…cigar and corduroy.

Patinating nicely I'd say. LFG patinated at nine months. We remain astonished.

And the trousers here aren't just any corduroy swathing. Here's horizontality’s maiden debut for 2011. Rumble strips I imagine them…since they are going sideways. Speed bumps for my britches. And if anyone’s britches needed slowing down, courtesy of a horizonticated vibratory prod, it would be me.

Oh. And there’s cowboy boots here too.

Onwardish. 

ADG II

Cigars—Smokin’ and Wearin’

I genuinely enjoyed cigars at one time and had a humidor full of good Cuban cigars when I moved out of my marital home. Interestingly, they never made it off of the moving van. Neither did my Jimmy Lile folding knife…The Gent model…but that’s another blog story. I'm about to light up a cheapie in the photo above. LFG's mom and I were out at a great bed and breakfast near Charlottesville...along with two of our favorite long weekend comrades back then. Hanky and Panky.

There was a time before the cigar fad became an absurd craze, when Cuban cigars really were better. And any regular smoker could discern and appreciate the Cuban experience. I used to smuggle Cuban cigars in from Europe like a mad man. I’ve long since given up cigars…from any source.

One of my non-Cuban favorites though; was Arturo Fuentes’s Short Story. These little babies were perfect for a quick smoke when LFG’s mom would put me out on the patio for my exiled ritual. I do kinda miss a good cigar.When the cigar craze was at the height of absurdity, the little Short Story cigars were hard to come by mainly for one reason. The shape of this little torpedo was such that only the most skilled hand rollers could turn them out with consistent morphological quality and skilled rollers were in short supply. 

Mavis Toussaint Cindarella Fuentes, pictured above, rolled mine specially and would always send me a little love note in my box. Nothing like a little love in your box.

I remember my first visit to 19 St. James’s Street…James J. Fox. Robert Lewis began selling cigars over two hundred years ago from 19 St. James’s and J.J. Fox merged their operation with Lewis in the early 1990’s. One’s first time for many things is epic…leastways for me. 

Fox still had the rather simple typewritten announcement inside the front door, announcing that the shop would be closed on Churchill’s funeral day, in honor of their most famous patron.

And you can go downstairs and sample a smoke the same way Churchill did…even sitting in his chair.

Of course there are other fellas in addition to Winnie with iconic cigar corollaries…

The other man in white…Mark Twain.

Kipling…I still need to write a ditty about the Beerbohm-Kipling squabble.

JFK…who if legend is accurate, ordered Pierre Salinger to procure one thousand little Cuban cigars before he signed the Cuban embargo executive order which is still in place today. Brilliant no? We export our entire manufacturing economy to another communist country yet God forbid we send a quart of milk or import one stalk of sugarcane from Cuba. Shut up.

And of course the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, was an ardent cigar and cigarette devotee. (And obviously a devotee of horizontal striped socks) He founded the Marlborough Club in Pall Mall as a result of not being allowed to smoke cigars in the reading room of White’s Club in St. James. 

A pissed off horizontal sock wearing Royal with social standing and enough bon vivant-ishness to desire his cigars whenever and wherever…and suddenly you have a new gentleman’s club…all because of a cigar.

I’m thinking that the Prince of Wales probably had Knollys send over to Robert Lewis’s for his supply of cigars. Some for home, some for the Marlborough Club and some for travel. Wonder if he kept any in his private dining room upstairs at Rules?

But then the Cuban cigar procurement process became complex. Twenty five years ago you could walk in and avoid Cuban confusion. One hundred percent of the Cuban inventory in most reputable European cigar shops was hand rolled.

Cuban grown from Cuban seed and Cuban wrappered Cuban tobacco…probably rolled by gals like these Cuban pieceworkers.

Kinda like buying Levis back then. There might have been three choices of Levis when I was a teenager. Not much to be confused about…501s for me. And to this day, I avoid denim doubting by simply focusing on my standing order of 501s. But it got silly…kinda like the whole cigar craze got silly. There are fifty versions of Levi's to confuse you upon demand. Cuban cigar quality in general declined probably for no other reason than supply not meeting demand. Cigars from other growing regions closed the quality/value gap significantly. Then the predatory marketing bullshit began. You needed a Cuban cigar doctorate to sort out the truth. “Made in Cuba with Dominican tobacco and a Cuban wrapper”…or vice versa…“Dominican grown from Cuban seed…machine rolled in Cuba.” It just became unworthy of the effort. And by the way, I always thought that Cohibas were overrated and rolled too tightly, even the ones I smoked in London over twenty years ago.

I’m a redneck from South Carolina. This has long since been established. So when I say that something is base and in poor form, you gotta consider the rather low floor of gentility from which I declare such things. 

But I’ve always thought that those guys weekend/golf outing and God forbid, the wedding photos in the back of Cigar Aficionado Magazine are absurd. Nobody looks good with a cigar hanging out of their mouth. Nobody.

These guys look like turd salesmen with samples in their mouths. When you torque it up with the alpha-testo-puffery manifest in those group shots of rental tuxedos and Meyer Wolfsheim cufflinks, you can include my ass out. The cigar craze got to the point where I’d look at people on the golf course or in the queue to buy the goods in my store here in Old Town and think there’s no way all of these people are smoking these things and really, genuinely enjoying them.

But there is a cigar that captivates me thoroughly. Cigar shell cordovan. I think anyone’s first go at a pair of shell cordovan shoes should be an Alden Color Number 8 move. Probably the classic tassel loafer to start. But after that, why not a cigar?

Really--after you’ve stabled a couple of shell cordovan thoroughbreds, you might want to consider a cigar colored shell contrivance. The boys at Horween report that the cigar shells are probably fewer in production than any other hue they contrive. I think it’s the most stunning.

So here’s the Alden full strap loafer. Fully manifesting it’s preening cigarness.

The lines on the full strap are clean and sleek. Kinda like me after my once weekly shower.

The ridges and crinkles that begin to show after a day or two of wearing are one of a kind, part and parcel manifestations of cordo-uniqueness. You never know how the fibrin striations are going to play out and henceforth, become an immutable patinated badge of your pair, and your pair only. You just don’t get that with cowhide.

And these babies don’t make your breath stink or cause irregular epithelial cell growth in your pie hole.

Coming in at about the same price as a box of twenty five hand rolled Cubans at J.J. Fox, I’d opt for pedal cigar adornment these days.

The full strap goes with everything. You can wear ‘em with a pair of shorts in the summer and then roll in to the Handlin’ on Sunday morning sporting the same shoddings, glossed with a thin coat of contrition. And not a bad choice to accompany The Brethren flannel jammies I say.

The cigar color is chocolaty enough to be different from Horween #8 while possessing the deep pool of cordovanessence that informs any gawker that this ain’t cowhide.

So let me shut this drivel down and go to the office. 2011 is unfolding in a maniacally blessed way and there’s consulting esoterica that little ADG must ply today in prep for another flurry of travel. Atlanta, San Antonio and some back to nature conference center in New England will see me within the next month.

Onward.

ADG II