Warmer Than a Handshake

It was a blustery winter day in February that I set out to make what was to become a yearly event to upper northeast New York State. My boss, Lloyd, was with me and this was my first buying trip to the glove center of the country. While there were many women's gloves imported from Italy, men's gloves were still primarily made in the Twin Cities of Johnstown and Gloversville and Lloyd was showing me how it was done. It was always a pleasant event going from this manufacturer to another over the course of the day. We were to spend 2 full days there viewing the various gloves made by the several businesses. Most of the companies welcomed the opportunity to let us take several samples back to our hotel room where we would spend two full nights poring over the way gloves were made and which ones would fit our buying budget. While it was somewhat laborious, it was my first trip and I found it very interesting, We would spend the two nights writing the styles down and then as another sample showed more promise, cross off the first and in this way gradually reduce maybe 50 samples to the 6 or 8 we would actually plan to purchase. I learned which were pigskin and which were cape -skin (Lamb) and the various grades and appearance of each; which were hand sewn as compared to machine sewn and other interesting facts about gloves. Ultimately we would arrive at a given number of which to buy and which to eliminate from our buying plan. I would make this trip and go through a similar process for several years following this first trip. I was the buyer of menswear in a department store for seven years before the store would close and I was to be employed by another retail department store in another city. But that is story to be told at another time.

The gloves purchased would begin arriving at my store in September and we would begin advertising them as the weeks passed by. As the buyer, I would supply the advertising department with necessary 'copy' so they could smooth it out for the buying public. One time I wrote my copy and used as a headline "warmer than a handshake". It was used in that manner in the paper and some years later, long after I had left the retail field, I saw that line used by another department store trying to sell gloves. That made me feel good that some one else felt it was an appropriate line to be used in advertising gloves. Small achievements are food for memories. I enjoyed those trips very much and although I worked far into the night making my decisions they were memories I had long ago forgotten until I happened to pull an old pair of gloves from a rarely used drawer. Thus are memories rekindled and brought back to mind and although it has been many years since that first trip, it was a small voyage into new learnings that even today, with this writing I have remembered a peccary pigskin from a sueded capeskin. Not only are my hands warmed by this look at the past but so is my heart and mind as well.