Trouser Bark
One of the Regulars
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- 191
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- I exist in your head
Several can recall the first leather jacket they tried on.
Several may be able to recall having seen a first leather jacket they liked enough to spend money on.
I'm guessing that for some there's another connection to the industry (or hobby as I've heard it referred to here) that might be interesting. Please share a peek into your first exposure. None need be epic but a glimpse would be appreciated. I'll share mine / you share yours.
When I was a boy my father was a general contractor and a carpenter at heart. Some friends of our family owned a tannery and my family would go to their house on occasion for dinner or the kind of visit that was more common prior to the internet. The first time we had dinner at their house was more than a half century ago. A whole salmon cleaned, beheaded, and with a lemon sliced up and inserted in the cavity. It was wrapped in foil with salt and pepper then stuffed into the coals in the fireplace at their log home. It was many years before I realized that would be an experience that few elsewhere might ever experience for themselves.
The tannery was separate from the house and had to be. When you walk into a tannery there's a smell that hits you like a version of 'somebody needs to wipe the baby's ass' but with an edge that only fermentation and chemistry can provide. The first time I walked into the place l was around 12 and fighting to keep my stomach from going off the reservation. The owner walked up from somewhere toward the back and was eating a box of raisins. Most of what I recall in the vats was seal but there were also wolf, lynx, and a few other hides would come through the place as well. I recall one polar bear. The owner liked to share and though I never worked there he taught me how to run some of the equipment and I could wander the place as if it were mine. One machine would remove guard hairs such that the finished pelt would look and feel better to the touch. It seemed to be a planer of sorts to me and to this day I have no idea what the internal mechanism was that allowed it to grab only the guard.
My father built new vats to replace the older ones that had seen better days. When you think of a vat note that it's not like a tub. These looked something like giant wooden wire and cable reels oriented vertically and elevated off the slab so they could rotate on a hubbed center axis. Picture two giant flanges maybe 4' apart and the span between the two flanges was also wooden (slats) and very tightly fitting so once the wood had gotten wet and swelled the vats didn't leak. They'd turn for days and I rarely recall them not moving but to load or unload. There were doors in the sides of the flanges that allowed you to toss hides in or pull them out. All hides left the shop w/ hair on them and the amount of chemical in the vats filled only roughly a foot of depth in what was a roughly 10' diameter vat.
If there were an aspect of learning about the place that took the most getting used to it would have been bringing in skins from behind the shop. Hunters would come by and throw their hides in piles behind the building and through some kind of telephone voodoo the owner always knew who's pile belonged to whom. The hides would arrive with a layer of fat on the inner side of the skin and in winter they'd be frozen to each other. In summer they'd be crawling with whatever liked to eat fat. If you've ever tugged on something that seemed fixed in place and had to give it a good yank you may have had a bit of that stuff fly into your mouth. You naturally tried to spit whatever flew in back out. That's how it worked behind the building but in summer time whatever flew off the pile and into your mouth would impart an acquired taste and sometimes it would be moving. You learned to yank with your mouth shut and breathe through your nose. At some point the smells that might have previously made you curiously uncomfortable became fine.
I never worked there. I was just the family friend's kid that had rooted all through the place and was shown how everything worked by an old fart that was kinder than many are to kids..
That was my earliest connection to the trade. Interestingly, at the time spotted fur seal jackets were commonly seen. Now you can go years w/out seeing one.
Several may be able to recall having seen a first leather jacket they liked enough to spend money on.
I'm guessing that for some there's another connection to the industry (or hobby as I've heard it referred to here) that might be interesting. Please share a peek into your first exposure. None need be epic but a glimpse would be appreciated. I'll share mine / you share yours.
When I was a boy my father was a general contractor and a carpenter at heart. Some friends of our family owned a tannery and my family would go to their house on occasion for dinner or the kind of visit that was more common prior to the internet. The first time we had dinner at their house was more than a half century ago. A whole salmon cleaned, beheaded, and with a lemon sliced up and inserted in the cavity. It was wrapped in foil with salt and pepper then stuffed into the coals in the fireplace at their log home. It was many years before I realized that would be an experience that few elsewhere might ever experience for themselves.
The tannery was separate from the house and had to be. When you walk into a tannery there's a smell that hits you like a version of 'somebody needs to wipe the baby's ass' but with an edge that only fermentation and chemistry can provide. The first time I walked into the place l was around 12 and fighting to keep my stomach from going off the reservation. The owner walked up from somewhere toward the back and was eating a box of raisins. Most of what I recall in the vats was seal but there were also wolf, lynx, and a few other hides would come through the place as well. I recall one polar bear. The owner liked to share and though I never worked there he taught me how to run some of the equipment and I could wander the place as if it were mine. One machine would remove guard hairs such that the finished pelt would look and feel better to the touch. It seemed to be a planer of sorts to me and to this day I have no idea what the internal mechanism was that allowed it to grab only the guard.
My father built new vats to replace the older ones that had seen better days. When you think of a vat note that it's not like a tub. These looked something like giant wooden wire and cable reels oriented vertically and elevated off the slab so they could rotate on a hubbed center axis. Picture two giant flanges maybe 4' apart and the span between the two flanges was also wooden (slats) and very tightly fitting so once the wood had gotten wet and swelled the vats didn't leak. They'd turn for days and I rarely recall them not moving but to load or unload. There were doors in the sides of the flanges that allowed you to toss hides in or pull them out. All hides left the shop w/ hair on them and the amount of chemical in the vats filled only roughly a foot of depth in what was a roughly 10' diameter vat.
If there were an aspect of learning about the place that took the most getting used to it would have been bringing in skins from behind the shop. Hunters would come by and throw their hides in piles behind the building and through some kind of telephone voodoo the owner always knew who's pile belonged to whom. The hides would arrive with a layer of fat on the inner side of the skin and in winter they'd be frozen to each other. In summer they'd be crawling with whatever liked to eat fat. If you've ever tugged on something that seemed fixed in place and had to give it a good yank you may have had a bit of that stuff fly into your mouth. You naturally tried to spit whatever flew in back out. That's how it worked behind the building but in summer time whatever flew off the pile and into your mouth would impart an acquired taste and sometimes it would be moving. You learned to yank with your mouth shut and breathe through your nose. At some point the smells that might have previously made you curiously uncomfortable became fine.
I never worked there. I was just the family friend's kid that had rooted all through the place and was shown how everything worked by an old fart that was kinder than many are to kids..
That was my earliest connection to the trade. Interestingly, at the time spotted fur seal jackets were commonly seen. Now you can go years w/out seeing one.
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