The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  We left early one morning, chugging northwest through the Gulf of Guayaquil. Later that day we were to cross the equator, the name adopted by the country I’d finally left. The ship’s crew had prepared a “bottle message ceremony” for us and gave us each a parchment printed in English and Spanish: “If perchance, this bottle’s found/Let me know where it went aground,/Just write to me without delay/I’ll send a dollar . . . right away!!!” Below that was space for a name and address. We were to place the note inside an empty wine bottle, seal it, and then, when the ship’s horn bleated, we were to toss them over the starboard side.

  The bottle ceremony seemed perfectly silly. The equator itself, however, had fascinated me as far back as I could remember. When this book was taking form in my mind, I daydreamed about traveling along 0 degrees latitude all the way around the world. My trip would begin at the Galápagos Islands and proceed westward 24,000 miles until I returned to the equatorial monument just north of Quito. I spent most of two days poring over detailed topographic maps, each one covering a 350-mile stretch of the 25,000-mile equatorial circumference. In all, I would have traveled through almost fifty countries, including tiny island nations. To my dismay, I found that the equator passes through some of the most miserable parts of the world.

  Although the nineteenth-century theory that tropical countries experience more turmoil than those in the temperate zones had been discarded, I envisioned enough trouble, political and health, to make me dismiss the equatorial route right away. There were further obstacles: In South America alone, fourteen languages are spoken on the line; the Congo and Uganda have unpronounceable towns whose names have four consonants in a row, and a river with four consecutive vowels flows through Gabon; Sumatra has a town with twenty-two letters: Bandjarsialanbertunggu. Lake Victoria and the Amazon River enticed me, but high-altitude ice climbing in Kenya did not. What intrigued—and repulsed—me most on the maps were entire regions marked “unexplored,” “approximate,” or the foreboding “abandoned.” Following the equator was a trip I’d rather read about than take (and a book title Mark Twain had already used). And so I tossed my message bottle into the Pacific Ocean and watched it bob off into the distance.

  Our bottle ceremony was tepid compared to the real tradition, one that has a long and somewhat honorable history among seafarers. One sailor dresses himself as King Neptune and subjects “polliwogs”—those who have never crossed the equator at sea—to playful humiliation, such as a dunking, shaving, paddling, or recantation of public acts. When Charles Darwin crossed the equator aboard the Beagle in 1832, he and other initiates were blindfolded, drenched with buckets of water, and led upon a plank that tilted into a large bath. “They then lathered my face & mouth with pitch and paint,” he wrote in his diary, “& scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop.” Survivors of the nautical hazing become “shellbacks.”

  Unlike 0 degrees longitude at Greenwich, England, an arbitrary international designation a mere century old, the equator goes back to the planet’s creation. It forms the seam of the earth. “There isn’t a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had its rights,” wrote Mark Twain, who reported his crossing thus: “A sailor explained to a young girl that the ship’s speed is poor because we are climbing up a bulge toward the center of the globe; but that when we should once get over, at the Equator, and start down-hill, we should fly.” Olga Fisch had said that when she was a child in Hungary, she thought the equator was a silver band and little girls had to shine it.

  A few weeks before leaving Ecuador I received a letter from a friend who wrote while sitting at a bar in Kenya; half the bar was in the Southern Hemisphere and the other half was in the Northern. At the equator monument near Quito, tourists arrive by the busful to have their pictures taken standing astride the middle of the world.

  Ecuador has become a leader in a most unusual international fray involving the ribbon around the earth 22,300 miles above the Equator. In effect, what Ecuador and other countries along the Equator say is, if a country controls the land beneath it and the water around it, why not the space above it? They want a voice in regulating the satellite space over their countries, rather like the Law of the Sea stood on its head. This novel approach to international law may be symbolic, but it provides Ecuador and the other countries with their only voice in the politics of outer space.

  After I returned to the United States I went back out to follow the hats again as they crossed the North American continent. During my absence a letter arrived postmarked Quito. Five days after my ship left Ecuador, a thirteen-year-old boy happened to be walking along a deserted stretch of beach near Salinas, and a glimmer of light reflected off something rolling up out of the tide. What was it—a rock? A seashell? Andrés Barsky, whose family was vacationing from their home in Quito, took a close look. My bottle had drifted ashore.

  Andrés’s family lived in self-imposed exile from their native Argentina, waiting for the return of democracy to their homeland. His mother is a psychologist; his father, a sociologist studying rural Ecuador. Among the communities he had researched was one where paja toquilla grows.

  Andrés and I became pen pals—he writing about his progress in school, and I about my life in the States. During a subsequent trip to Ecuador, the family invited me over for dinner. Andrés showed me the original message he’d found that day, somewhat worn but still intact. On a map he had marked the route the bottle took. He estimated that it had floated southeasterly about two hundred miles. Tall and thoughtful, Andrés marveled with me at the circumstances that brought us together. What were the chances of the bottle surviving such a trip, of anyone finding it, of the message inside still being readable, of—of—of—well, we agreed, laughing, it was almost too much to fathom. With the fall of Argentina’s military dictatorship, Andrés and his family returned home.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  PRODUCTION LINE

  New York City. “Every time someone moves out of this building,” eighty-four-year-old Karl Dorfzaun complained, “a movie company moves in.” Dorfzaun was rummaging around the piles of hats that cluttered his office on Broadway near Times Square. Most of the building still housed garment manufacturers and their showrooms. When Karl Dorfzaun first got into the hat business soon after fleeing Germany, his shop was located on Eleventh Street. Among European refugees in the garment trade, his move to the eighth floor of a midtown building symbolized upward mobility.

  Shipments arrived from Italy, the Orient, and Ecuador every week. Ecuadoran straw hats come duty free under the Generalized System of Preferences. The GSP, established during the Kennedy administration, waives the import tariff on thousands of items from friendly developing countries. While John Kennedy’s penchant for going hatless adversely affected the domestic hat industry, he is credited in Ecuador for making trade with the States more inviting.

  The Cuban revolution affected not only the economy in the town of Febres Cordero in Ecuador, at the beginning of the hat trail, but in the office of Karl Dorfzaun in New York as well. “I used to sell beautiful Panamas to Cuba. Montecristis. The men who owned the sugar plantations bought them. They cost five hundred to a thousand dollars apiece. Each one was like silk. That was under Batista.”

  The market for Ecuadoran straw hats has decreased worldwide of late, Dorfzaun said. “In the early 1970s there was still a demand for Panama hats. In South Africa they bought them for school uniforms. I will sell them there. Germany too. Now mainland China is making imitation Panamas. They’re much cheaper, so what am I going to do? I can’t push them. I wouldn’t work against Ecuador.”

  Karl Dorfzaun didn’t wear a Panama, or, as far as I could tell, any hat at all. I never saw his nephew Kurt in one either. I had asked Ernesto, one of Kurt’s sons who helped out around the office during summer vacation, if he ever wore a Panama during the school year in Boston. “En casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo,” he replied. In the house of the blacksmith, use a
wooden knife. Adriano González didn’t wear a straw hat. Nor did anyone in the Ojeda family in Biblián. “We weave the hats for an income, and not for ourselves,” Isaura had told me. “We have to make money for our necessities.” Victor González, who brought the raw straw from the coast to Biblián—again, no sombrero de paja toquilla. Domingo didn’t wear one the day we went out to the straw fields, but it seems likely he owned one. On the coast, where no social caste attaches itself to wearing straw hats, they are practically mandatory for constant outdoor labor.

  Now, thousands of miles from its homeland, the Panama hat is openly appreciated. Although the hats had already attained some popularity in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century, the first mass exposure of Panamas came during the Spanish-American War, when the United States government ordered fifty thousand Ecuadoran straws for soldiers headed for the Caribbean. The mobster era gave a raffish aura to Panamas. (Hat exporters in Montecristi call the style with the widest brim the Capone.) The hats can be found in the writings of Mark Twain and Graham Greene. They were part of the summer uniform for men during the 1930s and 1940s in the United States, and a race-track necessity in England. No self-respecting movieland detective would be caught without his Panama during the golden era of private-eye films. It became Sydney Greenstreet’s trademark, and Charlie Chan’s as well. (Both he and his son wore them in Charlie Chan Goes to Panama.) Writers such as Tom Wolfe and Garrison Keillor gain an extra measure of élan by wearing Panamas.

  Panama hats accentuate the extremes of the people below them and magnify their personalities. In Lay Bare the Heart, civil rights leader James Farmer describes a Mississippi prison director during the 1961 freedom rides as “a stereotype of the cotton-belt plantation owner. His middle-aged face and neck were wrinkled, too. Small eyes squinted through gold-rimmed spectacles and white hair peeped from under the Panama on his head.” On top of Albert Schweitzer, however, the hat radiated the positive image of a man worth listening to. In the language of fashion, Panamas convey confidence, taste, and achievement.

  In New York, United Parcel Service picked up Karl Dorfzaun’s unopened shipment of straw-hat bodies from Cuenca, and trucked them to Resistol’s plant in Texas. Resistol paid Karl Dorfzaun $43.50 a dozen. The hat bodies that Adriano González bought from Isaura and the other weavers in Biblián for about $.65 were now worth $3.62 each.

  Garland, Texas. “There is nothing we could do to improve upon something as classic as the Panama,” said Bob Posey, who develops Resistol’s hat line. Posey works a year ahead of time, anticipating fashion trends, merchandising patterns, and availability of raw material. A good corn crop in the Andes can cause a ripple in the straw-hat trade. A Hollywood movie can create a tidal wave.

  To most people Urban Cowboy was a movie, but in the hat trade it defined the outermost limits of merchandising and manufacturing. “Nobody was prepared for the Urban Cowboy explosion,” Posey said. “We just couldn’t sell enough.”

  In the straw plant, Tommie Massie was more blunt: “The bigger and uglier the hats we made, the more the public bought them.” Such was the demand for western hats made from Ecuadoran straw bodies that the company opened a new plant at Weslaco, Texas, near the Mexican border, and kept it and the home plant in operation day and night. At the height of the boom, Resistol shipped more than one million straw hats in a year, most of them western-style.

  “For a long time hats were dead as a fashion item, except for ranchers and cowboys,” explained Karl Frankl, who oversees a national sales force of forty-five. “Kennedy’s hatlessness influenced young people. Then came the long hair and the flower children, both of which worked against the wearing of hats. Cars at the time were getting lower and lower—it was impossible to get in or out of one with a hat on. The hat industry didn’t address these issues, hoping they would just go away. Then boom! Urban Cowboy revived a dying industry. Overnight we became the most profitable division within Levi Strauss. The New York cowboy was born—they grubbed at anything. The unknowing consumer bought the cheapest of the cheapest handwoven hats.

  “Urban Cowboy died because the market was saturated. Men who always wore hats rebelled. They thought that American manufacturers had cheapened authentic American fashion. The real high-quality hat was beyond the reach of the boom. There was always a premium on special hats, like the classic Panama.

  “Now we are witnessing a revival in the hat business. The industry is becoming more innovative. The push came with Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Indiana Jones sporting that awful-looking fedora. He even wore it to bed! I loved the guy for it. Michael Jackson often has a hat on when he sings. That immediately sends a signal to youth that hats are exciting. The return to short hair makes it easier for people to wear hats. And we have a more conservative type of youth now. More and more young guys going out for job interviews wear hats now. It says something to prospective employers.”

  Heavy machinery and workers filled Resistol’s straw-hat manufacturing plant. The sounds of sewing machines mixed with hydraulic presses and hissing steam. The smell of thick lacquer blended with bleaching formulas and heated straw. Racks full of hats in mid-production rolled down the aisles between work stations. Much of the equipment at the plant is old and no longer made. Some of it is one of a kind, for which company repairmen improvise spare parts. At one end of the plant, which altogether measures about two-thirds the size of a football field, sacks full of straw-hat bodies arrived from Ecuador, the Philippines, China, Japan, Taiwan, and Italy. At the other end, bulky boxes of elegant Panamas went out into the world.

  After the hat bodies that came from Cuenca via New York were removed from their cotton bales, the MADE IN ECUADOR stickers were removed. The hats were sorted by size and quality and shipped off to St. Louis, Missouri, for bleaching. The only volume hat bleacher in the country has his operation there, and when he sent Resistol’s hats back a few weeks later, they looked a bit lighter, with a completely uniform color. A slight stiffening solution was also added.

  At the plant each hat gets a coded Inventory Control Ticket telling the workers at each stop what process that particular hat should undergo. Straw cowboy hats, for example, get drenched in lacquer, dress Panamas get only one coat, and fashion Panamas often get none at all. Like production lines in other industries, the one for finishing straw hats involves numerous operations all in progress simultaneously. Think of the hats’ progress through the plant as a river, with tributaries strengthening the flow as they enter it. Plant manager Massie and his bosses synchronize what gets done where by whom, and how often.

  The hats from Biblián were softened and stretched; first over a steam table, and then around a metal mold heated to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. A rounder—similar in appearance to a sewing machine through which a hat can be rotated—trimmed the outer brim down to a quarter-inch, just enough to be folded over double-strength for welting. Then an edger, which works about the same way—are you following, Isaura?—cut away the excess from the welting.

  Ruth McGee welts hats. “It’s like sewing the upper and lower lips together.” McGee, who started working for Resistol in 1964, was in her third term as president of Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union local No. 129-H. “If it wasn’t for the union, we wouldn’t get any raises.” As a right-to-work state, union membership in Texas is not required, but Resistol workers are tied to contracts negotiated between the union and company management. McGee estimated that more than half of the straw plant’s 120 hourly workers were members. “If they don’t do you right, you’ve got recourse. For most of us, our pay is tied to production. If your machine breaks down and they don’t fix it immediately, you can file a grievance.”

  Workers at Resistol, who hire on at $3.35 an hour—the 1985 minimum wage—have never gone on strike against the company. With incentive bonuses for exceeding production quotas, some factory hands earn $7.00 and $8.00 an hour. Dolores was earning $5.18 an hour for sewing her quota of 660 sweatbands inside straw hats each day, plus $.79 for each ad
ditional dozen she completed daily. She lives in Garland with her husband and three sons. She was in her seventh year at the plant. “If your machine works well,” she explained during her half-hour lunch break one day, “you’ll do OK. Mine hasn’t for the last week or so, and my production’s down. I did forty-two dozen hats yesterday. Once I did ninety dozen, but that was years ago.” Did she know in what country the straw-hat bodies originated? “I’m not much interested in where they’ve been before they get to my machine, or where they go once they leave it, as long as Patricia here keeps sending them over. For me it’s a job, that’s all.” Patricia: “I saw some hats in the warehouse once. They said ‘Republic of China’ on them, so I guess that’s where they come from.”

  There is a healthy mix of black, white, and Mexican employees; well over half the total are women. As the Hispanic with the most seniority on the floor, Julio Melendez, a hat-blocking supervisor, lends a hand to the novicios, especially those who speak little or no English. “A lot of the Mexican workers come from San Luis Potosí and Durango. They’re all kinfolk—sisters, brothers, uncles. They all know each other. They’re used to hard labor and construction, so this is easy. They want to work.” I asked him how the workers felt about the imitation Panamas they made for the officials at the Los Angeles Olympics. “People from all over the world watched the games, so there was a little bit of pride in that. Yes, a little bit of pride.”

  Tommie Massie oversees operations from his office adjoining the plant floor: “We find the Spanish boys, they pick up the knack right away. They’re real good at blocking and shaping. I’ve got one white lady sewing, and two Spanish girls and a black girl. They’re all real good.”

  After being subjected to the rounder, welting, and the edger, the hats went back for one more press in the heated mold to reshape the newly welted outer brims so that they turned upward slightly.