Famous Overcoat

In 1948 I was in Cleveland in the middle of winter, and boy was it cold. I went to Richmond Brothers and spent about half of my net worth, $22.50, to buy an overcoat.

I wore it a year or two, then after we moved to Texas my brother (a School Superintendent who lived in Pennsylvania) borrowed it. Later, my Dad (a minister who lived in Indiana) used the coat for a winter or two. When we moved to California I thought there would be no more use for such a heavy overcoat, but I hung it in the office at the "think tank" where I worked. Hardly a winter month passed that someone didn't wear the overcoat back east somewhere.

A few years later when I worked for a different company, I was required to fly to Minneapolis at least once a month. I soon determine that the only thing dumber than getting on an airplane in Los Angeles with an overcoat, was getting off an airplane in Minneapolis without one. And when I wasn’t traveling with the by now famous coat, oftentimes someone else was.

More years passed, and our son-in-law (who works at Disney) needed a warm coat when he traveled east in the winter. So guess what, he loved the coat, and the people he traveled with commented on his fine attire. One day someone snatched the $800 overcoat belonging to a Sr. Vice President of Disney, so he borrowed “my coat” and loved it.

It's still in “style,” still in the greatest condition, and being a 1/2 inch thick, is so very warm. You can’t buy much of a coat these days for $22.50, and for whatever price you might pay, most likely the coat wouldn’t last 55 years — and counting.