Editor’s Note: We will be publishing periodic dispatches this week from Denver, Colorado, from Alabama native and D.C. veteran journalist Brooks Boliek, one of the best feature writers and columnists around. This ain’t just blog copy y’all.

Letter from Denver
by Brooks Boliek

DENVER, Colo., Aug. 24 — Most people came to the Mile-High City this week to see, or maybe even meet, Barack Obama. Of course, I’m not most. I came here to see Jack Weil, or maybe even meet Jack Weil. Of course, it didn’t work out that way.

Jack Weil, inventor of the cowboy shirt

This is my 11th convention. My first was in New Orleans, or was it Atlanta? I can’t remember which came first as I used to do them in pairs. I was a reporter then for The Montgomery Advertiser. As a reporter, I only missed Chicago and San Diego. I’m writing this little missive for the Locust Fork Journal as kind of a period in one sentence of my life.

I am no longer a reporter. I was one until I got caught up in the changing economy and the tectonic shift undergoing the national and world economies. That is, until a few weeks ago when The Hollywood Reporter, my employer for 16 years, laid me off.

I knew when I decided to be a newspaperman nearly three decades ago that I was taking a risk, but I thought it was a risk worth taking. I love the English language, and I love American history. As a reporter I got to see a bunch of the former and write a bunch of the latter.

When The Hollywood Reporter laid me off, I pondered whether to come here at all. My paycheck is running out, and I’m not entirely sure where the next one is coming from. It was my wife, Jeri, who told me I should come.

She knows me better than I know myself. She told me I’d seen 10 white guys get the nomination, and I should be there when the black dude gets it. It is the one really truly historical convention in our lifetime, and I should be there. We’d figure out a way to pay for it.

“Also it’s in Denver, the heart of the American West, and you’re a cowboy,” she said. True, I am a Rexall Ranger. I mean, I have ridden a horse and eaten at least one cow, but I really have never been on the range. It’s the myth of the American West that captures my spirit. “And,” she said, “you can buy a shirt at Rockmount Ranchwear.”

For those that don’t know me, I am a clothes horse. I love couture. I actually like to go with my wife to shop for shoes. I am a big fan of The Washington Post‘s Robin Gihvan, and celebrated when she won a Pulitzer.

I firmly believe that the only things that America has truly given fashion are blue jeans, the leather flight jacket, and the cowboy shirt. At heart I am a fop, and for the Western fop, Mecca is on Wazee Avenue in Denver’s LoDo, as lower downtown is known.

That brings us back to Jack Weil. It was Jack Weil that invented the cowboy shirt.

Real cowboys — the ones that rode the range, helped subdue the Indians, and gun down the bad guys — wore any old shirt they could afford. A real cowboy might even have two, but probably not.

It was Jack Weil who conceived of the idea of the cowboy shirt. It was he who thought the American West needed its own style. It was he that put the snaps on a snap shirt. It was he that I most wanted to meet on my stay in Denver, even as a journalist without portfolio.

Unfortunately he died Aug. 13 at his home near here. He was 107. I wish he could have held out just a little longer so I could fulfill my wish to meet him.

Marvin Parsons was working at the Rockmount Ranchwear retail store when I walked in and expressed my condolences.

“This is a Mecca for me,” I said. “I know everyone is sad, and I know Mr. Weil was 107, but I really wanted to meet him. Barack, I’ve met. But Mr. Weil, now, he really changed the look of the nation.”

Parsons told me they all felt the same way.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s something we all knew would happen, but we still weren’t prepared for it when it happened.”

Known by the nom de plume Papa Jack, he is quoted as saying he owed his longevity to quitting smoking at 60, drinking at 90, and eating red meat at 100. Although he was known to have a medicinal shot of Jack Daniels twice a week.

The store was busy and was sure to get busier as more conventioneers roll in. I went to peruse the racks of shirts, and other Western paraphernalia. (Weil may or may not have also invented the Bolo tie.) I was looking for one shirt in particular. I was looking for the Heath Ledger shirt.

The late actor wore a yellow window-pane-pattern shirt in the movie Brokeback Mountain. He bled on it when his character Ennis Del Mar and actor Jake Gyllenhaal’s character Jack Twist had a fight in the Ang Lee classic about love, life, homosexuality, and the American West.

That shirt sold for more than $100,000 on eBay in a charity auction. By some accounts it’s the most expensive shirt ever sold. Now, I didn’t want that exact shirt. I could never afford it. Paying the average seventy bucks for a shirt when you’re an unemployed newspaperman is hard enough. I did, however, want one just like it.

Unfortunately, like Jack and Heath, that shirt, Style No. 69-139, is no more. Parsons told me they couldn’t get the material. They have an example like the one Ledger wore, on display behind glass, leaving me to look for one that was as close a match as I could find.

Weil’s decision to use snaps came in the late 1940s. Cowboys weren’t good at sewing so replacing the snaps was easy, and the shirts would rip open if they got caught on a cow’s horn. They also have a certain flair if you want to bare your chest.

That flair caused an embarrassing moment for me in high school when my ex-friend Sherman Ackerman ripped a cowboy shirt of mine open in the hallway. It also caused a bloody nose for Sherm and a trip to detention for me.

At first the snap-maker Scoville Manufacturing wouldn’t sell Papa Jack the snaps. They didn’t think it was the right application. Eventually they gave in, but it seems Papa Jack and the company had an uneasy relationship. In the store’s upstairs museum/office where vintage Rockmount shirts are wrapped in plastic, a type-written note on one of the oldest reads:

“We used enamel snaps until I convinced the SOB’s at Scoville to make pearl snaps.”

While Weil was determined to give the West its own style, he knew that selling the shirts to cowboys wasn’t going to pay the freight. His grandson told The Washington Post that Papa Jack joked that “the family would have starved if we only sold to cowboys.”

While the shirts help define the West, they aren’t made here. Parsons told me that they are manufactured at a factory in Georgia and all the fancy needlework is done in India. It seems that even an American icon has to globalize if it wants to succeed in the new economy.

I found the shirt that looked most like the Heath Leger shirt, and tried it on. Unfortunately the yellow color made my skin look kind of green. Yellow can be kind of funny. I guess you have to be a movie star to pull it off, or, in this case on.

I didn’t leave empty-handed. I bought Style No. 6455 in Blue/Yellow. I might not get into the stadium to see Obama get the nomination, but I will leave Denver with a piece of history.

Tags: Cowboy Shirt, Jack Weil, Mile-High City, Rockmount Ranchwear

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