The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 380: Steven Kurutz—American Flannel

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

What does it take to make a traditional flannel shirt in America? According to this New York Times reporter it's a combination of engineering and artistry. And Steven should know; he wrote the book on it, American Flannel.  Steven explores with us the history of U.S. textile manufacturing and how our thirst for cheaper goods led to the death of small company towns and the creation of the rust belt.

This book is called American Flannel. You know why? Because the shirt I'm wearing is flannel made in America by our friends at American Giant. See what I did there, Chuck? The part that doesn't make sense is if I'm listening to this right now, I didn't see the book. I don't see the shirt. You could be naked for all I know. Yeah.

But I'm going to post this on the Facebook, the video, so people will see it. See what I'm thinking? Right. Now, if you are listening to this, right now you don't see me pointing to my head the way people do when they have a good idea. And you don't see the flannel shirt that I'm wearing. To Chuck's point, and that's got to be very frustrating for you. Very frustrating. And look, vexing.

And look, it's my fault. Here you are listening to a podcast. And the guy who's hosting it is talking to you as though you're watching it. I understand the world's not perfect. But that's really the subject of this entire hour. the imperfections in this world as manifested by and within our relationship to the business of making our clothing. It's a problem, my friends. It's an enormous problem.

How enormous you say? Well, how about this? In 1980, 70% of all of the clothing worn by Americans was made in this country by Americans. Today, that number is 2%. 2%. 2%, Mike. 2%. 2%.

2%. That's awful. Well, it's chilling, man. And I don't want to fill you with dread or overstated. I don't know how loud the alarm bells should be ringing. But I do know that we're not the same country that we were when we made our own clothes. And a lot of people believe that there's been a hollowing out of sorts. and that we've lost something more than the factories in the factory towns,

more than the mills in the mill town. We outsourced more than value. We outsource something that is really essential to who we are as Homo sapiens. Anyhow, this book, American Flannel, is by our guest today, Stephen Curritz. He's a writer for the New York Times who wrote an amazing article a few years ago about our friend Bayard Winthrop's quest to make a flannel shirt in this country. Right. That article went bananas.

And a lot of people took a real interest in it. And so Stephen kind of doubled down. He's written this terrific book. He profiles not just Byard, but a sock maker in Indiana, I believe, and some shoemakers. Shoemaker in Maine, I think. Brancourt up in Maine. Yeah. Yeah. What you get is this is basically a business book shot through with biography and written by a guy whose own personal life and childhood was informed.

Stephen had a front row seat to the relationship between work and humanity in a factory town. Renova PA he grew up in. Yeah, Renova. I don't want to oversell it. It's important. The conversation is, entertaining whether you buy his book or not. It is called American flannel. And you should give it a look. And while you're at it, you should buy one of buyers shirts. They're amazing. I wish you could see it right now. For those of you who aren't looking at me, it's soft. And it's all, all the yarn is hand. You know, they don't do it that way, Chuck, anymore. But they just print it. Yeah. This is like a single bolt in China, right? It's just a big piece of fabric. And they just print the design. That's a

what American flannel was. No, no, no, no. Each of those fibers is a different color, and they're woven together. Yes, weaved. I almost said weaved. You almost did. Weave me a wone. It is a love letter to one of my very favorite shirts.

It's called American flannel. And while it's simple in certain ways, it is tackling one of the biggest issues facing our country, Our willingness to make things, our enthusiasm to make things, and our appreciation for the people who make them. It's worth a listen, and it's all going to happen right after this. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time? Do you miss the rotary phone?

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I'll just say it at the top. It's a terrific read. Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me on. Well, sure. I mean, Chuck's out of front row seat to this my journey, which has not really been as profound as yours, I don't think, but after 20 years of dirty jobs and a couple of other like-minded shows, I have just seen firsthand what it takes to make stuff here. And it's both humbling and demoralizing sometimes. And you've just put it in such a readable fashion with just the right amount of data and just the right amount of personal stuff. stories in here to really get people's attention. In fact, Stephen, this made me laugh. This was not the blurb I was expecting. Quote, I can confidently say this will be one of my favorite books of 24. Stephen King. Right. Yeah. I mean, how the hell does that happen? He liked the book.

I don't know him. I mean, I have no connection to him. I happen to be rereading his book called On Writing, which is an amazing book. It's like a, of memoir and sort of a guide to writing and publishing. And in there, he talks about how he had a job at a textile mill when he was a teenager. He gives this great quote, can I swear? I don't know. Yes, you can. He describes it as like a dingy poll out of Dickens' novel.

Did Dickens ever use a hole in his novels? You know, I think he introduced old and great Gatsby. and then with Nicholas Nickleby hyphenated it, which caused a real hue and cry, you know, among the grammarians because we weren't quite sure. No one had ever, at that caliber anyway. Hey, well, let's just riff real quick. I mean, if you'll excuse the sidebar,

but people's opinions on Stephen King really vary quite a bit, but I actually think 100 years from now, he'll be our dickens. People will think of him just in terms of, the body of work. It's not just a horror writer, obviously. I have that book you mentioned on writing. And like yours, it's modest in width, but it is packed with so much good stuff. And like the hat trick or like the really neat trick that he pulls off in that book is he not only tells you how to write and he not only explains why he writes the way he does and what his process is,

he demonstrates it in the book itself. Like, as he's writing how to write, he's showing you how to do it. And it didn't occur to me that he was pulling that off until I was about halfway through. Yeah, that's an amazing book. I can understand that parallel because in Dickens' day, he was the popular writer. You know, I think that a lot of those novels were serialized in newspapers and people waited for them. And he was reaching the masses in a way that Stephen King does. I mean, you know, like his output is just incredible.

It's just prolific. You know, I know the heavy lifting it takes to write a book and for him to, I don't know, what is it, 30, 40 book. Who knows how many at this point, but it's remarkable, you know, what he's done. I mean, he's the most, I think he passed Agatha Christie as the most published author in the world. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing he did, Stephen, I mean, and as a writer, I'd love to get your take on just the balls it takes.

Dickens did it. And King, I think he did it with the green. mile, or maybe it was Shalshank, but he published it as he wrote it, right? A couple chapters at a time. So you know, as a writer, how easy it is to put yourself in a corner and you've got to go back and do a tear down. If you don't have that option, holy crap, man, you're just playing with a different owner's manual. Yeah, that's like, you know, that sort of famous analogy, like, that's like flying the airplane as you're building it, you know, and to commit to that. And you have no out. There's no writer's block when you're doing that.

I mean, it's just you really have to be confident and understand the craft to pull something like that off, for sure. And the deadline can't be your enemy. Right. That's right. You have to work well under pressure. So how did all of that inform this book? Like, did you know how it was going to end when you began it? No, I didn't.

I didn't know how I was going to end. And I sold it in March of 2020, just as the pandemic. was happening and the world was shutting down. And that, it was like a blessing and a curse. It was a curse because I was excited to do the thing I love to do, which is you go out on the road and report. And, you know, you know this from your shows and things. You're like meeting people and being in the place is really the best part of it.

You know, and then you sort of have to go back and edit. And, you know, in my case, like face a blank page and write. So I was excited to do all that. And then the pandemic hit, I had to report my phone for months. You know, I couldn't go anywhere and I'd do everything by phone. However, it gave me an ending. All these things that the book sort of talks about, they can be somewhat abstract for somebody, especially if you haven't lived it, you know, like if you're not from a town where there was a factory and the factory closed down, these things can be a little abstract. But then we all saw

the reality of what happens to a country that loses the ability to make things. We saw that firsthand in the pandemic, you know, and what was the first thing that people didn't have, they didn't have the personal protection gear. And you saw doctors and nurses in the wealthiest country in the world going to work in trash bags. So it brought a lot of those issues that the book explores. It made them very tangible to people, showed real life consequences of that decision making. So once that happened, I realized, oh, you know, the book is taking on another layer. And it's not the exact ending, but I address that toward the end of the book. And I get to those things.

Well, it's a wonderful thing. I've said this. It occurred to me for the first time in 2008, the first time the headlines caught up to the themes of a show that I was deeply ensconced in. And Dirty Jobs was a rumination on exploding toilets and misadventures and animal husbandry. And then the country went into a recession. And then all of a sudden, we're having this much larger conversation about the ever evolving and ephemeral definition of a good job, right? And I'm weighing in, way outside of my lane on all sorts of issues that I've been personally interested in, but didn't really have permission to mouth off about. You have a pandemic and a lockdown, and you're right, any rumination on work, any examination of what it is at our,

core that either inspires us or demotivates us to build a thing, man, that is, it's not just consequential, it's primal. And that's why I really love your book. It's modest in so many ways, but it's grappling with something that goes right to the guts of who we are. So maybe the right question, or the better place to begin is with the article that you wrote for the times. about our friends over at American Giant. Was that the thing that really began the Odyssey for you? Yeah, that did begin the book. I mean, I had done another, there's another character in the book, Gina Locklear, the sock queen, and I had done that piece for the Times back in 2016, and I was interested in this topic. But that article about Byrd, so in late 2017, I met

Byard Winthrop, who we both know, and you're wearing an AG flannel shirt there. So, I was unfamiliar with him, but I learned that, you know, American Giant makes everything in America. Every aspect of that garment from the buttons and then the zippers and the thread and the sewing and cutting, everything's done here. I found out that Byer was at the beginning of this process. He had already made the world's greatest hoodie, and that got American Giant on the map. He had made T-shirts. He had made jeans. He had kind of systematically tried to unlock each individual garment.

And he got to a point where he felt like he could take. on the complexity of a flannel shirt and what surprised me was that America no longer made flannel shirts it just seems so iconically American I mean you think about the American style cannon you know blue jeans and white t-shirts and a t-shirt exactly you know good pair of work boots a flannel shirt it is such a democratic small D garment you know it's like the Malibu Surfer and the punk rock musician and the main farmer, you know, and the carpenter. Right? I mean, it's like they've all got the flannel shirt.

And I just couldn't believe that we no longer made it. And Byard couldn't believe that either. And when he started to investigate, he discovered that it hadn't been done since the 1990s, probably. That was the last time a flannel shirt had been made here. So he set about to reconstruct, to make a flannel shirt. And to do that, he had to reconstruct the entire supply chain. The flannel seems simple. It's like everybody has a flannel shirt, you know, your grandfather, everybody,

hangs in our closet. It's not an easy garment to make. It's this combination of engineering and artistry. It takes both. So I followed him on that journey. And again, talking about the Stephen King thing, like, Byard agreed to do this piece. for the times, I agree to follow him.

We had no idea either of us whether or not he was going to succeed. And if he failed, would I write an article or not? I mean, is it a noble failure and it's worth writing about, or does it only work if he makes the flannel shirt? It's like chronicling Alex Hunnold's free solo attempt. If he fell, right? You're not knowing if he makes it. This could be a really great documentary.

You were kind of a bummer. Exactly. That's right. That's right. So, and I was really struck by Byard. I mean, he has an incredible sense of mission. I mean, he's like, no one's out there doing this. Levi's and Ralph Lauren and Wrangler and all these other places, Nike, like, they all make things overseas. I mean, they may make some small portion of things here, but generally speaking, they make things overseas. There's no hand-wringing about that. And Bayard has this incredible ambition, and he's outspoken, and he has a sense of mission. So I knew he was also a really interesting character. So I followed him on that process, and I wrote a piece about it for the New York Times. And that journey is basically it's the spine of the book. And then there's all these branches that go off from that central journey. But that is how it all started. And I'll say just one other thing on that point. I mean, in one sense, Bayard was doing something seemingly basic.

He had set out to make a flannel shirt. In another sense, I thought the flannel shirt, his attention, attempt to do that spoke at much bigger things. It asked all these questions about, okay, like, how much of our capacity, our manufacturing capacity, has been shipped overseas? What can we get back? In this case, flannel. Can we get it back? Is it possible to resurrect it? That tradeoff the country made 40, 50 years ago, we're going to ship manufacturing offshore. And in return, and we're going to get cheap clothing and cheap electronics, flat screen TVs at big box stores.

How do Americans feel about that tradeoff 50 years later? Do we feel like it's worth it? Is it a tragedy that we can't make a flannel shirt here anymore, like that most iconic American garment? I thought, like, his mission, his quest, brought up these interesting issues that I wanted to explore and write about. Why did you want to explore them, though? I mean, where's the being?

in your bonnet with this thing? Well, the be of my bonnet, I guess, is personal. You know, I'm from the Rust Belt, like on both sides, really. Like, I've lived through de-industrialization. My mother grew up in Buffalo, and her father, my grandfather, was a sheet metal worker. And he went to Buffalo in the early 1940s. And his whole career kind of mapped the decline of Buffalo. You know, he worked for Bethlehem Steel. He worked for Curtis Wright. I would see, like, the last 10 years of his career, he did a lot of strike duty and stood on a picket line and had scrapped and scraped and tried to find jobs. So I lived that experience through him. And then I'm from a town in central Pennsylvania, north central Pennsylvania that was once a railroad town. The Pennsylvania Railroad had its

maintenance shops there. It was kind of like a stopping point on the line. And so the entire town, it was a one industry town. The whole town existed for those railroad shops. The business district, was built, not on Main Street, but across the street from the shops. You know, so it's like when the shops closed down, the whole orientation of the town faced those shops. So the shops closed in the 19, starting in the 60s and then 70s. Then a couple businesses went in there. There was a place called ChemCon.

They made seasheds for the Navy. A couple other businesses in the early 80s went in there. They didn't last. you know, and the town just, I saw what happened to it. I saw what happens to a town when the industry goes. What's the name of the town, Stephen? Town's called Renovo, RENO-O-V-O, Renova, Pennsylvania. It's a very small town.

It's very isolated. The nearest town is 30 miles in any direction. It's in the, like, the last sort of upper tier of the Appalachian Mountains, culturally very Appalachia. So, you know, like all those businesses on Front Street, When I was a kid, I was born in the mid-70s. So when I was a kid, there was still a shoe store and a five-and-dime, and a, what I remember, a workwear store.

You know, there was one of these men's stores that sold, you know, wool-rich and, like, Kromer caps and all these sorts of, all the, like, Carhart and all that kind of stuff. For the workers who worked in the shops, you know, the buildings ended up, like, the stores went out, and then nothing ever came back into the buildings. And then, you know, when you have a brick building, that's 100 years old and it sits empty for 20 or 30 years, it slowly decays and then

eventually it has to be raised. People in the town, some of them moved away. Some of them drove 50, 60 miles one way to the nearest town to get a factory job. My experience, so my father had one of the few good jobs there. You could either work for the state. You could work for PennDOT on the highway, which I did in college, or you could work for the forestry. which was another state job, or you could work for the gas company, CNG, Consolidated Natural Gas. My father went to work there at 18. He retired at 55. Same place, this whole life. Health care, pension, union, the whole deal. So it was like a tornado came through town and passed by my house, you know, because my father had a good job and stability. And my best friend down the street, his father worked for KempCon, and before that, the railroad shops or whatever, and couldn't find work.

They had to leave. They ended up moving to Massachusetts. So, you know, it's like I saw this stuff play out in a very real way. And then right after college, I moved to New York. And when you move to a place like New York City, it's the exact opposite. Buildings don't get torn down. They get built up. It's like a never-ending construction zone. prosperity. And the work is right in front of you. Yes. To your point, you can't go half a block

in Manhattan without seeing construction. Right. And it's literally being made before your eyes. It's such an important point because when you talk about the unintended consequence of removing shop from a town like you grew up in with the same consequences of removing shop class from high school. It takes a while for people to understand the totality of, of that one thing. But I've written a lot about this. I think we're up to our neck in it right now. I think those chickens have come home to roost in sort of a maybe a smaller way than what you're describing. But it's really useful to know that you had a front row seat in a town like that to this world that I think a lot of people, Stephen, they not only can't relate to it, they have no idea that it existed. Like a town like

Woolrich. Talk about like what really happens, like that relationship that towns used to have with work, with a capital W. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to Give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Roe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues. You'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data for just $3499 a month with no contracts and no commitments of any kind.

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At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure talk. Yeah, I mean, and there are many towns like this, you know, it could be an apparel or it could be a steel mill or it could be railroad shops or anything. But so I'm from Renovo, but 25 miles down the highway is Woolrich, Pennsylvania. So I grew up in that area where the Woolrich brand started in 1830. And, you know, Woolrich made workwear, started making workwear for, you know, the founder John Rich went around on a mule-drawn cart selling his socks to men in lumber camps. You know, that's how that brand started.

Woolrich invented the lumberjack flannel shirt. So the town of Woolrich and the company Woolrich are inseparable. They are one and the same. And it was a true company town where everybody who worked at Woolrich lived in town. They could walk to work. The rich family, you know, sometimes that happened. And the people who ran the companies were SOBs, you know. And it's like, you know, you see coal mining situations where you work at the, you have to buy from the company store.

and all this sort of stuff. Woolrich was one of these places that was run in a very sort of benign, if not benevolent way. And so the rich family donated land for the community park. The rich family built the church. The rich family employed during the Great Depression

when the mill workers, when the mill was struggling, the rich family employed the mill workers to build company houses so that they could keep them employed. men could live in those company houses for something like $20 a month in rent into the 1970s. Even though you weren't making a lot of money because apparel tends to be a lower paid job, you know, you had security.

And so that's the way Woolrich was run from 1830, probably to the early 2000s. That's a hell of a run for a company. I mean, Woolrich was the cable TV provider. Woolrich did the trash sanitation. I mean, everything, everything revolved around that. And they believed, the rich family believed, especially if you were a manager and higher up, they believed that the products would be better

if you had a connection to that community. And, you know, if you lived in that community and you worked at that mill that somehow, in some, like, intangible, like, you know, way, atmospheric way, the products you made would be better because you had a vested interest in it. That counted the rich family. You know, it's not like the rich family got wealthy, and then they moved to greener pastures and bigger cities because they wanted a more cosmopolitan lifestyle.

The rich family built their large houses right across the street from the mill. That's the kind of company town. There were many, many towns like Woolrich in the textile industry that were run that way. Set up the schools, everything. Close-knit, everything was right there. And if you grew up in a place like that, you know, like there's just this deep connection, as you said, this deep connection between home and life and work. It's all kind of one thing.

I do agree that part of this is ephemeral. It's difficult to really articulate. It's almost alchemy. You know, when you get work and life smashed that closely together, they become as inseparable as the threads in this shirt, I guess. But there is one element to it that I think is so obvious it's easy to miss. And that's the fact that when you live in a place like Woolridge and you walk down the street, you see the actual garments that were made by the actual people who you actually have dinner with or see a church. So there is a tangible expression of this alchemy.

And it's the flannel itself. It's the workwear. sell. It's the product. And to me, that's what we arbitraged out of the whole deal. You talk about the bargain. You know, we're going to revisit this. Was this a good deal that we made? Well, for price, sure. For quality, probably not so much. But it seems like those are the issues that everybody focuses on and not the other thing, the connection you have with the neighbor. Like the guy you know who actually fixes your pipes or puts on your roof or makes your clothes. and so forth. That's been hollowed out. That's gone. And that's a big part of what comes out in your book. I don't know that you actually say it that directly, but it's impossible not to conclude.

I'm only halfway through, and it's screamingly obvious. But if you would, remind me of the stat, the one you know got my attention. I want to say in 1980, we were making, what, 70%? I of our clothes? Yes. So in 1980, 70% of the clothing we wore was made in America. So made by your fellow Americans. And today? Today, it's around 2%. 2.8%, something like that you could round up to 3%. It's roughly 2%. The clothing in footwear is 1%. So that's that journey that the book tells, I mean, from 1980 to now, how do we go from 70% to 2%? And who, Who is that 2%? Who are those people that survived that process?

You know, I mean, it's like... Their name is Don Quixote or possibly Sisyphus. Right. It's Bowlers and it's windmills, man. Exactly. Yeah, and I say in the prolog, I mean, like, I'm a newspaper person. So, I mean, like, to have your industry disappear while you are trying to make you living at it, you know, while you feel like you're in the prime of your career and, you know,

it's like the ground is slipping out from it. I relate to that. And these people are still. alive, many of them. So I wanted to understand what happened. But I just want to go back to something you said a minute ago that's kind of like that intangible, you know, like seeing your neighbor. There's another thing that comes out of that, which we've lost, is this stability. Okay, when I said my dad went to work at 18, retired at 55, never made that much money. I mean, if I go back and look at his W-2s, you know, my mother didn't work. We were a single, you know, income household,

maybe $35,000. If he had overtime, a really good overtime year, 45, something like that. However, and the same thing goes with Woolrich and the folks living in that village and living in those company houses, that stability and knowing that my dad was going to have a job, knowing he was protected by a union, that stability allowed my parents to save for a retirement, and to save and to put me through college. And I, you know, I'm the first of my family to go to school. That kind of stability over years and years, you know how it is. I mean, it's like, even in the white call world, it is so cut throat.

And you could lose your job, you know, in the next round of layoffs. And there's no sense of stability. It's like we're all out here scrambling. And when you're in the lower rungs of the income ladder and the class system, that scramble is brutal. And to have stability where you may not be making a ton, but you have a regular check coming in and you can budget and you can make longer-term financial decisions

based on that. And for many of the people who worked in textiles and apparel that I interviewed and write about in the book, they had that. And the book, that's an important kind of facet of also what we lost in that trade-off. I agree. What are your thoughts then back?

to the bargain that we made. Really, what we sold was the stability that you're talking about. Yes. When we said, all right, low prices every day, whatever, we're going to put the consumer at the very tip of the spear in front of the worker. And maybe that's sort of a false chronology. But it seems to me that those are the two most important groups in the country. Now, we're all consumers. Not everybody's a worker, but we're all consumers. So to give the powers that be the benefit of some doubt, I would imagine they said, all right, the global economy is exactly that. And the biggest benefit is going to come to the biggest group. And we're all going to benefit from these lower prices. But man, you don't have a country of consumers

without the workers either. And you're right. What do you tell a young family who can really only function if they have the sense of stability around them. And to see that stability completely gone, like we can't just say, okay, a higher minimum wage. We can't just say, okay, let's just pretend that the foundation is still there and create the constructs of the stability that we miss because we outsourced the proximate cause of that good thing. That's a bit of a rant, but is there any wisdom in it at all? No, no, I wholeheartedly agree. I mean, that decision, It's a series of decisions. You know, it's not like the Illuminati

got together in a room necessarily. But, you know, at the highest levels of Washington and Wall Street for 50 years, those decisions were consistently made and they benefited a lot of people, but they really harmed a lot of people, too. And to your point, I think the chickens have come home in the last 10 years or so

where we really understand what those decisions did. I mean, once you do that, It's like opening the floodgates, you know, and then you see situations where, I mean, I keep reading these articles all the time where you've got part-time workers and the company does these little tricks to make sure they're not getting full-time wages so they don't have to pay them, you know, the health benefits. I mean, that's that kind of thinking of like, let's just chisel away and chisel away. And, you know, it's all about the numbers. It's all about the next quarter. It's not about the people. It's not about the long-term health of a community or a family.

or the country. Or the quality of the products, Steve. Right, right. Yes, yes. I mean, that's the thing. I've had a lot of people on this podcast, and I met a lot of people over the years who I put in the,

and I say this with affection, the bloody do-gooder category, right? They're working very hard, either on a foundation or on a project. I was just talking to a guy, Chad Hauser is his name, and he runs a restaurant called Cafe Momentum, and the purpose of the restaurant,

which is a five-star restaurant, by the way. The workers are all justice involved youth, right? 18, 19 years old. Many came out of foster care. All of them have done some kind of time. And now they're right there teetering. They're either going to just fall off the cliff and wind up in a life of recidivism or they're going to turn the corner. So we have this big conversation about how important that is and how to manage those people and how to engage them in a meaningful way and all these different things. But it's usually me who raises my hand and says, hey, if the food sucks, none of this works. Yeah. None of it. Right. That's right. I mean, there's an elegance in that. And it's so easy to forget. It doesn't matter what your

intentions are. I said it's a buyer too when he was on here. I said, you can get away with charging more because people understand ultimately, at least conceptually, you still get what you pay for. But this better be a great shirt. I mean, it better be great, dude. It's a $100 flannel. It better be some kind of awesome. Yeah. And he rushed to agree.

Right. I mean, one of the things that struck me, I'm in the styles department at the New York Times, you know, that's what I do. It's not that I cover, I don't cover the fashion industry really. but I'm adjacent to it. And in fashion, a lot of the conversation is around marketing and buzz and trend and the runway show or which celebrity has been signed up to be the spokesman for this ad campaign. The conversations I had in the book with people like Byrd or Gina Locklear, the sockmaker,

or this father-son team in Maine, Rancourt. and co. They make hand-sown shoes. Those shoes are amazing, by the way. Those shoes are amazing. They are. And worth every penny. But the conversations I had were, I would say, almost entirely about quality. Because

that's how they compete. They can't compete on price. All these manufacturers that are in America know they cannot compete on price. And to your point, patriotism only goes so far. And so their entire focus is

quality. You know, I mean, Bayard got on the map because he put so much thought and effort and money into this hoodie, you know, that got proclaimed the world's greatest hoodie and that American Giant sort of took off from there. I watched Gina on that factory floor. I watched her work on a sock pattern. And her socks, it's like she's painting on a sock. I mean, they have that level of intricacy to them. And tell me more about her. Well, okay, so, She's from this. So her name's Gina Locklear. She has a sock brand called Zaccano. She grew up in a town, like you can't talk about Gina without also talking about the town. So she grew up in a town called Fort Payne, Alabama that was once the sock capital of the world. One in every seven or

eight pairs of socks, sometimes people say seven, sometimes people say eight. Suffice to say a lot of socks were produced by the millions in this town, mainly white tube socks. So if you ever bought a pair of white tube socks for basketball or whatever, they were likely made in Fort Payne, Alabama, up until the early 2000s. So for a century, this town's entire, similar to Woolrich, its entire reason for being, and its entire identity was based around socks. They were sock makers. There were over 100 mills there. Incredible entrepreneurship and innovation. So Gina's parents owned one of these mills.

They made socks for Russell Athletic. during the glory days, you know, where they would just get an order for, you know, like 50,000 dozen socks or something. Just set the machine run. 50,000 dozen, you can imagine. Sox are in dozens. That's how it's done. So, but by the time Gina was an adult, offshoring had come and the new sock capital is a city in China. So she left Fort Payne and she was in her late 20s and she was having a quarter life crisis and not sure what to do with her life and unhappily selling real estate.

and she just decided, I want to go back to Fort Payne and I want to make socks. And at that point in time, her parents mill, they had one employee and they were about, you know, to close up. So she went back and she basically reinvented, you know, Fort Payne had existed doing only white tube socks. And Gina decided to come in. She was going to do organic fashion socks. So she was going to appeal to a millennial buyer who's eco-conscious, wanted a pop of color in their wardrobe. So she started making these socks. And at first, she had like one machine and her parents had the rest. And then eventually her business grew and she took a whole line of

production. Now she, you know, it's like she's basically running the show down there. She makes these beautiful socks with flowers and, you know, all sorts of designs. So one sock had an El Camino on it because her father is a Chevy guy and he had an El Camino when she was younger. So she put these little El Camitos on socks. I watched her once make a sock. She was making a Scotty Dog's sock. And on a sock, you have the base color, then you have the toe and heel color, then you have the color of the designs, and then you have the top, the sort of the ribbed color.

So you have all these things going on at once. And the Scotty Dog had a little collar on its neck. And that collar was maybe like three or four threads. That's it. but it had to be right and had to work with all the other colors of the sock. And I watched her spend like 45 minutes just iterating over and over and over again until she got that Scotty dog exactly how she wanted it and satisfied her. Like that's the kind of level of detail that Gina could never get if she just said,

okay, I found a factory in South Korea or I found a factory in Vietnam or Honduras. They're going to make my socks. I'm going to pocket all the profit. And when they show up in a box to my warehouse, if they're okay, they're okay. It's a totally different way of doing business. You mentioned before earlier that flannel is very difficult to make. And your book is called American flannel.

I know you're explaining in the book, but can you give our listeners a little primer as to why it's so difficult to make? I love stories like seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranchers. and promises to deliver high-quality American-grown meat for a fair price.

Today, that promise, and Ben's absolute determination to keep it, has not only propelled good ranchers into the top tier of meat delivery companies, it's fueled enormous awareness among meat eaters like me, that we have all been affirmatively deceived by policies that allow imported meat to be marketed as domestic. That's the reason I switch to good ranchers. If I'm being honest, though, I doubt that I would have stayed this long had the quality not been so exceptional. Every single cut I've devoured from Good Ranchers has been straight up delicious, and every morsel was raised on a small American farm or ranch.

Give them a try. Subscriptions are affordable and flexible. In fact, if you start your plan today, you'll get free meat for life and $40 off your first order. Just use code mic at good ranchers.com. Free meat for life, 40 bucks off your first order. Good ranchers.com. American meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow,

don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get good ranchers now. A-ha. Sure. So, Beyer was trying to make a yarn-died flannel shirt. What Mike has on is a yarn-died flannel shirt. A cheap fast fashion brand will just take a bowl. bolt of fabric and they will in effect stamp a plaid pattern onto that shirt. The way Byrd wanted to do it,

your grandfather's flannel shirt was yarn dyed and that means that every individual yarn is dyed a different color. And the interweaving of those different varied colored yarn is what creates the plaid pattern. So you have to have somebody, you have to have a dyer to dye that yarn. You have to have somebody warp it, which means laying out all those dyed yarns, thousands of them, on a warp beam, and then that gets transferred to a loom. Then you have to have it woven with the crossways pattern, the way that a loom weaves things. Then after that, you have to have it finished and you have to have it napped. And napping is the process of taking those fibers and kind of roughing them up and raising them a little bit to get the softness, the trademark softness of a flannel shirt.

And all of those processes are incredibly difficult. I mean, you need an artist's eye to color match in the dyeing. You need an engineer's ability to warp, to lay that pattern out. It's like taking a 3D puzzle piece. You know, if Mike had a stray red yarn going through one of those white squares, his shirt would be screwed up. So it has to be perfect. And then the napping, if it was napped too rough, you would break those threads.

If it wasn't napped sufficiently, it would come out rough as sandpaper. And so you need all of those things to make a flannel shirt. And that's why it's so difficult. And Byrd and this guy, James McKinnon, who was like his quarterback on that project, they ran into a serious problem when they got to the napping. And they weren't sure they were going to be able to make that shirt because it was coming out like hotel curtains. I mean, it just was not coming out like a flannel shirt.

Well, I can tell you they succeeded because that shirt is incredibly soft. It's softer than any other garment I've felt since I was a kid. Yeah, that's the idea, that pajama feel, that comfortable. That's what makes flannel thinner. And the more Mike wears that shirt, the softer it will be and the more worn in, it would be like old faithful.

Well, I've had it on for two weeks straight now, so it's really... That's all you wear. It's really something. That's all I wear. And one other thing. Oh, yeah, we want to use cotton grown right down the street. We want to control that too. Yeah, right.

We want to make deals with people who are growing cotton. We want to hire people in this zip code. And then we want to put every ounce of energy we have into supporting that effort. And if we can't get the flannel shirt right, right? I made this point a couple of weeks ago. I did a story on the toothpick, which you would love, by the way. There's a book by Henry Petroski called Toothpick. And it just looks at, well, the species relationship with picking our teeth,

but the very unique relationship here in this country and how strong Maine was the toothpick capital of the world and how billions of pieces were being made. And we did it all. I mean, we grew the white birch. We did like everything. And of course, it's all gone now. But the same basic question is posed. If we can't make a flannel shirt, if we can't make a tooth pick, what hope Detroit, right?

Right. At what point does somebody like you, somebody has to grab our country by the metaphorical lapels and shake and say, look, you know, 2% are left. Yeah. 2%. 2%. Now, the real question is, are they crazy? Are they stubborn? Are they hard-headed? Are they Cisophis? Are they Kehote? Are they more to be pitied than censured? What do we do with people with the three folks that you basically focus on in this book? Yeah. Well, I mean, the simple answer is we support them. I don't want 2% to become 0%. I only wear Zecano socks, you know, since I was, you know, attuned to this before writing the book. But after writing the book, if I can buy socks here, I'm going to buy socks.

If I can buy a flannel shirt made here, I'll pay the extra money to buy the American giant flannel shirt and do that. So I think they had to be supported and we have to encourage growth, you know, so that the 2% grows from there. I mean, you know, I keep saying, and Byard has said this too, if some of these large brands would bring not all their production back, but some of their production back. Five percent. Right, exactly. You could have that factory that would make the Wrangler jeans would know that they had orders for those wrangler jeans. And, you know, it's like this idea of competing where prices just get lower and lower and lower and quality gets stripped out and stripped out.

It's not sustainable. It is not sustainable environmentally. It's not sustainable economically. it makes for bad decision-making and bad products. I mean, I wanted to understand the people that were left to your point and figure out, like, why. And, you know, someone like Gina grew up in it. She has all this rich family history.

Someone like Byrd, he was on Wall Street, you know? I mean, he quit Wall Street. Like, he had a path in front of him. Byard is from one of the oldest families in America, the Winthrop's, you know. Like fell off the Mayflower. Exactly. That's right, you know. And he had a path in front.

of him to be that country club, Wall Street guy, and live in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he grew up, he made a different choice in his life, you know, and that was interesting to me, too. It was a, it showed character there to make that kind of choice. And, you know, I wanted to also, like, honor these people and celebrate them in a way because they're doing things the hard way. Yeah. Well, you did it, man. It's a terrific book. Do you know our friend, Selena Zed by any chance? No, no, I don't. Oh, man. All right. Well, you're welcome. Tell me, please. Well, Selena is a reporter like you, a little older, about my age. She has a column called The Middle of Somewhere. She only reports on stories that she can drive to, not because she's

afraid to fly, but she's just obsessed with the back roads of the country. She grew up not far from you, Pennsylvania. Oh, wow. The Rust Belt is her beat. But we've become friends because we're in violent agreement on some educational issues, shop class, trade school, things like that. Man, she really would dig with your screaming and she would, you guys should get together your like-minded spirits and she would write an amazing piece about this book because it really does. Like so many people care about this, Steve, but they're not sure how passionately to weigh in. because the uncomfortable truth is that a lot of people are listening to this conversation right now who totally agree with every single thing they've heard.

But when it comes right down to it, they can't afford to pay for the flannel shirt I'm wearing. And when it's sitting next to other flannel shirts that maybe don't feel quite as soft and maybe don't look. I mean, this is not a big conversation for them. They have a choice. Right. Yes, that's right. So I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. I don't want to be Pollyanna about it.

I don't want to judge people for buying what they need at a price they can afford. But at the same time, I don't want to ignore this story because it's hugely important. And, you know, how do you think about parsing that when you're out at your cocktail parties and talking with your buddies over at the Times, right? Like, how does this work in your world? Well, if you live in a place, you know, I live in Maine now for 24 years. I lived in New York City and lived in Brooklyn. And there's a lot of disposable income.

And so people have the money there to spend on clothing. And also, you don't drive in the city so you don't have that big car payment and that car insurance. And maybe you put more value on your clothing. You know, like I'm going to spend extra on clothing. Whereas at the same time, I never stopped caring about and going back to where I'm from. So I move between these two worlds all the time, and I understand that other world. What I would say is you have to reframe it a little bit.

I mean, yes, okay, the Red Wing boots are probably three times as expensive as the work boots you're going to get in a Walmart or some other place. Wolverines too. Yeah, yeah. But they're going to last you. They may last you three times or longer than that. And Red Wing also has a program where you can send those boots in and have them redone and have them last even longer. Rankort has the same program. And it's about sort of making that decision of like, okay, I know these are expensive.

These are a stretch. But in the long run, I'm not going to throw them out. They're built to last. They're durable. They're high quality. They're not going to. wear out on me. It's tricky, but also, you know, I also hope we get to a point where that flannel shirt comes down in price a little bit. If more people make and you get a little more economies of

scale, then this stuff doesn't seem so boutiquey or just geared to people with disposable income. There's something funny in reporting this book, you know, like there's something about clothing where the average American, and I'll include myself in this, like, sometimes balks it paying a lot for clothing. Like you see like the big Ford truck. It's like a $70,000 Ford truck. You know what I mean? And you see the dude, the construction dude, you know, driving that truck,

and the truck payment's probably like $800 or $1,000 a month. But like you show him a $60 flannel shirt and a $30 flannel shirt. He's going for the $30 flannel shirt. A lot of people have made this tradeoff. There's only so much money to go around. the American worker has not had a raise inflation adjusted in like 40 years. So I don't fault the American consumer at all. And when there's only so much to go around, you have to make choices.

And some people make the choice if they have disposable income for the truck and maybe a vacation once a year, and they'll sort of cheap out on clothing. So I understand those kinds of tradeoffs, but I would just argue that, okay, Every time I buy Parazacano socks, I'm supporting Gina. I'm supporting the workers in that factory. I'm supporting those workers' families. I'm supporting that community. It's a tangible thing.

When I spend money on fashion at H&M, I have no idea where that money's going. I didn't know I did. I'm going to say this all wrong. But the thing I'm most proud of, when I look back at dirty jobs, wasn't any of the things that I ever got credited for. It was realizing that I was showing the country the people who by and large make the thing. And that to me is the real connection, Stephen.

That's the interwoven interpersonal quality that we're missing today. I mean, you just said it perfectly. When you buy a pair of sacano socks, you see Gina in your mind. Right. When you pull out this flannel, you see. Byard. More to the point, and maybe we should start to land the plane here because you brought it up nearly an hour ago, during a lockdown, you've got to do your work over the phone. That's like the cat in Pet Cemetery, bring it back to Stephen King, right? It's not quite a cat.

You're not quite a reporter when you're limited to not being there. But tell me about the first time you stepped into that factory down in Carolina and saw the people doing the thing, that's a different kind of reportage. And I just think it's so critically important for you to be able to do that job so you can write about it and help reinforce that bond between your reader and that worker. That's what my little show did. And I can't take credit for it because that's not why I did it. But nevertheless, it has to happen.

It has to. Yeah, yeah. I mean, any chance I get to go inside a factory, it's an amazing experience. From the sock factory to seeing how they were made, I mean, what comes to mind is the shoe factory in Maine, in Lewiston, Maine, Rankort. They make hand-sown shoes, these hand-sown dress shoes and moccasins. The people they employ are some of the last people in the country to make hand-sown shoes. I sat there and watched for an hour. I just watched them do that job. It was like a ballet.

It was like a physical ballet. They have various tools and you can't make a mistake and the leather is tough and you have to punch through it. And you're sewing and doing all this stuff simultaneously. If you make a mistake, you could ruin the leather. Those shoes, there's something like 130 steps from the piece of tanned leather to the shoe that's finished and then gets put in a box and gets sent to you. 130 steps at a whole factory. It's not just the hand-sellers. There's many steps before that. And I watch those shoes sort of come down that line. And you just get such an appreciation for how things are made, the work and the expertise that goes into it. And getting back to flannel,

you had two generations of workers that weren't trained up, two generations of nappers, two generations of diers that we lost. So that expertise, that expertise gets lost. And I just came away with a real appreciation. And I don't know, whatever rank-wort shoes are, I don't know, maybe $200. I don't know the exact price. To me, it's almost, it's low. They're cheap when you see the amount of work that went into it.

And I bet if I went to a car factory, I would have a similar experience or any kind of place. I mean, to see how the product is made and to see the work that goes into it is, It's very eye-opening. It's humbling. It is humbling, yeah. If you really want to walk it back to the place where the unraveling begins, I think about this a lot with regard to the skills gap and just our overall relationship with work and how otherwise thoughtful, responsible, decent people become so profoundly disconnected from the things and the people around them that are intrinsically responsible for polite society. it starts with the erosion of the appreciation that you're talking about. That's where it starts.

I mean, just listening to you talk about the 130 steps involved in making that shoe, now I will judge people because you can go into one of two columns. You're either the kind of person who is gobsmacked and interested and want to know more. Like, what are those 130 steps? Is it on a checklist? Do you have to memorize them? Who's in charge of making sure step 72 and step 96 don't somehow get juxtaposed? That's amazing.

And if you're not inherently curious about that, then I think it's incumbent on, well, anybody with the platform to try and foster that curiosity. Because if the curiosity isn't there, how could the appreciation be there? And if the appreciation isn't there, why should anybody give a damn about the complexities of flannel were the intricacies of footwear, were the sublime joy of slipping on a certain type of sock versus another. Right.

Right? Yes. You know? That's the alchemy. That's why your book matters, I think. Thank you. I mean, yeah, and well said. I mean, there's this moment,

I'm thinking of something Bayard says in the book. He has this moment where he's working, before he started American Giant, he worked at another brand. And when he got there, they were known for making this product in America in this sort of almost artisanal way. Almost it was like a, you know, like a French atelier or whatever. They made these amazing messenger bags.

And during his period there, it got outsourced. And he says something, and that turned him off. And that, as a consequence, he, you know, he ends up starting American Giant. But he says something to the effect of when it all goes 3,000 miles away, it gets disconnected and the soul gets stripped away. And it's true. And to your earlier point, it is a somewhat abstract idea, you know. And sometimes life is quick and harsh.

And like to think about the soul of a product is a little kind of artsy and abstract. But it's true. And really good products in the process, there is a kind of soul craft. I mean, that book shop class is soul craft. And I mean, like, there is a kind of soul craft to making products and to manufacturing. And when it happens thousands of miles away and you're not privy to it, the soul does get stripped away. Matthew Crawford, I think.

Shop class for the soul or shop craft for the soul? Yes. Shop class as soul craft, I think, is the, something like that. Yeah. Yes. If it's a guy I'm thinking of, he came out of, it's similar to Byard. His background was, I think he was a professor. Chicago University and just decided in a kind of zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance way,

just went back to putting something together with his hands and trying to find purpose and meaning and the basic completion of the thing. That's something else we could riff on for hours. You know, it's a pile of yarn. And then it's a pile of colored yarn. And then it's a shirt. There's magic in that, you know. There's wonder in it. There is. I do think, you know, I just woke up this morning to read a Wall Street Journal article about, and you may have seen this too, about the trades. I posted it. That's the first thing I did this morning, Stephen. I posted it right away.

Yeah. I mean, I think we are, the pendulum is swinging back. I really do believe that in lots of ways. And one of the ways is this idea that, like, a four-year degree is everything. And the trades aren't worthwhile. And we've seen what that has led to. I just think there's a kind of, the pendulum is coming back. There's a reawakening and there's a realization about using your hands and the trades and making things.

It's what worries me the most, ma'am, the temptation to paint with too broad a brush. I was struck by it when you said earlier that you were the first in your family to go to college. And I think that's wonderful. I think it's great. But I also think it's unique, maybe not utterly unique. I don't know who's listening to this exactly, right? Half a million people are listening to this sentence, and I'm not even sure how it's going to end. And here I have already begun it.

But some people are going to need to be encouraged to pursue a university experience. And some people don't. Some people need to be encouraged not to take on all that debt and to master a skill that's in demand. I just don't know which is which. But that article you talked about this morning is important. And, you know, it's too early for a victory lap. But I've been at this 16 years. something tells me you're going to write another book like this, because once you become afflicted

with this, it's all you see. It's all you see. Yeah. You know, and whether it's a toothpick or a flannel shirt or a pair of socks or a decent pair of shoes, please keep doing what you're doing. It's, you know, the best path for the most people can't be the most expensive path. But the path that we're on right now to elevate that 2% and to tell the stories of these people, that's for, you know, that's for sale. So keep at it, man. Thank you. American flannel is the book. The subtitles terrific. How a band of entrepreneurs are bringing the art and business of making clothes back home. Did you think about saying America there, or did you go, no, home? Yeah, you can't. Those things get worked over to death. And America, America is that,

yeah, you can't do it. Yeah, yeah. I get it. It's a great book by wherever you buy your books. Chuck, did I miss anything? No, that's it. And you were right. It's shop class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. I'm typically 90% on these kind of things. I just don't mention the other 10%. I don't bring it up. Being wrong publicly 10% of the time is not a disaster. But if you're making underpants, for instance, and you want them, you know, like you wear them. And it's like, how much crap do you want in them? Right?

I've only got 10%. So, yeah, that's not enough to put them back on for a second day, right? In some areas, folks, you want to be 100%. But not in podcasting. And on that happy note,

thanks again, Stephen. It's terrific. Don't hang up. We've got to make sure you're uploaded as for the rest of you. We'll talk to you next week. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile.

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