Ware's Wares Wear Well

Ware’s wares wear well. That was the motto of the Regina men’s tailored clothing store called Ware’s I worked in from 1966 to 1967. 

Ware’s had had been around since the 1920’s I think. It was reputed to be the largest purveyor of men’s tailored clothing in western Canada and I believed it. There were no shirts, ties or shoes to be found there. Just suits, sport jackets, trousers and seasonal coats. In almost any size you’d care to mention. 50 tall – sure, no problem. 34 stout – what colour would you like? And with two professional tailors working in the back we could fit anybody. Any body at all. 

The tailors were both old European Jewish guys. One of them was a rather surly, chain smoking German. The other was a sad eyed, sweet natured Pole who’d survived a camp, I don’t know if I ever knew which one. They hated each other and wouldn’t speak unless absolutely necessary and then with a barely veiled animosity that was unnerving. The tailor shop was always silent except for the sounds of steam, sewing machines and the hiss of thread through tightly woven worsted. They were both brilliant tailors who could take a suit of clothes apart, alter it to fit, and put it back together again so perfectly you’d never know. When we sold a suit that would need alteration beyond pant legs and sleeves we could summon one of them from their lair by means of little recessed buttons located in multiple places throughout the store. A chime would sound in their shop and one of them would come out. The German guy always came out with one his roll-your-owns dangling from his lip and looking like he was ready for a confrontation and the Pole just shuffled out in his slippers with his spectacles half-way down his nose, looking sadly resigned to seeing how much work we’d made for him this time. 

The store was owned by a former traveling clothing company rep who lived in Montreal. He visited once a year. The mainstay brand we carried was Freedman, from Montreal, which I recently learned was owned by Leonard Cohen’s family. Freedman no longer exists, just as most of the once thriving Montreal rag trade no longer exists. 

The clothing in the store was made of wool, cotton, linen, silk and sometimes mohair and virtually all the fabrics were from the British Isles and Europe. China and Japan hadn’t really got into the game yet. 

One of the tasks assigned to me, as the junior guy, was to see to the mailing of altered suits to the men who’d come in to the city to buy their suits, usually farmers, but who lived too far away to come in again just to pick them up. I learned how to correctly fold and pack a suit so it came out of the box wrinkle free. Hint: the jacket is packed inside out.

The sales staff worked on salary plus commission. The manager, a man I came to like and admire, would regularly go around the store with his inventory list and once a suit or jacket or whatever had been on the racks for a certain length of time he’d mark it as having a higher commission. The suits and jackets all hung on the racks with lapels facing left, meaning the left sleeve was the one that hung down on the outside. When you turned the left lapel over up near the neck line you’d find the paper factory tag basted on there with the size, fabric information, inventory number and so on. The manager would mark these factory tags with a little star shaped ink stamp. The number of stars determined the commission bonus you’d get for selling the suit. There was a commission on all the products in the store including the brand new stuff but whenever possible we tried to sell the bonus stuff, especially the 4 star suits. Money, it’s a gas. 

One day a guy who’d been my physics teacher in Grade 12 came in. I turned to the only other salesman there and told him who this was and I had to be the one to sell him. This guy was one of those teachers that pretty much nobody in the school liked. He was a poor teacher for starters, a pedant with no capacity for making something interesting. He had a tyrannical streak too. And a really silly mustache. We never came to blows but we had a couple of doozy yelling matches. Yeah, I was one those guys.

I put on my best smile and greeted him like I was delighted to see him. Which I was because he was tall and thin with rounded shoulders and I knew exactly which ugly 4 star suit I was going to put him in. When he told me needed two I smiled a bit wider cause there were two ugly 4 star suits in his size range. 

When it was time to summon a tailor I went back to the shop instead of ringing their bell because I wanted a moment to tell the Polish tailor why this guy was in these two suits that didn’t really fit him all that well and weren’t really good colours for him. He got a lovely little twinkle in his eye and played right along. If the alterations had been any more extreme than they were he might have said something but they weren’t and he didn’t. Ka-ching. 

I stopped working there in December of 1967 as I was going to be moving north in January of 1968 to start working in radio at a little country and western station in Lloydminster. 

About 6 months later, no longer in radio and living in Vancouver, I bumped into a guy I’d worked with at the store, a salesman who’d been there since the war years. A large, florid, rotund, never married, hail-fellow-well-met guy with a widow’s peak, mildly drunk in the middle of the day, who had no idea who I was even though we’d spent a year working together just a short time ago. It made me inexplicably sad. 

And then in 1975 or so, after I’d moved to Toronto, I was back in Regina doing a play at The Globe Theatre and I saw a going out of business sign on the front window of Ware’s. I went in. The manager I had worked with was there, looking older and tired. He was overseeing the sale of the remaining stock and the fittings. The owner in Montreal had died and his family didn’t want to keep the store going and no one wanted to buy it. We reminisced for a bit, I told him why I was back in town, he told me his daughter was a playwright now and we shook hands and said goodbye.