CLOAKS & SUITS: Stitch in Time

CLOAKS & SUITS

Caught in a tight pair of Palm Beach pants earlier this year, the Goodall Co., largest U.S. maker of men’s summer suits, suffered some embarrassing rips. It made many retailers mad when a sudden cut in the retail price of Palm Beach suits (fixed by Fair Trade laws in 45 states) forced merchants to lose profits on the suits in stock (TIME, July 18). Last week, Goodall’s President Elmer L. Ward was confident that he could patch everything up. He had a brand-new kind of Palm Beach cloth which, he predicted, would revolutionize men’s light-weight suits.

Ward, a 6 ft., 200-lb. Boston Irishman, learned to keep his eye on the ball while winning New England’s golf championship in 1930. Since 1931, when Maine’s Sanford Mills and Goodall Worsted Co. first decided to make Palm Beach suits as well as Palm Beach cloth, Ward has been running their suitmaking subsidiary, the Goodall Co. Five years ago he consolidated his position by buying control of the mills and merging them into a new parent company, Goodall-Sanford Inc., with himself as president.

Ward knew that the wartime textile boom would not last forever. Three years ago he set his research chief, Everett Nutter, to developing a new cloth to meet the hot competition of rayons and tropical worsteds. The shakedown in the textile industry came before Nutter’s new fabric was ready. In the first three quarters of Goodall-Sanford’s last fiscal year, the company’s profits fell 51%; Ward quickly decided on his price-cut to clear out stocks for his new fabric.

One big change in the new cloth is the abandonment of cotton, which Everett Nutter’s older brother William first wove with mohair in 1906 to produce the original Palm Beach cloth. The new cloth will have just about as much mohair, but the “scratch” will be taken out by wrapping it in rayon and nylon. The mohair core, said Ward, makes the cloth almost wrinkleproof, the rayon makes it cool. With it he hopes to keep ahead of his rayon and worsted competitors with a suit that combines some of the features of both.