🎧 242: With the arrival of ...

     With the arrival of the twentieth century came a slow decline in interest in men’s furnishings, and that, of course, meant economic decline for Chacallit. For decades, this was a gradual slipping, but then in the period following the Second World War the bottom really fell out of the domestic men’s furnishings market. There were many reasons. Primary among them was the belief among younger men that everything had been changed by the war, that nothing was the same, that nothing prewar had much of a role in the postwar world, that the world had broken forever with its past, had left its sad old self behind. Interest in suspenders, detachable collars, shirt studs, and cuff links disappeared among younger men as if overnight. Though some interest in such haberdashery persisted among the older, more conservative, and wealthier, those men were increasingly attracted to the products of the rebuilding Europe, especially those of England and Germany, which were thought to be of a quality that the domestic products couldn’t match. (How ironic that the people around Chacallit who lost so much to that competition should be mostly of English and German ancestry themselves, and proud of it. Many people in Chacallit still distribute gifts on Boxing Day, and there’s still an annual wurst, kraut, and potato salad festival every summer.)
     For nearly three decades following World War II, Chacallit slept. It was awakened at last by a local boy, Deke Schumacher, who, riding the crest of a wave of success as Vice President for Computer Furniture at IBM, walked away from it all in a huff one day and returned home, to the steep hills of Chacallit, beside the rushing waters of the Whatsit, to start his own computer furniture company. Sales of the ChacalliTech Computer Scooter, a platform — actually a whole line of platforms of various sizes — that can be installed under computer components, allowing one to move them around at will, exceeded even the sunniest predictions of Deke himself. What the ChacalliTech ads say about the Scooter (borrowing, probably unconsciously, from a nineteenth-century advertisement for Studebaker wagons) is true: “The Brightest Star in the Computer Furniture Firmament Is the ChacalliTech Computer Scooter™.”
     Chacallit today is, in outward appearance, remarkably like the town in which Lorna grew up, and that similarity is the result of a pattern of economic decline and renewal that first isolated Chacallit from architectural modernization and then rescued it from physical decay. Had the town prospered throughout this century, modernization and overdevelopment would certainly have obliterated its past. Instead, Chacallit dozed until the ChacalliTech prosperity brought new hope for the future and an urge to restore and preserve the past, with the result that, when I visited, I found that I could easily imagine life in Chacallit as it must have been in the early part of this century, when Lorna was a girl.
     When Lorna was born, the century had just turned, and the mills hummed, turning out suspenders, collars, collar stays, cuff links, money clips, and the like. Money seemed to flow into the town as swiftly as the swollen waters of the Whatsit in a January thaw. Today, the gentlemen’s furnishings that one finds in the bright shops along River Road are likely to come from Japan, but prosperity has returned. The old brick mills along the Whatsit have been painstakingly restored, and some of the stern, handsome buildings now house the humming facilities of ChacalliTech.
     All along River Road a visitor will find, in other resurrected mills and warehouses, charming shops — among them the Tie-Tack Tack Shop and Hot-Cha-Chatchkes (a treasure trove of a place that specializes in gewgaws of the 1920s) — and intriguing boites and restaurants — including Chez Mom (a homey eatery where one can get Tarte aux Pommes Façon de Mom, and the day’s special is always listed as Les Restes), Eau Boy (an all-water bar with more than a hundred domestic and imported waters), 24-Karat Studs (a gay bar), and the Sleeve Garter Pub (where a Huber tends bar).
     The Whatsit Valley is a pretty but forbidding area. The winters here are long and cold, as they were then; the autumn woods blaze with color, as they did then; the spring earth is fecund and odorous, as it was then; the summers are damp and languorous, as they were then; and all the year round the night wind howls in the valley as if it held a grudge, just as it did then.
     The houses in Chacallit are plain and staunch. Only stubborn people could have built their houses here, notched the hillside for foundations, cut and fit the stone, created a level foothold for each house, for themselves, always working against the slope, always working against gravity. It is as if the difficulty of building here was part of the attraction that Chacallit held for its early settlers. Here was a place where they could test themselves, their resolve, and their aspirations against the slope, against the unrelenting downward tug. The builders bequeathed to the generations that followed them a test no less difficult, for they, too, have always to battle the tug of gravity. The young and well-to-do employees of ChacalliTech who now pay high prices for the staunch hillside houses, who paint them, furnish them sparely and brightly, and landscape their yards with plants that never grew in the valley before, find that the rain washes the grass seed down the slope, the garden cart wants to roll across the lawn into the drainage ditch that runs beside the road, and croquet is a nightmare.

In Topical Guide 242, Mark Dorset considers Life Imitates Art? and Chacallit, New York from this episode.

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