My parents had met as teenagers in a small town in northern Wisconsin and knew what cold weather was, and how to cope with it. I have a photo, taken some time in the late 1920’s, or early ‘30’s of my mother posing in her new, black sealskin coat – probably a Christmas gift from my dad. She looked glamorous, happy and very cozy. This, of course, was long before people began to worry about the extinction of wildlife. After all, a large portion of the economic history of our nation involves the fur trade. Early settlers hunted not only for food, but they made use of the hides and pelts of the animals they harvested. Native Americans used furs as an exchange medium to obtain cloth, tools and other trade goods from early entrepreneurs. Explorers and frontiersmen depended on wildlife for survival.
My family has a history in America going back before the Revolution, and one of my mother’s grandfathers captained a Spanish ship that, among other things, hunted whales – an economic necessity at a time when whale oil was a valued commodity, before we had the knowledge or technology to extract oil from the earth. Well into the 20th century, mankind was still blithely harvesting what for so long had seemed to be Nature’s endless bounty. Wearing fur coats was quite acceptable and nobody was predicting the endangerment of such an abundant species as seals.
In Knoxville, Iowa by the 1940’s, Mother’s coat was not only out of style but essentially unnecessary. Good woolen coats were stylish and not too expensive. Homes, stores and automobiles were heated and winters were much less frigid than those near the Great Lakes. The sealskin coat, while still thick, warm and glossy was much too heavy and bulky to wear most winter days, and certainly much too warm to wear in the car, even without the heater running. But there was one practical use for it, at least so it seemed to my sisters and me when it came on those nippy fall evenings in our town’s football stadium.
Our school mascot was a black panther and our school colors were black and gold. With a bright yellow scarf and mittens, the black fur coat seemed, to our adolescent imaginations, the perfect stylish outfit to wear when attending those late autumn games. Our stadium, municipal swimming pool and accompanying bathhouse (which served as locker-rooms for high school football teams) had been built by the CCC and was constructed almost entirely of stone. The stadium seating looks much like over-sized stone stair steps – just tiers of long, backless, hard stone benches. On late fall nights they were, not only hard, but exceedingly cold to sit on without cushions or blankets. The sealskin coat provided pure luxury on those cold nights.
Accustomed to walking everywhere we went in town, the trek to the stadium was about the longest walk we had to endure. It was on the opposite side of town from where we lived and was well over a mile away. On really cold football nights, the coat was welcome, but when the weather was milder, the heavy hide became a burden and the wearer could work up a pretty good sweat before the stadium came into sight. It was seldom an issue when it came to deciding who got to wear the coat when there were two or three of us who wanted to wear it. The oldest always had first choice – sometimes, in milder weather, that privilege was waived to the benefit of the next in line.
After we were all married and spending those Friday nights getting our own children dressed sufficiently warmly for their own football games, the black fur coat languished in cold storage for a few years. Eventually, Mother had it re-cut and made into a shorter, more practical jacket and a wonderful fur hat that looked as if it came from the steppes of Siberia. Unfortunately, that was when people began protesting the wearing of furs, and she gave it up altogether. I think it a pity that people had to give up wearing furs they already had, but am not surprised, as I’ve noticed that public opinion usually goes overboard in its attempts to right a wrong.