01.21.07
Haute couture, U.P. style
Creating a sense of place is one of the most important tasks for a mystery writer who sets his novels in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This means he has to get the details right about nature, the weather, the terrain — and the clothes his characters wear.
For the most part, U.P. attire is simply practical garb for an outdoors land where winter comes early, digs in deep, and stays long: tough denim, thick wool and goose down. The labels are Carhartt, Pendleton and Timberland, not Prada, Donna Karan and Manolo Blahnik.
A Yooper woman of Finnish extraction once told me, only half in jest, that dressing up to go out was simply donning an embroidered sweatshirt.
No one wears baggies or bling. Tats and piercings are few and far between. These are conservative people, and when they spend their hard-earned money, it’s on snowmobiles rather than threads.
These hardy folk swear by well-used chooks (knit caps), choppers (leather mittens with heavy wool inserts) and swampers (rubber-bottomed boots). And, in many instances, by their Kromers.
You don’t see Stormy Kromer caps all that much outside the North, most particularly the U.P. and northern Wisconsin, and when you do, it’s often atop a Yooper in exile. I own one (at upper left), the gift of a Gogebic County sheriff’s deputy who likes mystery novels. It’s the warmest winter hat I’ve got, and the most secure, too.
There’s a legend behind the Kromer: In 1903 a semipro ballplayer turned locomotive engineer named Stormy Kromer got tired of his cap blowing off whenever he stuck his head out the engine’s window at speed. He asked his wife, Ida, to sew folding earflaps to one of his old woolen baseball caps and add stout laces to the front to snug everything down.
It worked so well that soon all the other railroaders wanted one, and in 1919 Stormy and Ida founded a company in Milwaukee to make the caps. It’s still around, at www.stormykromer.com, where you can order one for $30 to $35, depending on the model. It comes in ladies’ and children’s styles, even brimless ones, and there’s a short-brim model for bowhunters that won’t get in the way of drawing a bowstring.
Now if we’d only get some real winter down here in Chicago . . .
