Textiles

Our textile business—that’s a business that took me 22 years to figure out it wasn’t very good. Well, in the textile business, we made over half of the men’s suit linings in the United States. If you wore a men’s suit, chances were that it had a Hathaway lining. And we made them during World War II, when customers couldn’t get their linings from other people. Sears Roebuck voted us Supplier of the Year. They were wild about us. The thing was, they wouldn’t give us another half a cent a yard because nobody had ever gone into a men’s clothing store and asked for a pin striped suit with a Hathaway lining. You just don’t see that.