High and Dry

A few years ago a friend of mine, passing the sign on the New York State Thruway for the central leatherstocking region, misread the word leatherstocking for laughingstock, and thought, ‘That must be where Russo’s from.’ She was right. I’m from Gloversville, just a few miles north in the foothills of the Adirondacks, a place that’s easy to joke about unless you live there, as some of my family still do.

In its heyday nine out of ten dress gloves manufactured in the United States came from Gloversville. By the end of the nineteenth century craftsmen from all over Europe had flocked in, and for decades the gloves produced there were on a par with the finest made anywhere in the world. Back then glove cutting was governed by a guild. You apprenticed, as my maternal grandfather did, typically for two or three years. The primary tools of a guild-trained glove cutter’s trade were his eye, his experience of animal skins and his imagination. It was my grandfather who gave me my very first lessons in art – though I doubt he would’ve put it like that – when he explained the challenge of making something truly fine and beautiful from an imperfect animal hide. After they’re tanned, but before they go to the cutter, skins are rolled and brushed and finished to ensure smooth uniformity, but inevitably they retain some of nature’s flaws. The true craftsman, he gave me to understand, works around these flaws or figures out how to incorporate them into the glove’s natural folds or stitching. Each skin posed a problem whose solution required imagination. The glove cutter’s job wasn’t just to get as many gloves as possible out of a skin but to do so while minimizing its flaws.

Leather had been tanned in Fulton County, using the bark from local hemlock trees, since before the American Revolution. Gloversville and neighbouring Johnstown were home to all things leather – shoes and coats and handbags and furniture, not only gloves. My other grandfather, who lived in an Italian village near Rome, had heard about this place where so many leather artisans had gathered in upstate New York, and so he journeyed to America in hope of making a living there as a shoemaker. From New York City he took the train north to Albany, then west as far as the Barge Canal hamlet of Fonda, where he followed the freight tracks north as far as Johnstown, where I was born years later. Did he have any real idea of where he was headed, or what his new life would be like? You tell me. Among the few material possessions he brought with him from the old country was an opera cape.