BRIAN LIBBY

Like a pinch in the neck from Mr. Spock

About three and a half weeks ago I spent an hour cleaning out the basement: vacuuming, mopping. I felt pretty exhausted afterward, but otherwise no cause for alarm.

When I woke up the next morning, though, I felt a searing pain going from the middle of my upper back and down my left arm to the fingertips. It was hard to move around, but I figured it was nothing a hot shower and a couple Advil couldn't cure. But by that evening, I was considering a trip to the hospital. I spent a sleepless night tossing and turning with pain and then hit the Portland Clinic's urgent care facility first thing in the morning.

The diagnosis, courtesy of a doctor who spent several seconds inquiring about my case, was a pinched nerve. I was prescribed muscle relaxers, told to take lots more Advil, and sent on my way. I had to take a taxi to the pharmacy because it was too painful to walk. By that evening, it was too painful to brush my teeth, cut my own dinner with a knife, or put shoes on. Just taking a shower ellicited more grunts than a discus thrower.

It's often occurred to me in the last few weeks that my injury is actually a lot like Mr. Spock's famous Vulcan nerve-pinch on Star Trek. The pain comes from that same shoulder-neck border area. I never dropped to the floor unconscious like Spock's victims, but I also haven't awakened a few minutes afterward good as new. The pinch still hurts. A lot.

After the doctor visit I spent most of the next two weeks lying on my back. I'd wake up around 5 or 6AM, at least two or three hours before normal for this spoiled writer, and simply move my pillow and blanket to the living room sofa. If not for my i-Pod, Food Network and visits from our fat cat Ruthie, I'd have gone stir crazy. At the same time, having had my busiest work period ever during April and May, I couldn't help but feel fortunate that the injury came after my book deadline and a stack of other assignments. It seemed as if my body held out until the coast was clear, and then broke down.

Especially given that my injury happened through the course of fairly routine housework, I felt like the pinched nerve was somehow the inevitable flat tire or busted carbeurator on a car driven for too many miles without a stopover. I'm not normally given to lamenting getting older, even though at 36 it's clear my physical prime passed a few years ago. I like getting older because it brings, for the most part, more career advancement, more emotional contentment, and hopefully more compensation. Even so, I wondered: is this the beginning of something, of an era in life where physical breakdowns inevitably happen?

For several months, I've caught myself checking the time when it's either 1:11 or 11:11. In numerology the number one signifies change. Although I don't automatically believe stuff like this, it has still given me pause to wonder if there's a course change or chapter switch of some kind coming. I hope the end of good health isn't it. Although it'd be too simplistic to make it so cut and dry anyway. I've been having headaches for over 15 years anyway after a car accident the day after Bill Clinton was elected. My normal roommate who drove me to the subway station was home sick after too much champagne the election night before, so a different roommate, who had had her driver's licence only a few weeks, drove me instead. We never quite reached the station.

Even so, my headaches are now pretty manageable. This pinched nerve, on the other hand can totally lay a person out.

Although it's totally unrelated, I've also connected this incident in my mind to the apparent end of the affordable airfare era. In the last few years I've had a traveler's dream come true: four visits to London, two to Tokyo and Kyoto, and single visits to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Bruges, Edinburgh, and Beijing. That on top of domestic trips to New York several times, DC, LA, SF, Houston, Austin, and Charlottesville. I'd really hate for chronic pain and unaffordable airfares to represent the end of this period of exploring the world.

It's now 25 days after the basement cleaning that pinched the nerve. I still can't sleep on my right side, but that's a big improvement over not being to sleep on either side after a lifetime of doing so. But a couple of accupuncture appointments have helped.

I've actually been able to measure the progress of recovery by the fingers on my left hand. When the injury initially happened, they all went numb. Over the next several days, the thumb got its feeling back, and that progress extended finger by finger across my left hand until all but the pinky had returned to normalcy. But the pinky has always remained numb. Overall I think the progress is the same. I'm probably 80 to 85 percent better. But will that last 10 to 15 percent ever come? Will I be in chronic pain the rest of my life?

I'm still inclined to be optimistic. And if I do get my health back completely, I'm going to count blessings. Since this happened I've talked to a lot of people, and been told several stories about friends and relatives who must live with chronic pain. The other day a gallery owner told me about a friend who begins every day swallowing four or five Aleve. I also think of my grandma who is up every night with arthritis pain. I don't want to be melodramatic about this, but good health is a real gift.

Stories that never ran: Stall & Dean vintage athletic wear

Continuing the theme of the last post, another article I wrote a few years ago that never ran, this one for the New York Times business section, was about a really cool vintage athletic apparel company based out of Seattle. It was for a section in the times called 'Grassroots Business', profiling smaller companies. But they discontinued the series before my piece was published. 

Although I never got to see this piece published, the owner of the company did give me a Soviet Union baseball hat that I still cherish to this day (pictured below). Meanwhile, here's the piece...

SEATTLE--It is somehow fitting that Jerry Cohen was born in Brooklyn the same year that the Dodgers baseball team moved to Los Angeles. As the CEO of Stall & Dean, a Seattle-based manufacturer of vintage sports jerseys and apparel, he is in the business of celebrating and selling history.

“I grew up learning baseball from my dad, who was originally a Brooklyn Dodger fan, but also taught me quite a lot about the Negro leagues,” Mr. Cohen recalls from Stall & Dean’s headquarters, a warehouse around the corner from Safeco Field, the Seattle Mariners’ stadium. “Even as a kid, the two things that I like most about baseball, as opposed to my peers, were the history and the uniforms.”

Today Stall & Dean is a leading manufacturer of vintage athletic apparel, which has become a $2 billion per year industry. “Retro or vintage licensed apparel has grown pretty nicely over the last twelve to eighteen months,” says Noelle Grainger, an apparel industry analyst for JP Morgan. “I think when you’re looking at any type of change in the growth rate over and above low- to mid-single digits [as the vintage market is today], that’s more a reaction to fashion trends than something driven by the fan consumer, because the fan consumer is fairly consistent,” Ms. Grainger agrees. “At some point that growth will wane, but there will always be a core base there.”

It’s no wonder, then, that Mr. Cohen says he is, “very uncomfortable with trends and fads, even when it benefits us. I never approached it that way. We always sold the idea of timelessness.”

Mr. Cohen’s company began in Seattle as Ebbets Field Flannels in 1987, offering hand-sewn, button-down wool flannel baseball jerseys in an era when most Major League teams were still wearing pullover polyester. A former rock & roll musician, Mr. Cohen’s company started modestly, with catalogues made at do-it-yourself copy shops and word of mouth the only promotion.

As sole proprietor, Mr. Cohen could not afford licensing contracts necessary to produce major league team apparel, so he began to make jerseys of old Negro League and Pacific Coast minor league teams, which at the time were public domain. But before he could make the jerseys, Mr. Cohen had to spend thousands of hours researching their look at libraries and the homes of collectors and former players. “I was a bit of a history detective,” he says.

The company’s name change, made official XXX years ago, reflects Ebbets Field Flannels’ purchase of Stall & Dean, an athletic apparel manufacturer founded in 1898 that once produced jerseys and shoes for Major League Baseball, but has in recent years been reduced to producing special-order uniforms for small amateur teams.

“We convinced them that their future was in their past,” says Stall and Dean’s current chief operating officer, Joe Cuff. By taking on the Stall & Dean name, Ebbets Field Flannels was able to claim a century’s worth of history and a moniker that better reflected its expansion beyond baseball jerseys into apparel from a variety of sports.

Stall & Dean occupies a niche between retro athletic apparel makers who are more fashion-oriented, such as Blue Marlin, and companies who make replica jerseys of major-league teams, such as Mitchell & Ness. The focus is more on quality than quality, with Stall and Dean charging as much as $300 for a single jersey.

“We don’t make 100,000 of every garment,” Mr. Cuff continues, “and you don’t find it on every corner across the country. The fabric and craftsmanship helps to drive our price up, but so does the fact that it’s special.”

Indeed, Stall and Dean has grown significantly over the last few years. In 1998, it reported sales of $1.68 million. This year, the company is projecting $8.73 million.

Although in the past Stall & Dean produced a small amount of jerseys and other apparel of major league teams, today the company has abandoned that side of its business entirely.

“The problem with licensing is it’s a dual-edged sword,” Mr. Cohen explains. “When you’re dealing with an NFL or an NHL, they give you the opportunity to use their team names and marks, but you do all the research for them, and they turn around and give the contract to competitors two years later. They also tend to edit and sanitize the history, and I never responded well to being hemmed in and edited in that way.”

Although it would be anathema to larger manufacturers, Stall and Dean’s abandonment of major league licensing agreements may have been for the best. Not only are the teams it features—an assortment of defunct professional league teams as well as international leagues and college teams—more unique in identity and look, but they collectively also represent a more untarnished spirit of competition.

“We want that purity from the days when it was about sport,” Mr. Cuff says, “not corporate sponsorships and ticket sales. Negro League jerseys like the 1940 New York Cubans and 1942 Newark Eagles continue to be top sellers, as do the 1968 Portland Buckaroos minor league hockey team, and even a line of roller rink teams such as the lightning bolt-festooned Latin Liberators.

Stall & Dean also has a licensing agreement with Harlem’s recently reborn Rucker amateur basketball league, whose circa-1950s and 60s vintage jerseys have become some of the company’s most popular items while also tying into its urban youth demographic, one of vintage apparel’s most enthusiastic. “Everything comes from the streets, and everything comes from the community,” says Chris Rucker, who operates the Rucker league and is the grandson of its founder, Holcombe Rucker. The Rucker Shamrocks jersey is easily the most popular, worn by a host of celebrity rappers and professional basketball players.

Next, Stall & Dean will release this fall a line of early- to mid-20th Century Ivy League sweaters, akin to what one might imagine a character from a J.D. Salinger novel wearing. After that, Mr. Cohen would like to expand various lines of international league jerseys, complementing teams already represented like the Tokyo Giants and Mexico City Diablos Rojos. And special orders continue, such as the new Slim Shady line for rapper Eminem.

“The interest in retro is cyclical, and now it happens to be in a really high cycle.” Mr. Cohen says, “but when it’s not a trend anymore, we’ll still be here, and still be making stuff that I consider timeless.”