My Lucky Shirt

I have been re-reading “REI: 50 Years of Climbing Together” which was written by Harvey Manning to celebrate REI’s 50^th anniversary and was distributed to employees in 1988.  Lots of cool stuff to revisit and anyone who thinks they know about REI really doesn’t unless they have read this book. 

Anyway, it features many pages from catalogs that exhibit the evolution of the co-op and one of those pages stood out.  It is circa 1977 and displays many products that I owned modeled by people I worked with.

From left to right and top to bottom we have Lynn Campbell, Jerry Desmone, Jim Rosa, John McNulty (the Marlboro Man), Lynn once again, a woman whose name escapes me but went to high school with my niece, Sue Anderson.  John Mueller, a guy who I don’t recall, Jenny who was Todd Frankawitz’s partner, Arleen Hiuga and Bill Egan. 

Article “F” modeled by John Mueller really caught my eye.  It’s a rugby shirt that was available in the store before it debuted in the catalog.  I bought a red and black striped version before ’77 and it was my favorite shirt.  I really liked the way it fit and how sporty I looked in it.  Most of all I liked the fact that good things happened to me when I wore it.  So many good things happened when I was wearing that shirt that I took to wearing it whenever I really wanted things to go my way.  Ultimately, I started depending on it when a desired outcome was a stretch and having things go wrong had serious consequences.