Read Online The Coat Route by Meg Lukens Noonan - Free Book Online
Authors: Meg Lukens Noonan
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with Salvador Dalí at the St. Regis, according to the biographer Ellis Amburn. The coat had been given to Kerouac by a friend, who had stolen it. Kerouac later traded it to the poet Randall Jarrell for a fur-collared leather bomber jacket.That same year, the slugger Ted Williams ended up with one by force majeure, according to a tale told to a reporter at the
San Francisco Chronicle
by a salesclerk. An earthquake had struck while Williams was trying on a vicuña coat on the fourth floor of Roos/Atkins, a Sutter Street menswear shop, and he had dashed in fright out of the store wearing the coat. The clerk said he had not returned.
A year later, a political scandal turned vicuña into a household word. Sherman Adams, Dwight Eisenhower’s White House chief of staff and a former governor of New Hampshire, was forced to resign when it was revealed in House subcommitteehearings that he had accepted a vicuña overcoat from Bernard Goldfine, a Boston textile manufacturer who was being investigated for Federal Trade Commission violations.
Vicuña hung in windows of Arabian palaces and was draped over sofas in the Kennedy White House. Newspapers noted that Hedy Lamarr wore a vicuña coat to her 1966 Florida court date to plead innocent to shoplifting $86 worth of merchandise. The tawny overcoats were de rigueur for everyone from Italian mafiosi to Japanese dentists.
Vicuña, it seemed, was everywhere. And then the supply all but dried up. The vicuña population fell from about 400,000 in the 1950s to roughly 10,000 by 1967.
Were it not for Felipe Benavides Barreda, an elegant former Peruvian diplomat and a graduate of the London School of Economics, the vicuña might have disappeared forever.
“I began to bellow and shout that there were no vicuña left,” Benavides said in a
New Yorker
profile. “They said I was mad.”
Benavides fought for reserves for the animals. In 1969, he helped establish the Pampas Galeras, a sixteen-thousand-acre vicuña sanctuary in Peru’s southern altiplano that employed armed guards to protect the animals from poachers. He also authored the La Paz agreement between Peru and neighboring countries with vicuña populations, calling for a ten-year ban on hunting and trafficking in vicuña wool. European zoos protested the treaty, saying they needed to import vicuñas for their collections, but the agreement stuck. The penalty was one year in prison for every vicuña killed. Traders were given three to five years, with no possibility for bail. The authorities were finally getting serious. In 1975, vicuñas were listed on Appendix 1 (most endangered) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES).
Though poachers were still operating and the Shining Path terrorist group hindered conservation activities into the 1990s, the population began to rebound. As the herds grew, the focus shifted from hands-off preservation to a policy of sustainable use. The vicuña, after all, had gold on its back and lived in a place where most of the indigenous people scraped along on about $300 a year. In 1995, the trade ban on cloth made from Peruvian fiber was lifted, and President Fujimori signed a law giving usufruct rights to the campesinos on whose communal land the animals lived. A consortium of three firms—the Italian companies Loro Piana and Agnona and the Peruvian company Inca Group—was awarded the rights to export and process the fiber.
The government also reinstated the
chaccu
, the ancient Inca model of sustainability. The plan called for rural Andeans to round up the vicuñas and shear and release them. The revenues from selling the raw fiber—roughly $100 for every animal shorn—would go to their communities. In exchange, they would protect the animals from poachers and do what they could to keep the population growing. By 1994, Peru had about 67,000 vicuñas; by 2010, there were close to 180,000. The International Union for Conservation of Nature
San Francisco Chronicle
by a salesclerk. An earthquake had struck while Williams was trying on a vicuña coat on the fourth floor of Roos/Atkins, a Sutter Street menswear shop, and he had dashed in fright out of the store wearing the coat. The clerk said he had not returned.
A year later, a political scandal turned vicuña into a household word. Sherman Adams, Dwight Eisenhower’s White House chief of staff and a former governor of New Hampshire, was forced to resign when it was revealed in House subcommitteehearings that he had accepted a vicuña overcoat from Bernard Goldfine, a Boston textile manufacturer who was being investigated for Federal Trade Commission violations.
Vicuña hung in windows of Arabian palaces and was draped over sofas in the Kennedy White House. Newspapers noted that Hedy Lamarr wore a vicuña coat to her 1966 Florida court date to plead innocent to shoplifting $86 worth of merchandise. The tawny overcoats were de rigueur for everyone from Italian mafiosi to Japanese dentists.
Vicuña, it seemed, was everywhere. And then the supply all but dried up. The vicuña population fell from about 400,000 in the 1950s to roughly 10,000 by 1967.
Were it not for Felipe Benavides Barreda, an elegant former Peruvian diplomat and a graduate of the London School of Economics, the vicuña might have disappeared forever.
“I began to bellow and shout that there were no vicuña left,” Benavides said in a
New Yorker
profile. “They said I was mad.”
Benavides fought for reserves for the animals. In 1969, he helped establish the Pampas Galeras, a sixteen-thousand-acre vicuña sanctuary in Peru’s southern altiplano that employed armed guards to protect the animals from poachers. He also authored the La Paz agreement between Peru and neighboring countries with vicuña populations, calling for a ten-year ban on hunting and trafficking in vicuña wool. European zoos protested the treaty, saying they needed to import vicuñas for their collections, but the agreement stuck. The penalty was one year in prison for every vicuña killed. Traders were given three to five years, with no possibility for bail. The authorities were finally getting serious. In 1975, vicuñas were listed on Appendix 1 (most endangered) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES).
Though poachers were still operating and the Shining Path terrorist group hindered conservation activities into the 1990s, the population began to rebound. As the herds grew, the focus shifted from hands-off preservation to a policy of sustainable use. The vicuña, after all, had gold on its back and lived in a place where most of the indigenous people scraped along on about $300 a year. In 1995, the trade ban on cloth made from Peruvian fiber was lifted, and President Fujimori signed a law giving usufruct rights to the campesinos on whose communal land the animals lived. A consortium of three firms—the Italian companies Loro Piana and Agnona and the Peruvian company Inca Group—was awarded the rights to export and process the fiber.
The government also reinstated the
chaccu
, the ancient Inca model of sustainability. The plan called for rural Andeans to round up the vicuñas and shear and release them. The revenues from selling the raw fiber—roughly $100 for every animal shorn—would go to their communities. In exchange, they would protect the animals from poachers and do what they could to keep the population growing. By 1994, Peru had about 67,000 vicuñas; by 2010, there were close to 180,000. The International Union for Conservation of Nature
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