Greek-Americans Who Made Suits Fine Enough for a President

The story of Greek-American tailors who worked in Rochester, New York, for Hickey Freeman, then considered among the world’s most prestigious brands for suits.

By Evan Bourtis

Inside a four-story building of sand-colored bricks in 20th-century Rochester, New York, tailors speaking different languages work with sewing machines, long metal scissors, needles, or clothing irons. Each has a different role in piecing together a men’s suit fine enough for a president.

My grandparents – papou and yiayia in Greek – immigrated to the United States to make suits for Hickey Freeman, then considered among the world’s most prestigious suit brands. They worked together on the third floor of a factory in the 1970s that made suits for Hollywood stars including Paul Newman and Ray Liotta.

That same factory also produced suits for presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama – and more recently – the suit that Joe Biden wore when he was sworn in as the nation’s 46th president.

Hickey Freeman built its reputation by recruiting highly skilled tailors from across the globe including Greece.

Lenora Ince – a Rochester resident who served as Hickey Freeman’s second-floor shop chair during her 25 years there – also remembers working alongside tailors from across Europe including Italy, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. She also had co-workers from Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and The Philippines.

“I loved the diversity because you never got bored. You’re always learning new things from people,” said Ms. Ince who started at the factory in 1985.

Hickey Freeman and the long-gone Bonds Clothing Company relocated 100 families from Turkey to make suits in Rochester between 1967 and 1969.

The latest of those years, my 40-year-old papou left the tailoring shop he owned in Athens and hopped on a one-way flight to the United States alone. At Hickey Freeman, he was no longer the boss. He was one Greek-speaking sewing machine worker in a symphony of English, Italian, and Turkish speakers, each with a different role in transforming a mass of cloth into a suit that would sell for today’s equivalent of more than $1,500.

The following summer, Papou reunited with his 38-year-old wife, 4-year-old daughter, and 6-month-old son and they began living together in a heavily-immigrant neighborhood in Rochester’s west side.

Yiayia began cutting plush fabric at Hickey Freeman in 1971, handing off her trimmed creations until her husband eventually stitched the pieces together.

She also met a seamstress who became her lifelong friend, Katina Petalas, a deeply Orthodox Christian woman born 88 years ago in the mountainside northern Greek village of Nymfaio. Katina still remembers carpooling to the factory with Yiayia when I spoke to her over the phone one July evening.

Katina, who outlived my grandparents, remembers working on the same floor as tailors born in Turkey, Greece’s geopolitical rival. Despite that, “Den malosame” – we didn’t bicker, Katina said while reminiscing about her old workplace.

Katina said she and Yiayia worked on separate floors but met in the lunchroom, both packing traditional Greek dishes to eat during breaks.

Greek-Americans settle in Rochester not only to make suits

My grandparents were among the 150,000 Greeks to arrive in the United States between 1965 and 1980s after the U.S. government lifted its restrictions on immigration from Eastern Europe.

The most popular destinations for Greeks in those decades were metropolises such as New York City, Boston, and Chicago. However, the mid-sized city of Rochester – about 550 kilometers upstate of New York City – also attracted Greeks thanks to its booming industries including Kodak, printing company Xerox, and Hickey Freeman.

Ms. Ince described Hickey Freeman as a “mini–United Nations”. When she began working there in the 1980s, there were about 1,200 employees. While some were lifelong Rochester residents, others recently arrived from another continent.

Ms. Ince, now an associate pastor and a hospice aide, invited me into her home to share her memories of being part of a multicultural workplace. When I began speaking about my papou bringing his family to Rochester after a year apart, her face lights up.

“The ones that came, especially from different countries, were hard workers and they came with their families,” she says. “They were trying to establish and build and make sure their children’s children have a better life.”

Sitting at her circular kitchen table, Ms. Ince reminisced about Christmas season parties at Hickey Freeman and her shock when first seeing how fast second-floor women could sew an arm sleeve. She made circular motions with her hand, like someone dipping a spoon into a bowl of yogurt, to show how fast the women could repeatedly puncture cloth with a needle.

Katina served as one of those lightning-fast needle and thread workers until she left in 1977. During my mother’s weekly call with Katina, we took turns asking her questions in Greek about her time sewing on the second floor. She described her workplace from five decades ago better than I can remember what I did at work five months ago.

Katina told stories about seamstresses who ate lunch in the bathroom to save time. She recalled that many seamstresses were Italian but there were plenty of Greeks to speak with about cooking and religion. She remembered her husband driving her and my yiayia to Hickey Freeman and eight hours later, my papou would take them home.

Immigrants helping fellow immigrants

In the era when my grandparents worked at Hickey Freeman, there were so many immigrant tailors that the factory held naturalization ceremonies to celebrate employees becoming new American citizens.

Ms. Ince recalled that well-established, multilingual tailors translated orders from bosses into English for newly arrived immigrants. That was a comforting thought knowing that my papou spoke virtually no English when he arrived and never became proficient in English.

I imagine Papou’s newly found fellow Greeks explaining how to fold, pin, and sew the inside of a jacket, Hickey Freeman-style. He was never obstinate, so I couldn’t imagine him getting upset if his boss told him to Americanize the sewing machine techniques he perfected in Athens.

When Yiayia joined her husband in the factory, they worked together on the third floor. As Ms. Ince explained, every floor had its specialties.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the first floor was dedicated to printing ads, repairing clothing, customer service, and office spaces. The next floor up was dedicated to sewing by hand and removing temporary thread. It’s also the floor where Ms. Ince became the first ever woman to press suits for Hickey Freeman, using a clothing iron to maintain their shape.

The third floor is where Yiayia’s specialty of cutting cloth and Papou’s specialty of machine sewing took place. Using scissors, Yiayia would cut fabric laid beneath an outline, marked up with pencil to indicate dimensions. Later in the suit-making process, Papou would guide fabric pieces past a metal platform to leave an even, stitched trail.

From seeing images of tailoring scissors from that era, it’s easy to imagine why cutting would have been a satisfying role for my yiayia.

The battle-ax sharp scissors of charcoal-colored metal, probably the length of Yiayia’s forearm, seemed brutally heavy. Neither finger hole had any padding like children’s safety scissors do. Despite that, the scissors would be no match for a woman who, even in her 70s, lifted foam-covered dumbbells from her chair while keeping an eye on her two troublesome grandchildren.

Yiayia’s remarkable arm strength made up for her difficulty walking from being afflicted with Polio as an infant born on the Island of Evia. Instead of letting her leg pain hold her back, she focused on what did work: Her mind (she was a math wiz) and her arms.

First day on the job in a foreign land

I could visualize my yiayia at Hickey Freeman taking an elevator up three floors and, first thing, selecting which type of fabric to cut. For suits, her color choices of 100% wool cloth included smoky gray, a shade of blue darker than the Aegean Sea, and a plaid pattern with black stripes on a pewter-tinted background.

At least those were the choices in a spring 1987 catalog of fabric samples. The samples, cut to about 2 x 1.5 inches, were wedged into the catalog’s pages. The catalog was just one of the items in a Hickey Freeman orientation packet folder archived at the University of Rochester.

The university’s library is home to the “Hickey Freeman Company papers” – a file holder containing photos, type-written letters, and newspaper clippings saved between 1881 and 2004. I didn’t spot my grandparents in any of the photos I examined.

However, the orientation packet helped me to visualize my grandparents first day on the job in a foreign land. Papou left the factory in 1973 and Yiayia left in 1977 but the packet is the closest window into their past that I can find.

The packet includes two black-and-white laminated photos of a bald man in his mid-50s – with an exaggerated, toothy smile to greet new employees – modeling two of Hickey Freeman’s designs.

One suit, appearing the same blended shade of gray as TV static, has a modern look with a notched lapel stretching down just past the man’s chest. The jacket’s fabric has clusters of parallel and perpendicular lines intersecting to form a plaid pattern. The dapper model casually stands with a slight tilt in his head and rests his left elbow on a wooden desk, showcasing how the luxurious fabric moves.

The other suit appears solid color and old-fashioned. The breast-pocket-side jacket flap is stretched over the other flap and buttoned to give it a tight-fitting look. The model has one arm in his pocket and the other leaning atop an imitation Greek column.

I envision my papou examining the photographed model on his first day to guess at how American suits are tailored compared to Greek suits – from the bulkiness of the shoulder pads to the grooves in the lapel.

I wonder if he was ever jealous of the suits that Hickey Freeman produced compared to his tailoring shop of several employees in Athens. Or maybe he saw Hickey Freeman suits as too unvarying, limited by the choices in a catalog, whereas his tailoring shop in Athens would give him more freedom to experiment.

A new chapter for the Greek-Americans beyond suits

Papou left Hickey Freeman for a job to build cameras for another booming Rochester industry: Kodak. Four years later, my yiayia and Katina also left Hickey Freeman for Kodak. They both left in 1977 after Hickey Freeman brought in “I michani”, the fabric-cutting machine, as Katina called it when I spoke to her over the phone.

Yiayia suspected that her position might not be around for much longer, so she followed my papou to Kodak. Soon after, my yiayia showed up at Katina’s house with a job application for Kodak and, in a matter of time, they were co-workers once again.

Decades later, the staff at Hickey Freeman would reduce to a few hundred because of changes in demand. However, a custom clothing giant aims to breathe new life into the factory.

This May, the announcement came that Hickey Freeman suits would no longer be manufactured in Rochester for the first time after more than a century.

The New York City-based Authentic Brands Group, owner of the Hickey Freeman brand since 2010, licensed the suit-making to the Rochester factory in exchange for royalties. When the license was up for renewal this year, the Authentic Brands Group decided to give the rights to make Hickey Freeman suits to another clothing company, which plans to move the production out of the U.S.

The factory continues to produce high-end suits, only under a less recognizable name: Rochester Tailored Clothing. Jeffery Diduch, RTC’s senior vice president of design, said the factory is still using the same tailoring techniques that gave it a world-class reputation. Those techniques have been passed down for generations and shared across continents.

“Hickey Freeman was the best in the world, bar none,” Mr. Diduch said. “Most of the factories that we think of today in Italy making the top-quality stuff, their technicians came here and learned what was called the American system. They went back and taught people over there how things were made at Hickey Freeman.”

Mr. Diduch was born in Canada and came to the U.S. on a visa thirteen years ago to work in design for HMX GROUP, then the parent company of Hickey Freeman. Mr. Diduch, now a naturalized citizen, says many current tailors at Rochester Tailored Clothing are of immigrant backgrounds, especially from Turkey.

Now, the factory is entering yet another era. Less than a month after the factory completed its final Hickey Freeman – a Navy blue blazer with an alternating white and light blue pattern on the inner lining – the Tom James company announced its plans to buy the factory. Tom James, the largest U.S. maker in custom clothing, has pledged to add 45 jobs over the next five years to the factory’s current staff of 200.

As Mr. Diduch is looking toward the future of the factory, he is also working to preserve historical documents from the Hickey Freeman era. Above his office desk lies original stencil sketches of 20th century Hickey Freeman suit designs. He has also collected decades-old suit patterns, photographs, and booklets that were once scattered throughout the building.

For many second-generation Americans, these materials serve as a reminder of their ancestors’ speculator tailoring skills that brought them to Rochester from overseas. One of my reminders is a suit my grandfather made at his home in his 70s, likely using supplies from a local fabric store, in the early 2000s as a gift for my dad.

My dad pulls out a fuzzy, dark gray two-piece suit from my closet, takes off the clear plastic cover, and lays the suit on my bed. I look beneath the right jacket flap where a brand label is supposed to be.

Instead, there’s only silky black lining, proving that the suit is a product of my papou’s own creativity, from the notched lapels to the side pockets deep enough to fit my entire hand in.

Knowing that all eight buttons – three on each arm sleeve and two on the flaps – were sewn by my papou fills me with good memories of spending summer days at his home. I run my finger along the inside seam that binds the thin lining to the thick, cozy fabric and wonder where Papou’s old sewing machine is now.

The pants are made of the same gray fabric, from the seven belt loops to the bottoms that are cuffed about an inch. Even the thread seems to be the same hue of gray.

My dad convinces me to put on the sacred object. It felt like getting a hug from my papou.