The Illustrated Tie

TIE ONE ON

Our former editor had met medical pathologist Ron Spark at an Arizona Town Hall meeting and immediately liked him. Spark has an intriguing hobby; he collects ties. With graphic artist Rod Dyer, he has written a novelty book titled Fit to Be Tied: Vintage Ties of the Forties and Early Fifties. Nothing would do but that we had to run a story about the tie man. It was colorful, it was light, and it promised a certain zany charm. Perfect! So it was that my friend Peter Ensenberger and I found ourselves on the road once again. The whole tie idea sounded a bit lunatic to us, but hey the guy lived in the historic El Encanto district, a part of Tucson we wanted to explore. Dr. Spark was puttering around his front yard when we found his handsomely restored home at the end of a curving lane. Two big Checker cabs, both in working order, stood in the curved driveway beneath a pair of stately old palm trees. He was unmistakable. He had on a conservative tan herringbone jacket whose color highlighted his blond hair and flattered his build. He had taken time from his practice at Tucson Medical Center to meet us, and he looked exactly like a doctor. Except for the tie around his neck. He wore a startling orange and russet number with a design that might best be called eye-catching. "I try to wear a different tie to work every day," he said. "I have 2,000 of them." He and his wife, Marcia, invited us into their home, and we trooped through the living room into a sunny sitting area off a grassy back patio. The place was richly decorated with American and Hispanic folk arts more quilts, carvings, pottery figures, and beautiful wall sconces than the eye could easily take in. "I was always a collector," he explained. "When I attended Johns Hopkins, I was interested in art history, but then I went to medical school. All you were allowed to wear was white. So, looking for some sense of identity, I'd go to seedy secondhand stores and buy what I thought were loud ties. "Then I joined the Army, where you had to wear those thin black ties. That's when I got interested in ties of the 1940s." The post-World War II era was a glorious epoch for American tie-makers. Before the war, Europe had dictated men's fashions, but the devastation of the continent left the industry with a vacuum, which U.S. designers were only too happy to fill.

Returning soldiers, finally free of military regimentation, had a taste for the individualistic and for well, the gaudy. "It had to do with the post-war euphoria," said Spark. American stylists catered to that taste with hand-painted, air-brushed, or silk-screened patterns and photographs that ranged from the representational to the wildly abstract (even Salvador Dali was persuaded to contribute his talents), and the tie broadened to belly-warmer size to accommodate the spectacular designs.

Spectacular they were. Ties pictured in Spark's book feature South Pacific isles and cascading mountain waterfalls; hunting dogs, antlered stags, and leaping swordfish; vibrant red and blue flowers; sailboats; trom-bones; geometric patterns and things that looked like flying meteors; cheescake; and, heaven help us, warring gladiators.

"Want to see some ties?" Spark asked. Of course.

He disappeared into the back of the house. What kind of man would wrap something that looked like a plate of ham and eggs around his neck? I wondered.

About to voice this sentiment, I noticed that Ensenberger had a faintly transported look on his face. He was wearing one of those loud sweaters that comedian Bill Cosby has made fashionable.

"The Southwest played an important role in American tie design," said the doctor as he returned lugging a large cardboard box. "California became a tie-making center, and all along the Coast they drew on Western themes.

"I think the popularity of Western ties represented a deep yearning among men to be free of the duties and obligations the war brought."

He opened the lid, and there, neatly laid out in well-pressed layers, were about a hundred brilliantly decorated swaths of silk and rayon (sometimes called "Raxon"), and "genuine cellulose acetate," all sporting designs that had some relationship to the Southwest.

"As you can see, some of them were conceived by people back East, who had no real understanding of the West." He pointed out that the orange tie he had on was made in New York by ARCO (Amer-ican Rembrandt Company). Brocaded with American eagles, it displayed a Plains Indian brave standing incongruously before a pueblo and a hogan.

Postwar fans of the Southwest favored cowboys, Indians, horses, steers (many of them fuzzy), bucking broncos, cacti in every color of the rainbow, ox-drawn

covered wagons, white-garbed Mexicans snoozing beneath sombreros, oil wells, buffalos, and cattle brands. Porter's, an Arizona-based Western wear store with outlets in several states, commissioned hand-painted ties, many quite handsome. But the pièce de résistance bore the head of a noble horse, handpainted, sequined, and bedecked with glittering gold braid halter and reins.

"Any chance that something like this might come back into style?" I asked, unwittingly eyeing the Cosby sweater.

"There is something called the 'retrospective' coming into vogue in Europe," Spark returned. The Europeans recap-tured the tie design market during the early '50s, he explained, when England again began exporting clothing. Tastes turned staid during the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Eisenhower years, and they have remained so, at least compared to the American glory days. "The retro-spective tie captures something of the '40s era. They're made in Italy." Spark's early training in art history must have given him the scholarly bent required to collect facts as well as fabric. By the time he came to Tucson, he had amassed a manila envelope full of information about ties, but the pressures of his new practice forced him to set the hobby aside. When he became president of the Pima County Medical Society, he realized he would face a void in his life after his term expired, and he determined that he would write a book about ties.

One day he was in a tie shop on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. The owner mentioned Rod Dyer, who also had expressed a desire to do a tie book. "We got together he loved ties but didn't have the research." They agreed to proceed as a team, and, said Spark, "I began to buy ties with abandon." The result was a monumental collection and a charming book. "Some days I will buy all the ties I can get my hands on especially if I am unsupervised," he says. They are, as he notes, treasures of wearable art.

As we were about to leave, Dr. Spark offered us an unusual business card. It bills him as author of Fit to Be Tied and as what he is: "Necktie Collector Extraordinaire."