Bowling

Showing 2 results

Interview with Alice Nast Statland about her husband Nat Nast. She recounts her husband's history, their move to Kansas City, and his desire to go into the sport shirt business, and his later shift to specializing in bowling shirts. She discusses the business's popularity through the 1950s and '60s, and diversified into caps, jackets and other promotional apparel, and was sold by the family in the early '70s. The brand was revived as Nat Nast Luxury Originals menswear line by their daughters several decades later and garnered a lot of media exposure. She also notes that original Nat Nast shirts could command two to three hundred dollars at the time of the interview.

Interview with Michael Lerner about the Kansas City garment industry and his family's company, King Louie. He recounts his father Morris and uncles founding the Lerner Cap Company, later changing the name to Lerner Brothers Manufacturing and going into production of military clothing at the start of World War II. After the war they shifted to sportswear, and later, to bowling shirts under the name King Louie, as his uncle Victor Lerner was a professional bowler. He discusses how the company grew to encompass bowling alleys and other businesses, shifting to overseas manufacturing and imports, and eventually buying back the brand from a venture capital firm in 2006 and re-establishing the business as an American-made, union labor firm that manufactures uniforms and promotional garments.