Texas plant takes on big cleaning challenge
Everything is bigger in Texas, even drycleaning bills. Just recently, Dee & Hattie’s Specialty Cleaners of Dallas charged $250 for a shirt, $250 for a pair of
pants, and another $100 for the cleaning of yellow bandannas.
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Normally, the plant charges a little bit less per garment: $6 for men’s pants, $4 for a hand-washed handkerchief, and $2.50 for a shirt.
However, Dee and Hattie’s can’t be blamed for inflating their prices when the shirt being cleaned has 22-foot
sleeves and the pants have a 16-foot inseam.
Besides, when you work on anything belonging to Big Tex, it means there are some
pretty big boots to fill
— size 70, in fact.
While the State Fair of Texas is not scheduled to run until Sept. 28 to Oct. 21,
Big Tex
’s outfit, designed by clothier Williamson-Dickie, had to be cleaned months in
advance.
According to an article in the Dallas Morning News, Dee & Hattie’s annually closes down all of its other operations in order to pay special
attention to the
“big” production job on hand.
The clothes, which are extremely weather-beaten from being outside for about a
month, are washed in a giant washer with cool water and low-alkaline soap,
which prevents color fading of the same bright red-and-blue colors that can be
found on Texas
’s state flag.
Once washed, transferring the wet clothes from washer to dryer requires several
strong men.
The pants alone take 90 minutes to wash, but that is nothing compared to how
long they take to tumble dry: over a day.
Then, several men are again required to fold the garments up neatly when they
are ready to go back to the Fairgrounds.
Dee and Hattie’s has long fostered a reputation as being a finest cleanestablishment in the
Lone Star state, and the company has even cleaned clothes for two First Ladies:
Lady Bird Johnson and Barbara Bush.
Of course, Big Tex is literally the biggest celebrity on the plant’s client list. The Dallas-based plant has handled Big Tex’s attire since the 1980s.
You’d have to go back further than the launching of MTV, however, if you want to
trace the roots of the state fair
’s icon.
Long before he underwent a modern makeover in 1997 to achieve his current look,
Big Tex went by another name: Kris, as in Kringle. In 1949, the Kerens Chamber
of Commerce utilized a giant Santa as a Christmas promotion, but the idea did
not last long.
A few years later, State Fair President R.L. Thornton (and former Dallas mayor)
paid local artist and stage designer Jack Bridges $750 to transform the holiday
icon into an eye-catching cowboy.
That same amount of money would barely cover his annual drycleaning bills today.
