Comment on the Contract and the Jacket Generally:
The Monarch contract is made of horsehide in a medium russet color. As the jacket aged, however, the color has faded to a lighter russet, and, especially in the sunlight, it is a pretty light-colored jacket. The leather is still supple after all these years, and apart from a very little bit of cracking around the shoulders, the leather remains remarkably pliable.
The thing that stands out immediately, however, upon handling the jacket is how light weight it is and how thin the horsehide is. Vic told me this in his assessment of the jacket’s condition, and he isn’t kidding. It’s almost as thin as lambskin. I remember hearing that Chuck Yeager, who wore a Monarch, once quipped to a jacket enthusiast that he switched to the Air Force’s newer jackets because his A-2 wasn’t nearly warm enough. That likely would have been true of any A-2, but I can especially see why he would do that with a Monarch. It really is just a windbreaker.
Nevertheless, the jacket is a slim yet comfortable contract. The design is smart and it oozes style.
I’m particularly fond of the pocket flaps on this particular jacket, which don’t look quite like most of the repros I see out there.
Defects:
One of the things I find particularly interesting in looking at originals is how
not perfect they were. It can be so easy to forget when you’re looking at repros that these jackets were rushed, rushed, rushed! Each worker had to sew the same stitch hundreds (or even thousands) of times each day. This meant they were
really good at it, but also that they would start to develop their own shortcuts, and when they made a mistake, they weren’t about to throw a jacket out if that mistake didn’t impede it from being worn. From what I can see, this jacket shows three signs of slapdash work on the part of the folks at Monarch Mfg. Co.:
1. misaligned pockets. This one is slight, but if you look at the photos, the pocket on the right appears to be about half a centimeter higher than the one on the left. This is a commonly-seen feature of originals. Getting the pockets perfectly aligned took careful work and did nothing for the functionality of the jacket.
2. A bad stitch sewing in the zipper. This one clearly is not a short cut, as the jacket is actually a bit difficult to zip up as a result of this meandering stitch. I almost wonder if the sewer didn’t get distracted (or fall asleep) while sewing this stitch. Regardless, it’s unlikely that anybody but the sewer and the eventual recipient of the jacket noticed the error, and it obviously didn’t stop the jacket from getting used.
3. The sizing: this jacket is listed as a 44, but has the dimensions of a small size 42. Vic opined to me that it was simply mis-labeled. I actually think there’s a bit more to it than that. The normal way that factories operated was that on a given week (or day), a company would only be making one size. This limited the possibility of mistakes (say, putting size 48 sleeves on a size 38 jacket). I've heard stories through the grapevine from people who worked at some of these factories, however, and they said that if the government didn’t deliver enough leather in a given week for the size of jacket they were making, their numbers guy would simply calculate the largest size jacket they could make with the provided leather, and make the whole week’s orders in that size, using the labels for the size they were supposed to be making. So if they needed to provide 5,000 size 46s by the end of the week, but only had enough leather to make 5,000 size 44s, they’d just make that, and label them all as 46s. We can’t say for sure, but it’s very possible that’s what happened here.
Clues about the Owner:
The jacket has a name plate, which is obviously the best indicator of who the pilot was, but the Army Air Force had hundreds of thousands of personnel during World War 2. Any extra clues help. So it's time to play Sherlock and do some sleuthing:
1. Stitch holes from rank insignia on the epaulets. The owner of this jacket was an officer, but probably not a very high ranking one, since there’s no indication that the insignia were ever replaced with the insignia of a higher rank.
2. The cuffs: one of the first things that I noticed in the pictures was how short and loose the cuffs were. This suggests that the knits were bunched up when being worn, and therefore that they were too long for the pilot. He was small enough to be wearing a size 42 jacket (he would normally be wearing several layers underneath the jacket, so his chest measurement was probably no more than 38 inches), and the sleeves on that were too long for him, so he was probably rather short.
3. Monarch contract: he had to have completed flight school after December of ’41, and probably before the Army started phasing out the A-2 in mid-’43.
Taken all together, we should expect M.L. Hyman to be a short junior officer who joined up sometime in 1942 and completed flight school by mid-’43. (As you've probably guessed, I've already identified him, but I thought I’d walk you all through the logic that brought me there
).