His last big occasion

How do you say goodbye to a man who helped men look their best? You start with the cuff links.

			Ron Sacino, one of two sons of Jerry Sacino, wraps his arms around a friend after the funeral services Saturday. Ron wore the last suit his father tailored for him.
	[Times photo: Lara Cerri]

	Jerry Sacino died Oct. 6 after surgery for cancer. He was 84.

ST. PETERSBURG - After the brothers said goodbye to their father, they went inevitably to his closet.

In the blur of the funeral details some things were certain. The coffin would be closed, but they would linger over what their father would wear inside it.

To Jerry Sacino it would have mattered, in every detail.

They thought about a tuxedo. People might expect that from a man who rented tails and cummerbunds to three generations of awkward prom dates and stuttering grooms.

But he was also the man who sewed their church clothes when they were small, no matter how quickly they outgrew them. He was a tailor who knew how to prune and shape a man with needle and thread until his wife saw him in a new way. He loved the feel of an imported fabric and an exquisite fit even when he was just walking the mall.

He taught them that a suit does not make a man, but in a small way, it can make a man better.

In his 84 years he dressed thousands of men for their most important and frightening celebrations. Now his sons had to dress him for his.

Second skin

Jerry - nobody called him Mr. Sacino - watched the Yankees in his boxers like everybody else.

But if he left the house, which he called the "Villa on Pass-a-Grilla," he put on a shirt with a collar at the very least.

He loved to walk to the Don CeSar for ice cream after dinner, and he loved to walk to Barnie's in Tyrone Square Mall for a small coffee and a newspaper and a chat about the Red Sox with Jason, who runs the register.

Everywhere he walked, he looked like the mayor.

His father was the same way. Giovanni came from Italy and opened a custom tailor shop in Massachusetts in 1916. He sewed school clothes for Jerry and his brother, Aldo, no matter how quickly they outgrew them.

Giovanni dressed up for family dinners, and if his grandsons Ron and Greg ever dropped by, he'd leave the room grumbling and come back in a tie.

After Giovanni moved Sacino & Sons to Central Avenue in 1949, Aldo and Jerry followed with their families. Jerry, skeptical about St. Petersburg's willingness to wear black wool, arrived with 25 white dinner jackets in the trunk of the car.

Ron and Greg grew up pressing pants and folding boxes in the back of the store and watching little transformations take place out front. The men would come in for their first confirmations or homecoming dances, their weddings and then their children's weddings. When they left, they always seemed taller.

They say that Ron, who became president of Sacino's in 1972, dresses the most like Jerry did. Greg is the vice president, and only slightly more casual.

Like his father, Ron doesn't notice the stiffness of a shirt collar or the snugness of a necktie. They feel as natural as his skin.

For his father's funeral, he wore a black suit with a black and white silk tie. The last suit that Jerry ever tailored for him.

Jerry's dimple

Before they walked his coffin into the Cathedral of St. Jude, his sons stopped and rested their hands on the lid.

Inside, every pew was filled and people lined the walls, and not one of them wore a tuxedo. They talked about what a gentle soul he was, how even the parrot called him Jer Bear, how much they missed him. And they agreed that in heaven he was rooting for the Red Sox, although he also loved the Yankees, in the funny way he loved all Italian athletes, regardless of sport or team. There was a DiMaggio on the Red Sox too.

They agreed that the clothes weren't just business; they were part of him.

"He loved to go to work and spend time with the customers," Ron said. "He loved well-made fabric and fine tailoring. He was the best-dressed man most of us knew."

Afterward everyone was hugging everyone, in the kind of hug that continues well into a conversation, with a lingering hand on an arm or a cheek, and a kiss, or several, at the end.

But here and there in the crowded room, people said that while they put on their jackets and tied their ties that morning, they took a little extra care to honor the man who taught them how.

The people who worked for him were easiest to spot. They would no sooner come to Jerry's funeral without a pocket handkerchief than they would come without their pants.

Jerry was particular about everything in his stores, but especially the clothes on the men who sold his clothes. They clumped together, compared cuff links, and remembered how he would tease them about their ties and correct the crooked jackets on the headless mannequins.

This morning, Christopher Constantinou thought about Jerry when he put on his green Tallia Uomo Italian suit, but he had trouble with the tie. He had never learned to tie a tie right; the knot was always too fat or too loose. Jerry would adjust it for him and then stick a handkerchief in his pocket, digging through a box of them until he found just the right one.

"He wouldn't speak to you until you had the right pocket square," he says. "Now I can't get out of the house without putting a handkerchief in my pocket."

His handkerchief today is ivory. But his tie does not look right, and Jerry can't fix it.

"Here, let me get that," says Vince Raffington, who manages stores in Tallahassee. He gives the tie a squeeze and a tug.

"See, you got to have that dimple there," he says. "Jerry always had that dimple."

Vince is wearing a black suit by DiCaprio. Jerry altered it himself and sewed the little Sacino's patch inside it by hand. Jerry knew that Vince liked a quarter-inch of sleeve showing. He carried a ruler in his pocket to measure the 4 inches from a man's thumb tip to his shirt sleeve. He didn't like to see his employees guessing.

He was particular about the way a salesman put on a customer's jacket, smoothing the back, tugging at the shoulders, running his fingers down the lapels and squaring the top button with the top buttonhole.

He wouldn't tolerate them being seen without a jacket, and when he did spot such an offense, he would call a supervisor.

"But I was vacuuming," one jacketless salesman told his boss. It didn't matter.

When an egg-shaped man in Lakeland didn't look right in his $150 tux, Jerry drove from St. Petersburg to chalk the alterations himself. When prom kids lined up outside the store in the busiest season, Jerry sat in the back sewing cuffs by hand. When some teenager's purple vest came in looking fuzzy, Jerry nipped at it with needle and scissors until it was perfect.

Vince would cringe if the man he called "Sporty" showed up in Tallahassee and he wasn't prepared. But in a lot of ways, he wanted to be just like him.

There is something about the way he could make a rented tux look like a custom suit, make a man feel like a model on his wedding day, make a little girl look at her father and suck in her breath and say, "Oooooh - Daddy."

He was in the stores six days a week until a few weeks ago, when he didn't show up at Tyrone Square Mall and the people at Barnie's wondered why.

The Italian model

In the hospital he wore slippers and silk Ralph Lauren pajamas because in the face of cancer surgery his big fear was that thin cotton hospital gown with the appalling opening in the back.

He knew what he meant to people because so many of them wrote him with the usual well-wishes and the occasional story about depending on him for a tux, or for 50 years of tuxes, or regretting that they have outgrown the suit he made 35 years ago, and could he help them into it again? Jerry sat up at night reading the letters, amazed.

He never recovered from the surgery. They talked to him for days even though he couldn't talk back. They tried to raise his blood pressure by talking about the IRS, but he slipped away.

And after Ron finally let go of his father's hand, he did not want to see him again. That's why no one at the funeral saw him in the coffin.

No one would get to comment on how natural he looked, what a nice job the funeral home had done with the makeup, how fine he always looked in his clothes. But that didn't matter.

They remember him in his polo shirts climbing into his red MG. Tugging his pants down around his hips to kid his baggy-clothed grandson. Looking like a catalog model in Italy last year, walking the ancient streets of Ruvo del Monte with a sweater draped around his shoulders.

At his wake, one of his managers cast an eye toward his flower-covered coffin and considered him inside it. "He's wearing a pocket handkerchief," she said. "I guarantee it."

The suit was custom made for him in Naples, Italy, not far from where his father was born.

The jacket is a three-button notch in a gray glen plaid, size 39 short. The fabric is Super 120's wool - a twisted knit that makes the delicate fibers as dense and soft as butter.

He wears a white shirt, blue silk tie and a silk pocket handkerchief.

In a pocket he carries a tie made for him by a secretary from a dress she used to wear that he always admired. His cuff links, which he has worn since 1972, feature a dapper man dressed like Charlie Chaplin. Jerry liked to show them off to people, and wait for them to notice that the little man's zipper is open.

They were his favorite, because they made people smile.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times 490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 Contact the Times | Privacy Policy Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright