Fur for Florida

Thousands of furs - coats, stoles, even a polar bear rug - hibernate for most of the year in cold storage under the interstate, in the tender care of the Gulf Coast's only furrier.

By LANE DeGREGORY

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 7, 2000

[Times photos: Cherie Diez] John Psaltis, president and owner of Florida Fur Cold Storage, jokes around while putting a dyed pink mink bikini on a mannequin in his retail showroom

ST. PETERSBURG -- Every year about this time, Peter the Polar Bear rolls out of the freezer.

He has spent the past 40 summers hibernating through the heat, draped over two clothes racks in an icy vault in a warehouse under the interstate.

Every day from April through October, an average of 67,500 people drive over his head.

Go either direction on I-275, near the off-ramp to I-175, and look down. Beside Tropicana Field's parking lot No. 3, you'll see a long concrete building shaded by the highway. A faded, stenciled sign says "Florida Fur" in black letters.

Peter is inside.

Few folks know he's down there.

He won't be for long.

He's a rare rug -- 70 years old -- one of the few polar bear pelts in Florida. His huge head hangs over one end of the rolling racks. His paws, as big as pie pans, flop against four silver rails.

He's one of the freezer's oldest tenants.

Soon, he'll be gone for good.

The warehouse, built in 1957, stands two stories tall and covers a long block of 19th Street S. The temperature inside is 38 degrees, the humidity a constant 54 percent. Hasn't varied since the place opened. The air smells sweet, almost suffocating. It doesn't circulate.

The floors are filled with thousands of mink stoles and fox jackets, raccoon hats and rabbit-fur muffs -- four generations of furry heirlooms.

People pay $45 a year to preserve these pricey pieces. Some furs seldom leave the freezer, haven't for years. Most, like the polar bear, get sprung once in a while.

There's an ankle-length Russian sable coat, worth more than a Tampa townhouse; a silky ermine collar stitched onto a sequined silver evening gown; a sleeveless taffeta dress Sigourney Weaver wore two years ago; a sleek cheetah coat, squirrel stoles, skunk-covered handbags; even hot-pink mink thong bikinis that sell for $250 each (yes, you can get them wet).

Each has its own story.

John Psaltis knows them all.

He knows where Peter the Polar Bear spends his mild winters, how the luxurious leopard coat came into this country, who has the only cotton candy-colored mink cuffs and collar in this whole section of the state.

"I'll never tell," Psaltis says slyly. "But you'll recognize her when you see her. You can't miss her in a crowd."

Right. She's the one who looks like the progeny of a local blueblood and the Pink Panther.

Psaltis knows almost every woman at the St. Petersburg Yacht and Country Club.

He usually can't remember their names.

But he always recalls their wraps.

He knows who has dyed rabbit fur -- and that it's much cheaper than beaver; knows who imported Australian fitch -- and that it lasts longer than chinchilla. Knows the difference between an Azurene Winterblu mink and its Desert Gold cousin. He can classify 34 shades of mink without consulting his office wall chart.

He knows that, each November, Peter's owner will pick up the polar bear and bring it home for the winter. Knows she'll drive it to her Tampa Bay area house, spread it across her stone hearth. Knows that, before Easter, she'll return Peter to his concrete tundra.

Then Psaltis will give the bear a bath.

"Go ahead, ask him," the bear's owner said. "Ask him how he spends a whole day every spring dunking that big bear in a vat of hot oil, how he cleans every inch of its nine-foot-long skin, how he fluffs the thick fur, makes it shine.

"John Psaltis saved that polar bear's life," the woman said. (Such as it is. The bear has been dead for seven decades.) "Well, he doubled its life," she amended. A private sort, she asked that her name not be used.

"He's the only one around, maybe the only one in the whole state, I would trust with Peter," she said.

Florida doesn't need many full-fledged furriers.

Psaltis is the only one on the state's Gulf Coast, one of only 100 in the United States. His fur-storage facility is one of the oldest in the country.

He is 67, six feet tall, three times a granddad. He still walks with the slim-hipped swagger of the professional soccer player he once was, still brags about his picture being published in a sports history book.

He grew up in Greece. When he was 11, he watched Hitler's Army execute his father and uncle. He emigrated to New York when he was 26, to escape the ugliness he had endured and to find a beautiful bride.

"America," he whispers. "Only an American would ask why I would want to come to America. Look. You see?" his voice grows louder. He's walking through his frigid warehouse, past aisle after aisle of black, blue and gold floor-length furs.

"It is a country where I can make my living working with wealthy, beautiful women," he says, "where I can fashion beautiful furs -- and live in Florida, where I never am cold.

"I am a warm-blooded Greek." He stops, waves his hand, smiles broadly.

"What more could I want?"

On his second night in America, in 1959, Psaltis met a gorgeous Greek girl named Helen at a dance in New Jersey. They married a week later, had two children, a boy and a girl.

Forty-one years later, he and Helen are still married.

His wife has four furs. His daughter has seven.

In 1962, Psaltis moved his family to Florida to escape race riots in Orange, N.J. His brother-in-law, George Manos, had opened a wholesale fur business in St. Petersburg 16 years earlier, supplying all the furs and fur storage space for Maas Brothers department stores. Manos gave Psaltis a job.

"I swept the floors. I cut the furs. I learned the business, top to bottom," says Psaltis. He sweeps his long arms in the air as he talks. He sounds like a cross between Ricardo Montalban and Zero Mostel.

"I learned that leather cracks when it gets dry, that closets are hot and dry, that they ruin fur," he says. "I learned, even, to preserve polar bears in Florida."

He learned to distinguish an ermine pelt from a weasel, to blow through the fur's fine top "guard" hairs and separate them from the shorter underhairs. "Ermine are the only rodents that turn white in winter, brown in summer," Psaltis says. He knows this without consulting the dog-eared Pictorial Encyclopedia of Furs sitting on his desk.

During 38 years as a Florida furrier, Psaltis has been summoned to testify about the value of dozens of custom fur coats. He has been ordered, during divorce cases, not to release $10,000 minks from his warehouse. He has helped owners take insurance out on their investments. (One woman stores 40 furs.)

Psaltis never asks his male customers who they are buying for -- never tells wives if he's met their husbands, or mistresses if he's met their men.

"Fur is a very private thing," he says. "Each is individual, needs attention, special care. Like a beautiful woman.

"And, like a beautiful woman, a fur needs to be taken out on the town."

Every year about this time, Psaltis prepares Peter the Polar Bear for its ride home.

But the rug is not traveling to Tampa this year.

This week, it's heading to Tennessee -- for good.

Its owner is giving the pelt her grandfather shot in Alaska to her grown son and new grandson. A fifth generation will grow up rolling on the soft fur. And the weather will be colder, anyway, in the mountains of Tennessee.

Psaltis says he'll miss the polar bear, the only one he's ever had. "It filled space on my racks for 24 coats," he says. "Peter took the time of 50 coats to clean."

He'll also miss the $400 annual storage fee the bear brought. But he's bound to make up the business. Fur sales and storage contracts are thicker than ever -- up 10 percent from this time last year, 30 percent from the year before that, he says.

The November issues of Vogue and Cosmopolitan are filled with naked models wrapped in thick, shiny fur.

"In my years, I've seen ermine fade into extinction and people dyeing minks pink," Psaltis says. "Stoles and capes go out -- then come back in. Fashion changes, but women always want to have fur."

Since his store opened, annual fur sales in this country have grown from just under $300-million to more than $1.4-billion. Protests from animal rights activists hurt fur sales in the late 1980s. But since then, the public's appetite has increased.

The Fur Information Council of America estimates that one out of every five adult women owns at least one fur. And younger women are starting to buy furs, even around here. That's a new trend, Psaltis says -- one which bodes well for fur's future.

"Before now, my customers were 40 and up, wives whose husbands bought them for them. Not anymore," he says. "Now, I have working women in their 20s who can afford their own.

"I had one recently who wanted me to sew a special label in the black mink she was ordering. "Make it say: I paid for it myself,' she said. "With love, Judy.'

"I store that one here, too."

Psaltis estimates his vaults house 80 percent of all the furs in the Tampa Bay area (not including the ones still on animals). Women are moving here all the time from New York, from Ohio, from Rhode Island, he says. They have furs.

They see the big concrete building under the interstate, they meet Psaltis at the Yacht Club, or they ask their new friends where to find a furrier in Florida.

"My friends up north are always amazed at what I have down here," the bear's owner said. "I send them all to John."

Psaltis works about 60 hours a week, more if there's a dance at the yacht club. He still hand-stitches most of the split seams himself, still does most of the cleaning with his secret fur formula. But beneath his blue-tinted bifocals, his brown eyes are growing dim.

He's relying more on his three employees.

He's getting tired.

But he's afraid to retire, afraid no one else can take care of his customers, look after their special needs.

He's afraid, if he goes, his business will fade like a pink mink thong bikini left to dry in the sun.

"They would miss me," he says, walking slowly through the warehouse. He stops to stroke a sable calf-length coat and shakes his head. "I have had some of them here for more than 30 years."

Who would miss him? "They all would," he says. "And me them."

"The furs and the women -- the women and the furs."

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