Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipality directors are breathing easier and looking a little more dapper after resolving an issue that threatened to spoil their sartorial splendor.
“The crisis is over,” declared SARM president Sinclair Harrison as he announced that new jackets had been found for fellow directors.
“We now have a supply into the new millennium.”
Readers of The Western Producer may remember last year’s grim situation, revealed by Harrison at SARM’s June district meetings. He reported there was no cloth left on the roll from which SARM jackets had been cut, and the color – a haunting mustard-brown -was no longer available from any supplier.
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The color, and the age it came from, had passed into history.
The crisis came to the fore when a director, unable to find a SARM jacket, went to a regional meeting wearing an ordinary sports coat. This drew a complaint from a councillor.
Harrison called on former directors to check their closets to see if they had any old jackets they could lend to new directors while they dealt with the problem.
SARM director jackets are well known to farmers and municipal councilors across rural Saskatchewan. They not only give their wearers an officious demeanor, they also allow them to stand out in a crowd of 2,000 councilors at SARM conventions. Directors, decked out in the distinctive SARM color, are easily recognizable in such crowds, shining like shafts of gold when all around is dark.
The jacket issue was not SARM’s main concern this year. Grain transportation reform, disintegrating roads, hopper car ownership, and a host of other concerns often occupied the association’s main energy.
Yet the jacket deficit was never far from mind.
Which was why Harrison was delighted when he caught sight of a jacket similar to the SARM color hanging in a Regina men’s wear store.
“They came off the rack at Colin O’Brian’s in Regina,” said a jocular Harrison, wearing one of the new jackets as he spoke.
On first glance, the jackets look similar to the old ones. But a closer inspection shows they are darker, browner, with a more red than yellow undertone. And the cloth has a rougher texture than previous jackets.
But they are close enough and this new tone is as distinct and easily recognizable as the old.
The old jackets will be kept by their wearers, who can do with them as they like, since they paid to have them made, Harrison said.
“They can put them into a time capsule for the new millennium.”
