The Feather Merchants

The ostrich feather business has one thing in common with the buggy-whip industry and the horse. All three were ruined by Henry Ford. When women began riding in open automobiles before World War I, they had to discard their majestic hats, crowned with glossy ostrich plumes. That spelled disaster for South Africa's ostrich farmers, who fed and plucked 1,000,000 ostriches every year. On the sun-baked Little Karoo plateau around Oudtshoorn, ostrich capital of the world, farmers killed their birds by the thousands, stripped the rich dark meat from the carcasses for stew. Flocks dwindled to 20,000 birds, and many of their plumes went into feather dusters.

Last week Oudtshoorn's feather business was in the midst of a new boom. Fashion had brought the ostrich plume back to style. In Paris, Christian Dior and other high fashion designers were trimming hats with ostrich feathers. So was Manhattan's Lily Dache, who explained quite simply: "It was time for the ostrich feather to return." Oudtshoorn's farmers did not question the verdict; they crowded into the feather auction hall, offered their pluckings to dealers so sharp-eyed that they could identify at a glance the feathers from any one of 200 farms. Bids for prime ostrich plumes shot up to $18 a lb., 10% higher than last year.

No one was more pleased than South Africa's ostrich king, 78-year-old Max Rose, who owns 8,000 birds. He sleeps by day in a hotel room in Oudtshoorn, breakfasts at midnight in his big, untidy office, heaped high with bundles of ostrich feathers, and works while others sleep. Max Rose, who has made & lost fortunes in feathers, is now apparently going to make another.

Baby Sitting. Until 1867, ostriches ran wild. South Africans believed that leathers of captive birds wouldn't curl. An Englishman named Arthur Douglass broke that myth. He not only produced curly feathers from tame birds, but also devised an incubator to hatch the three-pound egg. Others quickly took up ostrich raising (some paid native girls to take turns sitting on the eggs). Traders swarmed out to the scattered farms, offering cartloads of oil lamps, stoves and feminine finery in exchange for plumes, fashionable in late Victorian and Edwardian days.

By 1882, the feather trade was bringing in $5,000,000 a year, second only to Kimberley's diamond mines. Wild speculation broke out in land and feathers. Prices flew up to $500 a lb. in 1913, before the inevitable crash. Many an ostrich tycoon went to bed a millionaire and woke up bankrupt. Some of them trekked southward to raise oranges; the gaudy Victorian mansions they had built slowly fell to pieces in a weird jumble of white gables and green cupolas. Max Rose, who came to South Africa from Lithuania in 1890, was one of the few ex-millionaires who stuck with his birds. He scrabbled hard to get enough lucerne (alfalfa) for his hungry flock. "Usually they ate and I didn't," Max recalls. "Sometimes we shared the lucerne between us."

Queenly Plucking. Patiently, Ostrichman Rose learned all the habits and hazards of his birds.* He managed to keep his flock together, cashed in on each tiny feather boomlet as it appeared. In 1931, the Empress Eugenie hat style started a flurry in feathers. In 1947, Great Britain's Queen Elizabeth helped start the present revival by visiting Oudtshoorn, praising feathers and publicly plucking an ostrich. This year, Manhattan's Walter Florell ("the mood at the moment is to look bold") is trimming hats with Lillian Russell-sized plumes (see cut). But he has tuned them to the 20th Century by coating them with copper, rust and gold lacquers. Other Florell eye openers: one-foot-square feather muffs; a single feather-covered glove, worn shoulder length. That was enough to get Manhattan's Murray Sears, big U.S. feather merchant, to book passage to South Africa last week to buy up all the fine feathers he could find. Predicted Sears: "A big year for the ostrich."

* Rigidly monogamous, a pair of ostriches may spend their full 40-year adult life span together. Easily frightened, the birds, which can run at a 60 m.p.h. clip, sometimes cripple themselves dashing headlong into fences. But in the mating season a male ostrich will attack a man, can disembowel him with a single downward kick of his two-toed foot, whose claw is the size of a railroad spike.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.