Leisure Class: Pining For Polyesters

PORTLAND - For the environmentally anxious, the 20th anniversary of Earth Day today raises a troublesome question.

Whatever happened to the polyester leisure suit?

David Bantz knows the answer.

He opens the door to his closet.

``Just another stage of my fashion awareness,'' he says, and he retrieves a slab of pink and red.

Purchased for under $12 in the 1980s, the ensemble includes a pink polyester jacket with things on it, red-and-white polyester pants and a polished white plastic belt. Memories overtake him.

``This would have been our 10-year anniversary,'' he says. ``How time flies, but the leisure suits are still in great shape.''

Bantz, 41, has the authority to say so.

He is the Portland-based co-founder and president for life of the now-defunct but still-competitive National Institute for the Preservation of Leisure Suits.

From 1980 through the end in 1986, it featured an equinoctial gathering known as the ``Spring Fling Wing-Ding Thing.'' It featured more than 100 people in a room with polyester leisure suits, processed cheese and tins of canned-meat product.

But despite this annual public-education campaign, many Americans never equated polyester with ecology.

Leisure suits became rare except in parts of Florida.

Like poor-fitting puka shells, that still wears on Bantz.

For one thing, he says the daily use of leisure suits helped lessen American dependence on foreign oil by generating vast amounts of static electricity.

And because polyester is a manmade product - created simply through the interlocking of polymers prepared from equivalent amounts of glycols and dibasic acids - no fur-bearing animals had to be killed.

Finally, leisure suits took no energy to keep fresh because they required no washing. Bantz says a 100 percent polyester leisure suit will look just as good after 10 years as on the day it was found.

Ten years: It has been about that long for him. Back in 1980 is when he first became aware of the growing abuse of leisure suits. They had become the butt of humorless jokes. The last straw came on the day when either Bantz or one of his associates observed a telecast on which someone said, facetiously, that scientists had determined that leisure suits caused cancer in rats.

That kind of condescending and inaccurate statement is what triggered the formation of the National Institute for the Preservation of Leisure Suits.

Under tutelage of the institute, lime-colored polymers made a comeback. Americans finally came to see the leisure suit as a certain state of mind, a place to go to get back in touch with plastic.

At the time, Bantz was the economic development director for the small Oregon city of Tualatin. He and other co-founders appeared on national TV to promote what they called the ``Full Cleveland'' look - all-polyester trousers, shirt and jacket, white belt and shoes, turquoise jewelry, puka shells and ornamental gold chain worn over the open collar.

Bantz says this national educational campaign only once led to any misunderstandings. That was when a Cleveland talk-radio station put him on the air. Callers asked why the institute called it the ``Full Cleveland.'' Patiently, Bantz explained that shortly after Cleveland's chemically positive Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, a diver emerged with a thin coating of sludge which, when sloughed off, dried and treated, became the prototype for the modern leisure suit.

That troubled the Cleveland listeners. But not the rest of the nation. Riding the crest of cultural reform, the institute announced that the theme for one of the Spring Fling Wing-Ding Things would be ``Let's Get Digital.'' And for the 1984 election season, it was ``Let's Put the `Poly' Back in Politics.'' Thousands of people did, and by 1986, the institute was able to report that its research into the static-production characteristics of the Full Cleveland had ended. The institute was no more.

``We had completed our mission,'' Bantz says. ``We had gotten the United States out of the energy crisis.''

Those days were full of glory and Bantz will never forget them, but fashion times have changed.

As Earth Day comes around again, leisure suits are mostly gone.

But not for good, Bantz says. All over the country, he believes, they wait in the backs of closets. Should the crisis return, he knows that the suit that saved a nation can maybe save the world.