Stay Apparel Co. was a lifetime in the making

A youthful passion for hockey and baseball teams informs some of the Stay tee designs, including Flying Puck, left, and Hershey Sweet Spots.

I started Stay Apparel Co. at age 50, at least officially.

When I look back, however, it’s clear to me that the seeds of Stay were sewn when I was a child, enamored as I was of baseball teams and hockey teams and the related uniforms, logos, equipment and merchandise.

Growing up in Maine in the 1970s, my brother, Gary, five years my senior, and I would pore over the ads in Baseball Digest or a catalog for a hockey equipment retailer in St. Louis called Casey’s (“The Hockey Bible,” complete with a printed cover made to look like leather).

How into it were we? I remember my brother having taken part in a bus trip to see the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. He had bought a sticker (bearing the Red Sox logo, I suspect) for me but lost it. We walked more than three miles round-trip from our home to Lisbon Elementary School, from which Gary’s trip emanated, in the vain hope of finding that sticker.

We ordered fitted ball caps like the pros wore through the mail because back then they weren’t available in stores.

I was a big letter writer in my youth, especially to hockey players asking for autographed photos but also to minor-league hockey teams to order merchandise paid for with my paper route money.

Long before I lived within sight of Hersheypark Arena, I was writing to the Hershey Bears for a merchandise list and ordering a burgundy tee with the classic “skating bear” logo on it. From the Philadelphia Firebirds of the North American Hockey League, rivals of my hometown Maine Nordiques, I ordered a pennant that, to my chagrin, arrived folded in an envelope.

When Gary played Little League, the team hats were beautiful wool. His had a cream crown and a navy visor, navy button on top and navy sewn felt letters, CU, for Lisbon Credit Union, on the front. They had a stretchy back, what we’d call flex-fit today, approximating a fitted cap.

Hats and tees

By the time I reached Little League, styles had changed: beautiful caps were out, tall, foam trucker hats with plastic adjustable straps were in. I love trucker hats today, but they were abominations for a child who wanted to look like a pro back then. I even contemplated asking my coach whether I could wear a different hat than the trucker style, so much did I care about the aesthetics.

There’s never been a time in my life that I wasn’t interested in hats and graphic tees, and I’ve owned a lot of them.

When I was a reporter at the York Daily Record in the 1990s, I had hats, tees and sweatshirts made bearing “YDR” and the newspaper nameplate and sold them to co-workers in the newsroom.

When I created Pennsylvania Puck, a too-short-lived online hockey magazine, we had a great logo that we printed on youth jerseys for a series of hockey and skating how-to videos. (One of these days Stay is finally going to unleash a Pensylvania Puck tee on the world.)

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that all of these elements — the love of merchandise, of creating things, of connecting to places — are part of Stay’s story.

Many of the products we make are things I would have wanted to buy when I was a kid. In a very real sense, I’ve invested my life in them.

Stay officially began in 2017, but its heritage is decades long.