It was there, as much as anywhere, among the bagels and pastries in the sand, that Gorde decided someday to measure the sum total of all his days in terms of the number of lives saved or Constitutional principles upheld. He dreams of becoming the voluntary director of Amnesty International or the American Civil Liberties Union, and Virginia Textiles is his ticket to get there. "I want to have made enough money," he says, "that I can go to them and say, 'I don't want a nickel, just send me into your biggest rat hole and let me do the job."
But dreams, he is finding, are fragile things. "It's hard for me," he says. "It's like a state of suspended animation." Gorde thought he was strong enough to buy into the American Dream of business success without selling his soul. There was a time, not so long ago, when his mouth would have filled with sand if he had even thought to say he loved being "a hard-assed businessman." Now he fears that, despite his vigilance, he will slip over the edge, that Virginia Textiles, once only a means to an end, will, in fact, become the end.
Gorde got his first look at what he now describes as the "belly of the monster" at the age of six, when he started working half-days on Saturday in his father's business, Miami Fruit and Syrup Co. He didn't like it -- he wanted to play instead -- but over the following years he began to learn about business. "He was a natural," biis father, David "Bud" Gorde, says. "Jerry's what I call an off-the-seat-of-the-pants executive. It's all gut. You don't learn it in school and you don't read it in books."
Entering the University of Miami in 1969, Gorde planned to become a lawyer. But during his sophomore year, his sympathies turned against the war in Vietnam, until finally he dropped out of school to work full time in the antiwar movement, supporting himself by selling his hand-made leather crafts and living in the apartment of his friend, Robert Tarren, now Virginia Textiles's vice-president of sales.
Then the Democratic and Republican parties announced that they would both be holding their 1972 national conventions in Miami, and suddenly the city became a mecca for every radical group with enough money to make the trip. A local underground radio station told an advance man for the Yippies that, out of the local talent, Jerry Gorde had the best files of government and law-enforcement agencies, local staging areas, and potential donors. After the man had studied the files, he agreed that they might serve as a basis for Yippie operations during the conventions, and he called Abbie Hoffman.
Later that afternoon, they picked up Hoffman at the airport. Within 24 hours, Hoffman had called the radical pantheon to join him and Gorde in Tarren's apartment: Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg, among them. "It was a real kick in the pants," Gorde says. "Every one of my heroes was crashing in that room. Inside 72 hours, I was transformed from a dropout selling leather keychains and doing minor movement work to being part of the national coalition."
The Yippie slogan that year was "10 days to change the world," and Gorde was actually surprised when it didn't happen. "I really believed," he says, "that the war would end and we would all be marched down the streets in a ticker-tape parade." Instead, one night after the conventions had ended, Gorde remembers, as he was burning papers in the Yippie office, two undercover policemen stuck a gun in his face and said, "If you're here tomorrow, you're gone." Gorde left town that night and began the four-year period of wandering about the country that he sometimes describes as "going to Katmandu."
Katmandu, the capital of Nepal, was, to Gorde, a symbol for a state of mind that might sustain the '60s high, once the jasmine-scented reveries and movement energies of the Woodstock Generation were past. Gorde spent his time shuttling back and forth between Maine and Miami, working as a commercial fisherman or selling his leather crafts at carnivals and beach resorts. In 1976, he met Wendy Herron, now the 31-year-old vice-president of Virginia Textiles's retail division who, at that time, was a medical assistant to a doctor in Miami Beach.
Jerry and Wendy were living together in Bar Harbor, Maine, when Jerry's mother called to report that one of his cousins was going to close or sell her small T-shirt business in Richmond. Since Jerry and Wendy were about to leave for Miami anyway, they promised to stop off in Richmond to take a look at the business. "By that time, I was kind of burned out, and I was getting a little old to be on the road year after year. I was 25, and I'd been bopping around the country since I was 21, and the politics were over and the friends were scattered all over the place."
The shop was called Dirt Shirt. It was 10 feet by 20 feet square and contained one rack of irregular T-shirts and one wall of initials and pictures that could be heat transferred onto the shirts. "I walked into the store and said, 'Jerry, you've got to be kidding.' " says Wendy. "It was everything I hated -- plastic pictures on T-shirts. But Jerry went right to the books to see if we could make anything out of it. He said we needed an economic base, that it was a way to get to Katmandu."
Gorde wasn't alone. There were thousands of Yippies and hippies and assorted counterculture freaks opening T-shirt shops or leather-craft shops or macrame stores all over the country. But Gorde was different from most. He already had a large and reasonably well-informed talent for business from his years working for his father, and he had already thought out the conceptual underpinnings of his company's organization. "I knew that my ideas were so very different that no matter how brilliant I was and how good I could be in business, in an institutional business environment I would be considered to be a creative renegade and I would be bounced out of every company that I tried to get into. I had no degree. I had no professional background. I was really one of the disenfranchised. At that point, I decided to build my own system."
