Dad's Ties Week, Day 2: Liberty Skulls

Dad calls this his "skull" tie: inside some of the powder-blue areas are shapes that look like human(oid) skulls. (Click on the picture for a larger rendition.) Of course, as a child I thought that was really cool; as an adult, I still do! A Liberty of London tie is the last place you'd expect to find skulls, but there they are. Dad bought this tie at Hecht's in Landover Mall right after it opened in 1972. Landover Mall was the shining star of retail in Prince George's County, sitting right on the Capital Beltway and boasting 1.3 million square feet of space, the second-largest mall in the Washington area (Tyson's Corner being first). It was worth driving farther than our neighborhood theater to go to the movies at Landover: I saw first runs of Star Wars and Dino De Laurentiis's King Kong (no match for Peter Jackson's amazing remake, which I just saw over the weekend) there. But in the 80's the mall fell into disregard, and then into a long, painful decline, chronicled through some personal reminiscences and recent photos at deadmalls.com. (And yes, while the mall is a shuttered, empty hulk, the Sears is still open!) But about the tie: it's cotton, as Liberty's most popular floral ties have been, probably of their special Tana Lawn cotton. You may notice that the tie is quite narrow for 1972; it didn't used to be! Dad had it tailored down to a reasonable width when wide ties became unfashionable, and thereby got a couple more decades of wear out of it (and counting).