Remembrances: Sailing Retailer Became Icon of Fashion; Also, Vera Wang's Father Bolstered Her Fashion Empire
Gary C. Comer (1927-2006), Lands' End Founder</br></br>GARY C. COMER parlayed a love of sailing into Lands' End, one of the world's largest mail-order clothing businesses.</br></br>With its misplaced apostrophe that his then-fledgling company couldn't afford to fix, Lands' End made Mr. Comer a billionaire. Then he used his fortune to combat global warming, help children who shared his impoverished roots on Chicago's South Side and oppose President Bush over the war in Iraq. He died Wednesday at age 78.</br></br>The son of a railroad conductor, Mr. Comer skipped college and worked as an advertising copy writer for Young & Rubicam -- now part of London-based WPP Group PLC -- for 10 years before starting a mail- order business in 1962, in an office above a smoky all-night Chicago saloon. Drawing on his expertise in sailboat racing-he had won a bronze medal at the Pan American Games in 1959 -- Mr. Comer first sold sailing equipment through magazine ads. When he and five partners later incorporated as Lands' End Yacht Stores, he picked a name that "had a romantic ring to it and conjured visions of a point to depart from on a perilous voyage," Mr. Comer wrote in a 1988 essay for the company's 25th-anniversary yearbook.</br></br>About a decade after mailing its first catalog in 1965, Lands' End broadened its focus to classic clothing.