A few years ago I had some fellow Tulsans reach out to me and tell me about a tailor in town that I had to meet. His name is Sherman Ray, and though he’s 97 years old, he continues to work in his shop almost every day.
Sherman’s had an interesting life: he learned the craft of tailoring when he was a boy in Poland, survived the Holocaust, and wound up in Oklahoma where he started a thriving shop in Tulsa from which he made custom suits for oil executives and lawyers. People would come all the way from Dallas to get a suit made by Sherman. In fact, people still come up from Dallas to have him alter their suits.
I’ve had the pleasure of being a client of Sherman’s for a few years now. Every time I go to get something altered, I end up staying for an hour just to chat. He’s got a lot of great stories. In his 80s he took up weightlifting, and he bench pressed 225 lbs at a senior games here in town when he was 87. He likes to show off his medal he got for that. He still exercises every day, in addition to doing his tailoring work.
I wanted to capture some of the life of this old school treasure, so we created a little film about Sherman. I hope you enjoy it.
