Word: coats
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...Boylston,' which cuts through one of Boston's more affluent shopping districts. Later the Globe said that shopkeepers had complained to the Mayor that the march would disrupt their business. The two ladies, one short with short brown hair, the other taller in a long brown coat and with an ugly motley-skinned face, engage in minor histrionics. Raising her eyes to the sky, the short one beseeches the crowd to acknowledge her conciliatory stance...
...crowd advances, tossing rocks and cardboard tubes. Behind the closed ranks of the police, a black man is pummeled. A white woman in a beaver coat lunges next to him. She is clubbed on the back and falls face down in the gutter. Owens climbs onto the roof of the sound truck at the front of the column. He asks for attention. The crowd won't listen. His brown color-coordinated coat, pants and tie have the look of Esquire's fashion page. His moustache is definitely in Vogue...
Letters such as these, mistakes and all, are being delivered to hundreds of thousands of homes as a growing number of companies try to cash in on the profitable business of mail-order heraldry. Some of the firms claim to have extensive libraries consisting of thousands of documented coats of arms. Halbert's Inc. of Bath, Ohio, one of the largest and most aggressive companies, will produce (on pseudo parchment) "the earliest known coat of arms registered to a person with the same surname" -for a mere $2. When there is no known coat of arms for a family...
Boston's Sanson Institute of Heraldry puts coats of arms on everything from blazer patches ($14.95) to watches ($49.95). The American Heraldry Foundation in Clearwater, Minn., has a different approach. For a $39.95 fee, customers can suggest the motif of their shields. The Beihoffers, a farming family from Buffalo Lake, Minn., for example, picked a horse and plowshare and a spool of thread (sewing is Opal Beihoffer's hobby) for their coat of arms; because marriage and the home are important to the family, they also chose a pair of intertwined rings and a front door...
There are some corporate customers, usually liquor companies anxious to upgrade their image with a coat of arms. But the vast majority are ordinary citizens, most of them without any noteworthy lineage. Explains Halbert's Haslinger: "People get their shields because they are turned off by being a social security number. They want to remind themselves that they are something special." Adds Ken Kandler, president of Sanson's: "We sell instant...