Old Missoula

 

Clothing entrepreneur leaves legacy of customer service

 

By VINCE DEVLIN of the Missoulian

 

Apr 12, 2005

 

Angelo Bourlakas was a man who could close his business and leave town for a new career, return 36 years later to reopen and have repeat customers who spanned the gap.

 

The name – Angelos – is synonymous with high-end men’s fashions in western Montana. The store in Southgate Mall where he worked seven days a week was, as reporter Michael Downs put it in a 1994 Missoulian story, Angelo’s home.

 

The house he and wife Helen retreated to at night was simply where they slept.

 

Bourlakas, who died last week at the age of 79, would never divulge his age to reporters, and his obituary over the weekend didn’t mention his age or birth date. But brother-in-law George Lambros said Monday that Angelo just missed his 80th birthday by a couple of months.

 

“He really started from scratch and became a legend,” said Lambros who, along with brother Dan, were partners with Angelo in his first Missoula store, at 111 E. Main St.

 

It opened in 1956.

 

In 1961, the Lambros brothers left to open their real estate business and Angelos moved to the corner of Main and Higgins, where it grew to three floors and sold clothing for both men and women.

 

One early morning in 1966, Angelo was summoned downtown. A fire had started in a nearby jewelry store and was threatening his business.

 

He was able to save his paperwork but not much else as half a dozen businesses near the jewelry store went up in flames.

 

Angelo rebuilt, but it wasn’t the same for him.

 

“It was time to move on,” he told Downs. The Bourlakases moved to Los Angeles, where Angelo went from retailer to wholesaler, working for a manufactured tailored clothier.

 

“The suit and slack companies were amazed,” Lambros said, “because he not only could sell orders, he helped them design their lines. He’d draw designs on paper, and he was always way ahead of the curve.”

 

“There couldn’t be a better man,” said Tom Daskalos, who owns his own upscale men’s store in Walnut Creek, Calif. “He got along with everybody. The suppliers in New York, everybody loved him.”

 

Daskalos and Bourlakas met after Angelo went to work in California. They shared the same background – both immigrated to the United States from Greece as young men – and the same profession.

 

“We would go to New York for buying,” Daskalos said. “We would share ideas, a lot of good times, a lot of good dinners. He was my buddy.”

 

When it was time to retire, Angelo wasn’t ready. Encouraged by Missoula attorney Milt Datsopoulos, who once worked at Angelos, and by Southgate Mall, owned by his brothers-in-law, Angelo reopened his clothing store in 1994.

 

It stocks 5,000 ties, no more than any two alike, and fine suits, slacks and shirts. Half his brother-in-law’s business, George Lambros said, came from outside Missoula.

 

Dan Carlino, general manager of the Doubletree Hotel in Missoula, stopped in six or seven years ago.

 

“Just a routine visit,” Carlino said. “It was an experience. I was actually entertained.”

 

Angelo was at his side in a flash, ready to help.

 

“He was all over it,” Carlino said. “But he wasn’t pushy, it was in a caring way.”

 

Bourlakas immigrated to the Midwest, and graduated from Indiana University. He joined the Marines and served in the 4th Marine Division on Iwo Jima during World War II.

 

A job with Burr’s Department Store in Butte brought him to Montana, where he met Helen, his wife of 52 years.

 

And for a decade that began in the 1950s and another that began in the 1990s, he ran Angelos. It was a place where the owner could tell your size with a glance as easily as with a tape measure, and personally made sure you got what you wanted and that it fit perfectly.

 

“I’m in the service industry,” Carlino said, “and he lived what we’re all trying to do – have customers walk out talking about what a great experience they had.”

 

Angelos remains open.

 

“He was ready to remodel, he wanted to expand,” George Lambros said. “He’d just committed to another 10 years on his lease. He loved his work. He always said it wasn’t work to him, it was his hobby.”