“My dear, this is something you must always remember. Your bosom can be fake. Your smile can be fake and your hair color can be fake. But your pearls and your silver must always be real.” —Maryln Schwartz, A Southern Belle Primer: Or Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma
Atlanta is crazy about pearls, and oddly enough, it’s the men who are wearing them. It’s all Joc Pederson’s fault.
Unless your cable and your radio and your internet have been out and you’ve not talked to another human being in the past few weeks, you know that the Atlanta Braves clinched the World Series Tuesday night with a win in Game 6 against the Houston Astros. It’s their first World Series title since 1995, and in a city long used to disappointment when it comes to sports championships, it still feels a little surreal. But we’re coping—schools are out on Friday to celebrate the championship parade.
As the Braves team prepared for post-season play, centerfielder Joc Pederson turned his thoughts to the most important question of the upcoming playoffs. Namely, what jewelry would he wear to ensure he performed at his best. He settled on a string of pearls, and Southern women everywhere realized this man from California had hacked our secret.
Southern women love pearls. They are timeless and beautiful and class up any outfit from a little black dress to a t-shirt and jeans. Pearls have a long history in the jewelry boxes of the rich and royal. We don’t know who the first people were to collect and wear pearls, but some believe ancient tribes in what is now India were among the first. Pearls are mentioned in ancient Chinese writings, and the Bible speaks of pearls in more than one spot, including Jesus’s parable of the “pearl of great value.” The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all valued pearls as ornamentation on everything from clothing and jewelry to furniture.
Pearls, from ancient times until relatively recently, were extremely expensive. That’s because they only came from a few sources—the Persian Gulf along the coast of India and Sri Lanka, rivers and lakes in China, and coastal Japan were the main ones. The discovery of the New World offered new sources of freshwater pearls in the upper Mississippi River and in Central and South America. But they remained expensive because they had to be found and harvested, not created.
It wasn’t until the late 1800’s and early 1900’s that cultured pearls became a thing. Three inventors in Japan filed for patents around that time for processes that created what came to be called cultured pearls. Kokichi Mikimoto was the most notable of these, and his name became synonymous with cultured pearls. I was today years old when I realized why the Mikimoto pearls sold at the Japanese pavilion at Epcot are so popular. They are the original cultured pearls.
Mikimoto’s pearls have a midwestern connection. Mussels that lived in the upper Mississippi River were prized for the mother of pearl in their shells, and button factories sprang up along the river in the early 1900’s to make mother of pearl buttons for clothing. (The advent of plastic buttons combined with overfishing in the Mississippi killed the mother of pearl button industry, and most of the factories were gone by mid-century.)
Mikimoto discovered the best nuclei to use in creating cultured pearls was mother of pearl beads from Mississippi River mussels. The oysters accepted them better and died less often. A win-win. He inserted the beads in the mantles of oysters. They then created a pearl pocket around the bead and coated it with nacre, the part that makes a pearl a pearl. The U.S. exported thousands of pounds of Mississippi mussels a year to Japan through the 1990’s for use in growing cultured pearls.
Cultured pearls are much less expensive than natural pearls, and Mikimoto and others like him made pearl jewelry accessible to more people. It was not just the rich and royal who could wear them now, as the merely well-to-do could afford them as well. But they were, and are, still expensive enough to be treasured family heirlooms.
And now Joc Pederson has let our secret out of the bag—a nice string of pearls is appropriate for any occasion, even the World Series. Southern women have known pearls are empowering for quite some time, but now everyone else does too. Other men are following Pederson’s lead. At the Georgia Tech/Virginia Tech game last Saturday, I saw several older men walking around with their wives’ costume pearls on. Atlanta fans snapped up the $5 replicas they were selling at the ballpark. And word on the street has it that young baseball players all over the place are getting their own pearl necklaces to wear in games. I just hope some kindly grandmother has taken Pederson aside to tell him he must put his pearls on after putting on his hairspray and perfume. Otherwise he will ruin them.
I guess pearls go with baseball like hot dogs and apple pie now. I’m OK with that.
We are in World Series recovery at our house. Stephen and I are getting too old to string together that many late nights watching tv. It was such a fun ride! In the early 1990’s World Series runs, we were living in Dallas, Texas, and that first year we still had our Georgia license plates on our cars. Everywhere we went people honked and chopped at us. Thanks to TBS, the Braves truly are America’s Team. We’ll rest up and hope to watch Atlanta United in the playoffs soon.
Until next time,
Karla