Pressing Religious Concerns

No sooner had Janie Guerra, a pants presser at Comet Cleaners in Harlingen, Texas, returned to her station after lunchtime prayers than she noticed a familiar image on the press head pad. “I pick up the pants and I see the Virgin Mary,” she says. Store owner Buddy Fischer didn't want to sell the press pad, nor turn it into a shrine and have the store flooded with pilgrims, so he printed up copies of the photograph Guerra had taken with her cell phone, handed them out, and kept using the press. Before long the image faded. “I had to,” he says. “I had 700 pairs of pants to press."