For 99 years, a Wirtz man has been helping to dress McHenry residents.

That record comes to an end Dec. 30. Tony Wirtz is set to retire and will turn the sign from Open to Closed at Tony’s Family Tailor Shop for the last time.

“I need to slow down,” Tony said. “I just turned 70 and I have 12-hour days almost every day here.”

His family’s sartorial legacy begins with his uncle – also Tony Wirtz. The elder Wirtz began working at McHenry’s McGee’s Store for Men in 1926 and later bought the store. He hired his nephew Christopher Wirtz to work at McGee’s in 1963, and Christopher then went on to open Christopher’s Men’s Wear on McHenry’s Main Street.

Christopher hired his younger brother, Tony Wirtz, to work at his menswear store.

He never was much of a salesman, Tony said. Instead of selling suits, he began fixing them on the commercial sewing machines Christopher had bought for his store.

“I learned how to do pant hems” first, Tony said. “I enjoyed it. I was working with my hands.” And he kept learning how to do other work, from hemming jeans to deconstructing a suit to better fit its owner.

In the mid-1980s, Tony met a couple at Christopher’s who worked for Union Special, the industrial sewing machine company based in Huntley.

“He hooked us up with nice machines,” Tony said.

Christopher’s was selling suits made by Chicago-based Hart Schaffner & Marx. The company sent both he and wife Laurie to classes, learning how “to take a suit apart and put it back together.”

That is the part Laurie Wirtz likes the best – taking something apart to put it back together again.

“I knew how to sew, but I hated to sew. I still hate to sew,” Laurie said. “But I can adapt it once it is made. That is a totally different mindset. Alterations are a puzzle, and I like puzzles. I can put it back together as well as or better than it was originally put together.”

In 1989, Tony and Laurie moved out of Christopher’s and into the shop next door.

For the next 36 years, Tony ran the store at 3908 Main St. He’s the one who met with customers coming in to have a jacket altered or a zipper replaced. Then, he decided whether he or one of the off-site seamstresses – including Laurie – would work on the piece.

He always worked at the shop and Laurie at home.

“She works at home so we don’t kill each other. This place is too small for two people to work,” Tony said.

Christopher’s closed in 1998, and Tony could see his business slowing down then too. Men bought fewer suits “and wanted Dockers and polo shirts,” he said. “We needed other things to keep going.”

That was about the time that – in the late 1990s – that McHenry County sheriff’s deputies and corrections officers started coming to him to alter their work uniforms.

“That was big time,” for the business, Tony said.

Also at about that time, a woman who trained horses came into the shop with her daughter, who did dressage horse competitions. That was the kickoff point for the dressage alteration business, as his name was passed around horse barns in Illinois. He gets customers from outside the state as well.

The evidence of that client base is on his store’s walls. He’d tell the riders that their newly tailored suit meant they needed to win ribbons. Those riders then sent him photos of them in their suits, winning ribbons.

They were so busy with dressage riders, Tony said, they quit working on prom dresses.

He’s also stopped taking on new projects. As clients come in, he has to tell them he will be closing down and cannot do their repairs or alterations.

“I said the other day ... I have never disappointed so many women in one day and got hugs right after” he shared the news, Tony said.

He’s not going to completely quit tailoring, planning to continue working on the law enforcement uniforms and taking other work to supplement their retirement checks.

But the Wirtzes will spend more time with their grandchildren, and hope to do some of the camping he and Laurie used to enjoy when they could get away.

“Between that and the police alterations ... that is enough to keep me out of trouble,” Tony said.