He told his friend Apostolos Avramidis -- better known as "Tolly" -- that the Greek tailors like them were finished. Americans didn't know quality, didn't appreciate craftsmanship, wouldn't pay for anything but a ready-made suit off the rack. America, Tolly's friend explained, was the land of polyester and one-hour service.

Tolly tells this story from the lobby of the Progress Energy building downtown, where he has spent the morning hand-stitching a new hem into a pair of navy blue slacks, wetting his fingers to thread the needle.

At 78, he is proud that he never listened to his pessimistic friend. When he retires at the end of March, he won't blame changing markets, the global economy, the recession or American thriftiness.

"Nobody told me, 'Tolly, you are too old.' " he says in his heavy accent and spotty English. "I say that. Sixty years I am tailor. This is good news."

You can see Tolly through the window of his small shop, his hair whiter than chalk, dressed in a V-neck sweater and tie -- a tiny man with big glasses and a gravelly voice full of pride. Squint a little and Tolly could be Geppetto.

His customers rave. Tolly's is the place to go to make a size 40 jacket fit a size 41 body or to adjust for a belly that keeps growing after the shoulders have quit.

"Like we breathe, he can do that work," said Terry Dawson, who works at Progress Energy. "He's not a regular guy. I brought a jacket in here with the lining torn out, and he hand-stitched it so that it laid perfectly."

Without him, his customers will slink to his competition, the people that Tolly says "have the name tailor, but they are not tailors."

Many Greeks had tailor shops in Raleigh decades ago -- Italians and Germans, too. European tradesmen flooded the country in the 1970s, hoping to ply an Old World trade in lavish shops full of well-heeled customers.

They came from a world where men wore tailor-made suits. But by the mid-1970s, they were all making do with alterations.

Mike Palakis had a shop on Courtland Drive, and he kept 750 samples of wool, flannel and cashmere. He told a Raleigh Times reporter in 1975, "In America, 95 percent of people go to a store and buy their clothes off a rack. ... I only use polyester and double knits when the customer requests that I use them."

Tolly adjusted, too.

His daughter, Helen, guessed that he has made only four or five suits since they came to America in 1972.

But there is just as much art in fixing suits, hiding the signs of repair, making the fabric hug a lumpy-bumpy body.

He came from a family of tailors in Sohos, a northern Greek village of maybe 5,000 people. Formal education lasted only until he was 12, but tailoring training lasted until he was 18.

Three uncles were tailors. When Tolly was 7, one of them coaxed the boy into his shop with sweets, where he started his long lessons with a needle and thread.

"The tailor is not to go to school six months, one year, like the barber," Tolly explains. "In Raleigh, there is no tailors. No tailors."

When he was younger, there were maybe 2,000 tailors around Thessaloniki, the seaside city in the north. But when factory-made clothes arrived in Greece, 95 percent fled the country -- Tolly among them.

He spoke no English when he came to Charlotte, his job prearranged. He spoke little when he moved to West Virginia and worked for a department store with a Czech and an Italian as the only other tailors.

He jumped to The Hub in Crabtree Valley Mall, then to his own shop in Raleigh, where he has stitched and hemmed for 25 years. He says he never stopped learning needlecraft.

But he still speaks just enough of his adopted language to fend off pests. When the telephone rings, he tells them, "I retire. No more. I go home."

Then he hangs up laughing, sounding like he pulled a fast one on the modern world.