I was in Walmart the other day and overheard a woman who was shopping with her teenage daughter.
“So, after we get your backpack,” the mother said, “we’ll go pick out some new school clothes for you, too…maybe some skirts and tops, a couple pairs of shorts and some jeans.”
Her words made me think how lucky school kids are in this century. Back when I went to school, shorts, jeans and slacks were on the school’s “forbidden apparel, per penalty of death” list, so daring to show up for class while wearing any one of them would have resulted in my immediate expulsion.
And the only people who carried backpacks during my high-school days were hikers. We were forced to lug all of our books in our arms, which involved a lot of juggling, stacking and strategic balancing. And living in the city, there was no such thing as a school bus, so we had to walk many blocks to and from school. That’s why early in the school year, most of us girls tried to find guys who would carry our books home for us. If that meant shamelessly flirting, then we did it, solely for the preservation of our delicate arms and backs.
I still vividly recall the outfit I wore on my very first day of high school. Even though the temperature was about 80 degrees in the shade, there I stood in my red-and-green-plaid woolen skirt, green cable-knit sweater, green knee-socks and black loafers. And for a finishing touch, I wore a silver neck-chain that had a replica of a covered bridge hanging from it (it was a souvenir gift from Vermont).
By eleven o’clock that morning, I nearly needed CPR for heat prostration.
There seemed to be standard fashion rules back in those days. You never wore white shoes or white slacks after Labor Day, and back-to-school clothes had to be warm. That meant if you were a female, you wore a lot of wool. And if you were a male, you wore corduroy. So many guys wore new corduroy pants the first week of school, the swishing noises the material made when their legs rubbed together as they walked through the hallways made the place sound like a wind tunnel.
Other than making me hot, wool also made me itch worse than if I’d rolled naked in a field of poison ivy. But in high school, because wool skirts were all the rage, I bit the bullet and wore them anyway. After all, most of the girls were wearing stylish wraparound skirts that fastened in the front with a big brass safety-pin, and I didn’t want to deprive myself of wearing something so "chic" just because it made me want to claw off several layers of skin. Fortunately, I discovered that if I wore two or three slips underneath the woolen skirts, I could keep the itching down to a tolerable level.
Needless to say, I spent a lot of class-time sitting in sweat-soaked underwear.
“Gee, I didn’t expect it to be so hot in September,” my mom said on my second day of high school (back when Septembers usually were pretty chilly). “Why don’t you wear that pretty flowered cotton dress you wore to Cousin Douglas’s wedding?”
“Cotton? Flowers?” I gasped, appalled at the mere suggestion. “It’s practically fall! Everyone will be wearing wool.”
“You’ll sweat, sitting in wool all day,” my mother said. “You want to end up with diaper rash, like babies get?”
I didn’t care about diaper rash. My new back-to-school wardrobe consisted of wool skirts and matching sweaters, and I fully intended to show them off…even at the risk of self-combusting.
I’m pretty sure the reason why the back-to-school clothes nowadays feature shorts and T-shirts dates back to my generation (back when most back-to-school clothes looked as if they’d been made for kids in Siberia). When teachers noticed that we students were so busy squirming, sweating and scratching ourselves, we weren’t able to pay much attention to what was being taught in class, they probably decided it might be wise to change the dress code.
So, to the kids of today...you're welcome.
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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net
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