Blue Jeans and Tee Shirts

It wasn’t until I was in the fourth grade at Sawyer School in Chicago that girls could wear pants to school.  Somehow we girls  had survived the Blizzard of ’67 in those skirts, jumpers and dresses.  Over our bare legs we wore snow pants tucked into boots that were lined with plastic bread bags.  My walk was 3 1/2 city blocks to school and we all had to go home for lunch.  Dawn Kass had the longest walk, almost a city mile each way, in that lunch hour.

Snow pants on, snow pants off, snow pants on, snow pants off, snow pants on and snow pants off, and finally snow pants on and off one last time.   In between wearings, we hung them up on hooks at school in the cloak closet or, at home, our mothers would lay them over the space heaters.  Cloak closets were arranged in a row on one side of each classroom and looked like miniature four or five car garage doors that slid up to reveal a secret room filled with hooks and pegs (and stolen kisses) for outerwear.  When the doors were lowered, we could use them as “side boards” … the real blackboards were at the front of the classroom.

Our wood desks were arranged in rows and had mysterious holes in the upper right corner that teacher told us was for old fashioned ink wells.  If you were lucky, your seat only had two pounds of chewed gum stuck to it, not five.   Being modern children, we had No. 2 pencils and routinely raised our hands to ask permission to go to the sharpener.  For entertainment, we brought straws to school and chewed up little scraps of paper to make spit balls that we aimed and fired at the artwork on the walls opposite the cloak room.   Blue jeans and tee shirts were only worn on a farm back then.

As I reflect, both boys and girls suffered many cold days out on the playground because there was no such thing as a factored in windchill.  The playground monitors (volunteer mothers imported from Siberia) showed no mercy.  There we were, sometimes just in skirts with the wind whipping and our hands holding them down lest a godforsaken boy named Ricky or Jeff or Bill see our white underwear, shivering and shaking without an ounce of sympathy from the powers that be.  THEY were all smoking cigarettes in the teacher’s lounge.

When it wasn’t frigid, the girls perfected double dutch jump roping and the boys chased the girls, pulling pony tails.  We had a merry-go-round that parents today would outlaw.  It wasn’t a good day unless someone threw up or was flung off of it.  The swings were high flyers and we perfected the art of having a sitter on the swing and another person (the pumper) standing astride the sitter, making it fly.  Still no blue jeans or tee shirts.

Bread?  It was 29 cents a loaf.  Regular gas was 18.9 at the Sinclair Gas Station where a young man with big, green dinosaur on his shirt wore a metal coin changer attached to his belt as he  dispensed change and gasoline.  While our mothers walked with metal carts to the neighborhood grocer, we kids would play softball on the street corners using the four sewer covers at each corner for bases.  I always played second base.  Incredibly, some kids never made our home spun team.  Instead, they grew up to be accountants or stamp collectors.

We also played running bases (a twisted form of monkey-in-the-middle) and poison box in the alley.  Each house had its own 55 gallon metal drum in the alley for trash.  The only trash bags known to mankind were the paper ones that our groceries came in and our mothers gingerly folded. The cans were all ripe with maggots and stench by June’s summer solstice.  When told to take the trash out, we would pick up the lids, hold our noses, and wonder at the little rice-like moving creatures.  Blue jeans and tee shirts would arrive soon, along with the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour and Laugh-In.

Ahhh, the 70′s.  Credence Clearwater Survival, the Brady Bunch, Charlie’s Angels, blue jeans and tee shirts with round, yellow happy faces on them hit our shores along with the British invasion of the Rolling Stones!  “Blue” always proceeded the word jeans back then and no one wore them to church–yet.  Princess phones with 18′ foot cords stretched down hallways, around corners and behind bedroom doors 24′ feet away.  They replaced the standard rotaries and were available  in olive green, white, pink, or a throw up shade of blue.   Johnny Carson ruled the airwaves while NBC gave birth to Saturday Night Live!

Long live blue jeans and tee shirts.