A Story of Shorts

It's still spring and yet many of the kids in the neighborhood are wearing shorts. The robins and daffodils and people raking their grass all say that summer is coming, and with summer comes the wearing of shorts.

When I started school in the 1950's, not a lot of people I knew wore shorts. The women in our neighborhood mostly wore cotton house dresses with their hair pinned up or in some kind of cloth turban or scarf. One has only to watch an I LOVE LUCY episode to see what I mean. Some little girls wore shorts, but many more wore little sundresses even to play outside. A few boys wore shorts, but most wore blue jeans. No men or women I knew wore shorts. Not in our neighborhood. Not in our town.

Then came the 1960's. A lot changed. Girls and women not only wore shorts, some wore short shorts. My older sister who was in high school got into the very short shorts thing right off. My mother didn't seem to mind, but my dad went ballistic every time he saw her wearing them. He was an old fashioned guy. In his book men wore pants, and women wore dresses and neither were short. Children were just small adults. What their parents wore, they wore.

But over time, it became apparent to even my dad that those who wore shorts at the very least looked cooler than those who didn't, and at the most they really were cooler. I'm sure he thought about this as the scorching heat of our Indiana summers beat down on him while he mowed the lawn with a rotary mower, when he bent over to weed the large vegetable garden by the hour, as he sat in our stuffy little living room with its one window fan and tried to cool off, and especially as he increasingly saw TV commercials and magazine ads that showed people appearing to be as cool as a cucumber wearing their one hundred per cent cotton shorts made by union workers and bearing the trusted union label.

My father was the sort of guy who would give you the shirt off of his back, but he would also be sure that he had put another shirt on before he let you see him in his skivvies. I don't know if he was overly modest or just insecure, but he always appeared fully dressed, and he wore the same thing: dark pants, and a buttoned-down-the-front shirt. It was like a uniform. Newer ones for work on Monday through Friday and older rattier ones consigned for yard work and relaxing. And, of course, all the time my mother was wearing her trademark cotton house dresses which she often made herself from cheap printed fabric she bought at Harvey's Dime Store.

But then one day, it happened. My mother bought my father a pair of blue plaid Bermuda shorts. Who knows why. Maybe she thought he would look thinner, sexier, younger. Or maybe she felt real sympathy for his capacity to sweat and get red in the face wearing what he did to work outside all through the hot summer. 


Whatever her reasons, it was easy for her to produce a pair of shorts. She knew his size. He never bought his own clothes anyway. And so one day, certainly knowing the volcanic eruption it would cause, she presented him with the blue plaid Bermuda shorts and told him to go try them on.

We lived on Campbell Street in the house where my father grew up. Around the time I was born the property to the south of us was sold to a young couple who promptly built a small one story house on it. Across the street was a large ranch-style house, the first one built in our town. And right next to us to the north, was a small two story house, much newer than ours, but still pretty old as houses go. Bob and his lovely wife Dorothy lived in that house with their three children. 


I liked Dorothy because she seemed to be everything my mother wasn't. Dorothy smiled a lot. She had curly hair. She was slender and even though she, too, wore cotton house dresses, hers always looked good on her. She always greeted me with a smile and a kindly word when she saw me. Sometimes when I was out in the yard working she would come over and offer me a drink or a cookie, something my mother would never do. If my sisters and I came inside on a hot summer day to raid the cookie jar, our mother would yell at us to go back outside and stay out of the cookies. She probably was conserving food and being frugal, but the contrast couldn't have been clearer to a ten year old. Dorothy passed out cookies. My mother hoarded hers.

Dorothy's husband Bob was the only man I knew at the time who always wore blue jeans. And not nicely fitted ones like the guys wear today. Bob wore the boxy carpenter's jeans with loops for hammers and other cool stuff. My mother thought jeans were for hillbillies. I didn't know what a hillbilly looked like so I couldn't comment at the time.


Bob was a squarely built guy, not tall, not fat. He had a thick head of dark hair and he liked beer. That was another big no-no for my mother. Anyone who drank beer wasn't to be trusted. For several reasons most of which I never knew, my mother neither liked nor trusted Bob. 

No one in our neighborhood had a clothes dryer. Clotheslines criss-crossed every backyard in a patchwork display of socks, underwear, tea towels, sheets, and everything else that people washed in their wringer washers. There was still ingrained in many housewives the weekly schedule thing. Monday was Wash Day. Tuesday was Ironing Day. Wednesday was Baking Day, Thursday was Mending Day, Friday was Cleaning Day, Saturday was Shopping Day, and Sunday was a day of rest. If you followed the directions, presumably you'd get all of your work done in a week, and your kids and husband would know exactly what to expect on any given day and never run out of fresh baked bread or clean socks.

My mother was not an organized person. I'm sure she meant well, but it wasn't in her genetic makeup to adhere to any plan for long, so although she  attempted to follow the universal schedule, she often got behind. She used to quote the old Amish saying, "The hurrier I go, the behinder I get." As a kid, I didn't see the humor in it, and like a lot of kids, I thought the way things were done at our house was how they were done in everyone's house. But over the years and the more I explored my world, the more I discovered that this wasn't necessarily true. And because my mother, for various reasons known only to her, let the schedule slip time and again, it then would follow that she might end up doing her washing on Ironing Day or even on Cleaning Day or Shopping Day.


Which is why she didn't like Bob. Bob's wife religiously stuck to the schedule, so he must have assumed that all of his neighbors' wives did, too. That's the kind and forgiving explanation of what happened. And maybe that was true at first. Maybe he innocently hauled his nasty, smelly rubbish out to the big hundred gallon metal drum that all of our neighbors had at the back of their property to burn his trash. Trash in those days could include just about anything you didn't want. Bob burned garbage, old rubber things, clothes, paper, etc. 

Here's the scenario: that morning my mom had just washed six large loads of clothes for her husband and four daughters and herself in a wringer washer, which in itself was ordeal. Then she lugged the heavy baskets of clothes up from the basement, carrying each out to the backyard where she hung them on long cotton clotheslines. All of this took several hours and needed to be done early in the morning for the clothes to have the time to dry properly before the dew began to fall at dusk. By ten in the morning, my mother was ready for a rest. At exactly noon, the big factory up the street from us, the same factory where Bob worked, blasted its steam whistle telling its workers to take a break for lunch. 


Bob always ate lunch at work. Every morning we saw him leave his house carrying his large black metal lunchbox and head up the street to work. Our dad never carried a lunch box, so we liked to speculate about what Bob had in his lunch box. Bob left in the morning. He came home when the whistle blew at four o'clock. We all set our clocks by those whistles, and as children, we knew when the factory's lunchtime whistle blew, our dad would be walking home for lunch from the other side of town where he worked. There was a predictability to our lives and a lot of it revolved around the factory whistles.


But on this day, for some reason, instead of eating from his big lunch box with the other factory workers, Bob walked the three blocks back down Campbell Street at lunch time and then before returning to work, walked out to the backyard and lit a match to whatever trash he had earlier thrown into the metal drum incinerator, starting a roaring fire before he walked back up the street.

Now there were no covers or screens on the incinerators of that time. They were nothing like the neat little fire pits people use today, all the ashes carefully kept from floating across the yard by a snug mesh screen. No, Bob's incinerator was the kind that belched great chunks of sooty ashes and little bits of singed paper fragments and garbage and depending on how the wind was blowing on any given day, those ashes might fall in his yard, or they might float over into ours. 


On this particular day, pieces of Bob's flaming trash floated  across the wire fence that divided his yard from ours and over my mother's laundry hanging innocently on their lines where she had left it. One by one, sooty pieces of discarded rubbish landed on my dad's white Sunday shirt, our tablecloths, my mother's house dresses, our bath towels. Everything. It all had sooty pieces staining them black. It all absorbed the smell of burning garbage that always filled the neighborhood when Bob burned his trash.

My mother had never liked Bob much, but after this incident, she loathed him. And in fairness to her, this wasn't the last time Bob committed this attrocity against our clean clothes. She claimed he did it on purpose just to torment her. It certainly was a torment for her to have to haul all those loads of freshly washed laundry from the clothesline only hours after she had hung them there, now needing to be rewashed and then hung in the dark and musty basement when they should have had the sweet fresh smell of the sun and the outdoors on them but now there simply wasn't enough time for them to dry before dark.

My mother ordered my dad to go over and give old Bob the business, long ago speak for telling him off. Maybe he said something to Bob. I don't know. I do know that this became a fairly frequent situation. Maybe my mother had irritated old Bob or maybe he just liked to put my dad in the middle of what anyone could tell by hearing my mother yell was a real pickle. In hindsight, it could have been avoided entirely had my mother adhered to the neighborhood schedule, but either she couldn't or wouldn't so the dance continued.

And then the day arrived that my mother presented my dad with his new pair of blue plaid Bermuda shorts. There was the usually explosion from him, but I think my mother knew what was bluster and what was not. Or maybe she just had a way of wearing him down with repetitive nagging, but the result was the same. One  particularly hot summer's day, my dad put on his blue plaid Bermuda shorts.

My father was five foot three inches tall. He was heavy. At his heaviest, he weighed almost three hundred pounds. He wasn't that heavy at the time, but he was heavy enough to look like a blue plaid refrigerator wearing those shorts. His was not the lean athletic image that my mother may have envisioned when she bought the shorts.  And because my father was so vertically challenged, the blue plaid Bermuda shorts hung down way below his knees. My mother assured him that she would shorten them for him, but that they would be so much cooler than his work pants and that he should just enjoy them until she shortened them. He believed her.

As he walked out into the sticky hot air of a late summer morning, I imagine he was momentarily happy that my mother had worn him down because he could feel the slight breeze blowing across his short hairy legs. The blue plaid fabric was so much thinner than his work pants, and like a sheep shorn in the spring, he must have felt lighter in many ways.

That is, until Bob came out of his house and wandered across to our yard.

"Waaal, if et ain't Harry Lauder!!!! Ha ha ha. Yeah, it's Harry Lauder! Are you gonna dance for us, Harry?" Minutes later my dad stomped into the house and into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him. When he came out he was wearing the usual dark work pants. He silently handed my mother a blue plaid wad of cloth. It took some time for my dad to calm down.

Of course everyone in our house heard the insulting words many times over that day, that week, that summer, and for years to come. As children we had no idea who or what a Harry Lauder was, but being called that seemed to be a very great insult to my father. Years later I learned that Harry Lauder was a Scotsman who was a nimble dancer and singer on the old Vaudeville stage. He dressed in a long plaid kilt and tam o'shanter and he carried a crooked walking stick as he first sang and them danced his way across the stage.

I suppose Bob thought he was being funny when he made the connection between my short dad wearing long plaid shorts and Harry Lauder wearing a long plaid kilt. Maybe he was just kidding as neighbors kid each other. But based on the ongoing burning trash thing, maybe he had a mean streak and was just trying to make my dad feel stupid. 


And just maybe even my father might even have privately thought there was something to laugh at in the incident. If he did, he never mentioned it in that light and the whole affair kept my father from wearing shorts for several years after that. And when he did at last buy a pair of shorts, he insisted that they be properly altered before he wore them. Forever after, my dad's Bermuda shorts were worn only in the yard and they were always a plain color. Never plaid. 


I wonder if Bob ever noticed that?