Old Wore Out Stories

I can't say exactly why, but for some reason I enjoy sharing stories about growing up economically poor (yes, I know kids, you have heard each story a gozillion times)

I kinda knew we were short on cash as a kid, but everyone else in our world was pretty much in the same boat so it was never that big a deal.

As far as clothes were concerned, we got new school clothes and one pair of shoes once per year when school started. For many years Mom made my sisters' dresses (always just alike so they tried to coordinate so that they didn't wear the same dress on the same day) and she made my shirts and underwear. One day when I was older I was looking at the tail of a store bought shirt and realized something was missing. The I realized it was the first time I owned a shirt that didn't have the writing concerning the chicken feed in indelible ink printed on the shirt tail. (My shirts matched the girls dresses as chicken feed sacks only came in so many patterns)

When those clothes got holes in them, the holes got patched. No new clothes until the next school year started. Some times the patches got patches, but we kept wearing them.

Being a typical boy, my one pair of shoes per year got pretty ragged before the end of their life. One time when I was about 13 the sole of my "slippers" came loose and it made a flopping sound with every step. As this embarassed me, I cut the sole off the shoes and walked around with my stocking feet hitting the ground (but no flopping noise).

When I was about 16, my Dad and I shared a pair of dress shoes. We both had the same size feet. My job was to keep the shoes shined and in return, Dad let me wear them on special occasions when he wasn't wearing them. That worked fine for me as I had no nice shoes otherwise.

Dad made the same deal with our family vehicle, a 1953 Chevy pickup. Every other Saturday night he and mom would use the truck to "honky tonk". On the alternate Saturday nights he would let me use it to go on a date. Of course the truck was also Dad's oil field work truck so in order to go on this date, I had to get about two inches of red sand from the floorboard and use kerosene soaked rags to get all the oil and grease off the seats. No big deal, it was a ride and I was mobile and free (with a strong kerosene smell as ambience.) The only thing to do on a "date" was go to the Turnertown drive-in. The Dairy Queen in Henderson had not been built and there isn't much you can do with $2 anyway. The drive-in was 50 cents each and gas was like 18 to 25 cents per gallon so I even had enough money for a couple of cokes at 15 cents each (but not much else).

When I started high school my english teacher, Ms. Spradley, noticed the ragged condition of my clothes. She had me come to her room alone one day and showed me a sack of nice used clothes she had obtained from a relative and ordered me to try them on and keep whatever fit. She said that this would be our secret forever as no one had to know she was helping me with clothes. That dear lady smuggled used clothes to me for all of high school and to this day no one that I went to school with ever found out.

OK, kids, I blogged this stuff so maybe you won't have to hear it again (Naw, I enjoy telling it too much)