After more than 30 years of please yourself dress, Idaho schools are moving back to dress codes with some considering uniforms.
Fruitland requires khaki or black cotton/polyester pants, shirts with collars, shirttails neatly tucked in and no designer labels showing anywhere.
Borah High School and South Junior High in Boise have seriously considered uniforms, and Ontario Middle School adopted them last year.
It really takes me back to my good old golden rule days. When I started high school it was the style to wear jeans low just as it is today. We stopped short of showing our underpants as they do today, but multicolored boxer shorts weren’t available in those days and it’s doubtful we would have worn them if they were.
Boxers were for old men, real men wore Jockey shorts -- what teenagers today call tighty-whities. They came only in white as did tee shirts. It was the style then to wear a white tee shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the shoulder. If you were really cool, a pack of cigarettes was rolled up in one sleeve.
A thin white belt with at least two separate buckles finished the outfit. If you could afford them, which most of us could not, you wore black leather Wellington boots. Your jeans – Levis only! – were either turned up on the inside to create a straight blue line across your boots or, later, rolled up into a thin gray “cuff” no more than one-half inch deep.
The school dress code did not allow tee shirts, which were considered underwear and thus inappropriate for school. We therefore wore white dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Jeans could rest no lower than hips or Mr. Crosby, the coach, would pull them down as you walked down the hall. The principal, Mr. Reeves, would yank them up as high as they would go and cinch your belt as tightly as it would go. If they happened to slip back down during the school day, you would be sent home.
That was about all there was to the boys’ dress code. The girls had it much tougher. They could not wear pants unless the temperature dipped below zero and the school announced its permission over the radio. Dresses and skirts had to reach the knee. If there was any question, the suspect was required to kneel on the floor in the principal’s office. If the hem touched the floor, the dress was legal. If not, the girl was sent home to change.
Hair was another matter altogether. Girls could wear pretty much any style they chose. There was some talk of regulation when they began teasing it up into great piles on top of their heads – it was called “ratting” in those days for some reason – but it never came to anything. Legend had it that there were nests of cockroaches in some girl’s hair, but no one I knew ever saw one.
Boy’s hair was as carefully measured as girls skirts. It could not stray over the back of your collar. It was several years before the Beatles and the accepted style was more like Fonzie – swept back in great piles on the sides and top. The back was also swept back sideways and parted in the middle to form a “duck tail” or “DA”.
Hardly any boys had hair thick and curly enough to carry it off well. But with lots and lots of Brillcream, most of us could achieve a decent approximation.
The problem was, when you took a shower after PE, your hair would only stay in place as long as it was wet. Then it fell in a stringy mess over your ears and collar. You could bring a tube of Brillcream to school, but there was no place to carry it. The style covering pockets was very strict – nothing in the front and only a wallet and a comb in the back pockets.
Everyone carried a comb – a “rat-tail” comb. Anything else was very uncool. It was carried in the back pocket with the tail sticking up. Color didn’t seem to matter. In fact many boys carried pink ones which contrasted nicely with the blue-black jeans. Oh, by the way, jeans had to appear new. Any fading and they were consigned to weekend work wear.
Until the authorities cracked down, we sharpened the tail end of the combs in the pencil sharpener. It created a very sharp point, which looked cool and slightly threatening. I never knew of anyone being stabbed with a sharpened comb, but it might have happened.
It was not a good time to have bad hair, and boy did I have bad hair. It was thin and just lay flat on my head like a limp thin mop. Until I was 14 my parents forced me to wear a crew cut – the most uncool haircut possible. Haircuts cost $1.25 at Spin’s Barber Shop in the Vendome Hotel and “money doesn’t grow on trees,” my dad said, “although old Spin seems to think it grows on heads.” Ha, ha, ha.
What I wished for was a flat-top with fenders. It was so cool. Gary Edwards, a senior in high school, was getting one when I was waiting for my crew cut once. His hair was black like mine, but really, really thick and curly. The top stood up straight like a brush about half an inch deep. The sides were swept back into “fenders” that went all the way around culminating in a perfect DA in the back.
The best I could manage with my thin mopey hair was a dumb jelly roll. You combed the sides of the top into the middle then combed a line down the middle. Tony Krause could make a spit curl covering his forehead on each side, but I couldn’t and so looked like a queer trying hard to be cool
That turned out okay, because my best friend Barry was about the least cool kid in Weiser High School. His hair was cut short on the sides, parted on the side and clumped up in the front, just like an old man’s. He wore slacks and short-sleeved shirts in direct defiance of every clause in the fashion code.
Since Barry was my best friend, along with Glen who also wore a crew cut and Ron whose hair was like Barry’s, we settled for being not just uncool, but anti-cool. We talked national and international politics at the lunch table, wrote strident articles for the local newspaper, worked behind the scenes in student government creating winning candidates and never dated.
The called us The Four Stooges and we were proud. We loved the Stooges and we loved being anti-cool.
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