I Don't Care!...I Won't Do It!

 It's hot outside. We set a record temperature for our area yesterday (92) and might do the same today. Still, I had made up my mind to mow the back yard lawn today because in some places the grass is mid-calf high and there is rain predicted for the next four days. Some of my neighbors will probably mow later today; others not. We've all got different philosophies on how and when to cut grass. There's a couple of other differences between me an them. They've all got riding mowers. I don't. They all wear shorts. I won't. I don't care if it's a 120 out there, if I'm stupid enough to be cutting grass I'll be doing it in jeans. 

My attitude toward shorts has about 75 years of history behind it. In the late 40s and early 50s on Milwaukee’s South Side we all wore shorts, because our mothers made us. We didn’t want to, but come summer vacation out came the shorts. “You’ll feel cooler, and besides they look good on you” was the explanation we’d get in response to our protests. We knew the real reason was that there were no knees to wear out and they stayed cleaner a little longer. It was these same unreasonable mothers who made us wear rubber boots at the first hint of a snowflake, and not only wear them, but completely buckle them up which eliminated any chance of salvaging a cool guy image. The only situation that could possibly be worse would be shorts and rubber boots. Nobody could have survived that humiliation. You’d have to move to like Idaho, or someplace like that. 

The above photo taken of me in 1946 is what I'm talking about. I was probably kneeling down to make it look like I was wearing long pants. That obviously didn't work. Could I look any more like a geek? I guarantee that if I'd had long pants on I would have been standing tall with my best tough guy look on my face. That's what wearing shorts did to us guys.

I think mothers felt it was their duty to make our lives miserable when we were under 10 to 12 years old. Maybe they viewed it as character development. The problem with shorts is they made you look and feel like a sissy. I’ll bet in those days shorts were the reason for more bloody noses than anything else. We didn’t have any problem within our gang, because me, Ed, Baldy, Eddie, Pinky, Norb and Eugene were near the same age and all in shorts. It was when we crossed paths with some other gang who had slightly older guys wearing long pants that the insults would come and the fists start flying. If you were in shorts you almost automatically got called a ‘twerp’ by other guys. “Your mother dresses you funny” was a standard taunt. You could either take it and be labeled a sissy, or you started throwing punches. Even if you lost the other guy was less likely to mess with you next time you met. It’s probably not possible to understand the resentment we felt toward shorts if you weren’t there at that time.

We’d see photos in magazines like National Geographic of teenage guys in England, France, and Germany wearing shorts and laugh our heads off. Teenagers!! How could they expect a girl to even look at them without laughing? We thought mothers must be really strict over there! And then one day we saw photos of British soldiers fighting in Africa. They were wearing shorts. Soldiers in shorts! Can you imagine John Wayne leading his platoon in an attack on an enemy beach...in shorts? Forget the beach...can you even imagine John Wayne in shorts!? Or Wyatt Earp facing a dozen outlaws at high-noon on main street in Tombstone...in shorts? The outlaws would have been rolling on the ground laughing so hard that the gunfight at the OK Corral would never have happened! One of us suggested that maybe the British government issued shorts to make the soldiers mad and fight harder, but we finely decided that the war was causing shortages of everything and probably they didn't have enough material to make long pants for all of the soldiers. We felt sorry for the guys who were issued short pants.

Going from shorts to long pants was sort of a rite of passage. There wasn’t anything that triggered it. It wasn’t like...”Okay, you’ve reached a certain age or height so now you can wear regular jeans.” It was just…one day a guy would show up in jeans, and you knew he’d crossed over. In our gang Norb was the first. Nobody said anything and nothing really changed but things were never quite the same. If I remember right the following year Ed was next, followed soon after by Eugene and then Baldy. Then there were only three of us left – each of us hoping it would happen to us early next year because none of us wanted to be last. I don’t remember how it worked out. All I remember was there came a time in my life when I was finally through with shorts; an attitude and feeling that remains with me to this day. I could not force myself to go out in public wearing shorts.

Now, I do have a couple of pairs of Reebok shorts with matching tank tops that I wear for my morning exercise workout. And sometimes I'll wear them in the house if I'm just lazing around watching tv or whatever, but to wear them outside?...never! I know damn well that if I did that I'd hear voices from the past shouting, "Hey twerp - your mother dresses you funny!"