She cycled through the styles… buzzcuts in the warmer months, and a decent covering throughout the rest of the year. How's that for an awesome school picture? circa 1968.I think my favorite was having bangs, ‘cause I loved it when they got long. It felt so cool to have them over your eyebrows and getting in your eyes. Of course we were emulating the Beatles and the more we could look like the Liverpool Lads, the cooler we felt. And we also used to let the hair grow and hang down in front of our ears so we had “sideburns”. Then we kind of looked like Mr. Spock, and that was really cool, too.
As we got into High School, the bangs grew into “long all over” hair, with us constantly trying to whip our heads to keep it out of our face. And this eventually gave way to styled hair at “hair studios”. Oh, what a interesting hair tale we traveled.
Backpacks.
We never had them in school. We carried our stuff in ou
r hands. We had books, Pee-Chees and notebooks, and we carried them. If the weather was bad, we put them inside our coats. We kept the supplies we used at school in our homeroom class and/or in our lockers. The fun thing about Pee-Chees was how we altered the drawings on them. More on that some other time.These days kids seem to have everything and are prepared for a weekend camp-out every day that they go to school. Often the backpacks are bigger than the little kids hauling it. A change of clothes; a local bus, regional train and international
airplane schedule; seeds and starter plants to plant their own garden… who knows what’s all really in there. I just know that we seemed to get by just fine with a lot less.Britches. At some point in my life, I grew up enough to be wearing “pants” or “jeans”, or maybe even slacks. This did not, however, change the fact that my grandmothers would still comment on what a nice pair of britches I had on. It’s just one of those funny words that has, for the most part, gone the way of other words like trousers, stockings (guys socks – my dad still says this) and canvas high-tops.
What things do you remember having when you grew up that have been "replaced" or "improved" today?
The transition from nothing to backpacks was the addidas sport bag or with some other logo. For some reason I remember having a Craven A (I'm from Canada so I'm not sure if you had them in the U.S.) cigarette sport bag (how ironic) that I took to school.
ReplyDeleteA slow swing at the start gradually gaining enough momentum to swing it over my shoulder. It only had those super heavy science and math books in it though. No seeds... Except maybe apples that were "forgotten about" at the bottom of the bag and had disintegrated.
Nice 'do, Darryll!! I had bangs too. Actually I wanted a ponytail, but that was totally out of the question. My parents were no fun at all sometimes... okay they were never fun, actually, who's kidding who.
ReplyDeleteI just had a conversation about backpacks with my 11 yr. old daughter. She couldn't believe that we didn't have them! We did have some type of plain bookbag - tote thingy that we bought from school. I think maybe I used it a few times. We didn't have the amount of homework that the kids have now. That would have been horrible. My kids have spent a great amount of their after-school life doing homework. And I'm not even one of those bossy Mom's. I want them to go outside and play.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, I remember my mom talking about britches. I used to cringe everytime she said it. It was not the cool word to use!
Pee Chee's!! Man I must've went through millions of those things!!
ReplyDeleteI spent hours "improving" the illustrations on the front of the folders. You know.. a ball and chain on the runners leg... a bomb with a lit fuse being thrown at the baseball player.. blacking out some teeth..
Good times!!