In the early sixties, there were two lifestyles that affected your clothing choices. On one side you had the greasers (or birds, as we called them), still holding on to their '50s fashion choices: leather jackets, upturned shirt collar, skintight sharkskin pants, pointy black shoes, and cigarette pack folded into the white undershirt sleeve.
Then, on the other side of the spectrum, you had the more conservative dressers (or squirrels, as the greasers called us). We wore button down shirts, khaki pants and jeans, and tennis shoes or loafers. There were really no in-betweens back then. You were either a bird or a squirrel, period.
Our gang was comprised strictly of squirrels. Anyone who wandered into our nieghborhood with pointed shoes, or cigarettes in their sleeve, would have been politely told that they were on the wrong side of town. Not that they wouldn't have known it. Occasionally a few of us would ride our bikes to a section of Baltimore called Hampden. I knew the area well because I was born there. But Hampden in the early '60s was infested with birds.
We liked the area because the main drag, 36th Street, had a neat movie theater (I remember seeing The Mole People there), a used comic book store (I think it was in someone's basement) where you could buy comics for as little as two for a nickle (yeah, they were a little beat up, but who cared), and a nice drug store, and five and dime.
We were alway a little frightened when we visited Hampden. We just didn't know how the birds would react to our squirrel invasion. But they were always polite and tolerated our presence. We never took the chance of overstaying our welcome, however. There was always an underlying feeling of dread that at any time our button down shirts or Jack Purcell tennis shoes could set them off. We saw our movie, bought our comics, then got the hell out of there.
There were two ivy league stores a short drive from our neighborhood where we bought most of our shirts and pants, Frank Leonard's, and The Oxford Shop. The problem was that they were rather expensive. A cheaper alternative was The Sample Store in Waverly near the great old Memorial Stadium. There you could buy similar factory reject shirts and pants at discount prices.
For the most part they were fine. The shirts sometimes had a button slightly off-center or a small bleach stain or two. The pants might have a leg a half inch shorter than the other, or a stubborn zipper. But, other than that, they were fine.
The girls liked the shirts because they had a thin one inch long tab between the shoulder blades on the back of the shirt. I guess the tab was sewn on the shirt for the convenience of hanging it up, but girls just loved to walk up behind you, put a finger through it, and yank it off. If you were lucky it didn't rip the shirt. Girls just loved to do this and collect the tabs. It was like a power thing for them. The more tabs, the more powerful the hunter. I knew one girl who had over one hundred tabs. She was avoided on a regular basis.
Looking back on it, I don't know why we just didn't cut off the tabs with scissors right after we bought the shirts. I think we just liked the attention.
Bleeding madras was also a well liked shirt style in those days. It was not popular with mothers, however. Despite their best efforts, the shirts would always manage to find their way into a washing machine where, in the midst of white dress shirts and blouses, they lived up to their name.
The shoes we wore. On the tennis shoe side, I would alternate between Hummers and Jack Purcells. They were the tennis shoes of choice in our gang. For casual shoes, I once again alternated between taffy penny loafers (they had the sewn on lumps on the sides) and Bass Weejun loafers. For dress, I liked scotch grains and wing tips. We also had this shoe called desert boots, which was a tan suede high-top casual shoe popular in the mid-sixties.
The jackets and coats we wore. It seemed like every year a new jacket or winter coat would become popular. My favorite jacket in the early '60s was the flag jacket. It was a standard lightweight jacket with large rectangular red, white, and blue stripes running across its front. There were different varieties and patterns of these color combinations to break the monotony. My favorite was a cheaper offshoot of the flag jacket worn by at least one guy in our nieghborhood. The front of that jacket featured colored Xs and Os. I don't know what country's flags they represented, but they were widely mocked by the true flag jacket wearers. And the Xs and Os made good target practice for water balloons, pea shooters, and slingshots.
There were several winter coat styles. The reversible parka, The oxford suede, the herring bone/glen plaid reversible, and the lawman were favorites. I prefered the glen plaid reversibles, while some of my friends preferred the lawman. For me, the reversibles were like having two coats in one, and I would often reverse them many times in the course of a day.
The main problem back then of wearing a coat envied by others, was that eventually the other guy would get it (as I discuss in the record hops blog). But, unlike the '70s, the styles back then were pretty cool, and some, like the button down shirts with tabs in the back, still exist today. If only my wife would stop yanking those damn tabs off.