I was never what you would call a clothes horse. I just wanted to be dressed inconspicuously. I started picking strawberries when I was ten and the money I made was ticketed for school clothes. My mother pretty much took care of the shopping. She would drag me off to the store and pick out my clothes and spend my money. If my clothes cost more than I had in the kitty, she paid the difference. My clothes shopping is pretty much the same today but my wife is now in charge.

We did some shopping at Weiby's but we also shopped in Longview. Our shopping trips usually involved extended family and my aunt and my cousin would go with us. The bridge toll was a dollar each way and that was probably equivalent to ten gallons of gas. They liked to maximize their trips and they made it into the annual school clothes festival. We also packed into the car for a trip to Montgomery Wards in Portland. Then we would go down town to shop at Meier and Frank's and then have a hamburger at the Jolly Roger. Eating a hamburger in a restaurant was also an annual occasion. The Jolly Roger eventually got to be too jolly and we had a club sandwichs at Woolworth’s.

My wife, her mom and sisters along with her aunt and cousin would ride the Greyhound from Longview to Portland to do their school shopping at Meier and Franks, Lerner’s etc. These were big time trips and worth remembering. She also bought her clothes with her strawberry money and as I remember the era, your social status was related to what you wore. There was sufficient incentive to be a good picker but our folks also chipped in a little. I had friends however that bought all of their own clothes from the time they were in the 6th grade.

In high school, I mostly wore Frisco jeans and long sleeved shirts that were in a variety of a pastel colors. One year, we wore pink shirts with charcoal colored slacks and thin pink suede belt but my dad wasn't very impressed with that. Another year the fashion was no belt at all and he wasn't very impressed with that either. That is the year that I went hunting and lost my hunting knife because I didn't have a belt to hang it on. I lost it of course and that was still a topic of conversation forty years later. The knife had been a gift from my dad when he returned from a trip to California.

Some of the boys wore big heavy brogans that were highly polished. They put liquid polish on them and then set them on fire with a match. Apparently burning the alcohol in liquid polish set the color in some way. Incidentally brogans is from Gaelic for shoe and the Brits insisted that the Irish talked like they had a shoe in their mouth, hence the Irish brogue. I preferred the lighter weight oxfords and they were less expensive.

I think corduroy trousers were popular one year when I was in high school. They were the thing to wear when my uncle was in school but they never washed them. If they couldn't stand up by themselves, you weren't doing it right. We didn't have the same tradition.

My sister wore saddle oxfords all through school with bobby socks. I not sure they were always the in thing but she liked them so she wore them. I remember she had a big circle skirt with a poodle on it and that was the big deal that year. I think she was wearing something like that when she went to the skating rink next to the City Hall and she and her partner fell down. He apparently was stepping on her skirt when she stood up and folks saw an entirely new side to Jan. Simple white blouses were popular for the girls when I was in high school and I remember them as being prim and proper, sweet and sexy.

They say clothes make the man but it never did much for me as a boy. You could put a freshly ironed shirt on me and it looked rumpled. But you could put a wrinkled shirt on my friend Dave and all the wrinkles would disappear. I suppose that gives guys like me an opportunity to develop our characters and it probably kept the girls from bothering me so much.