My first front-page story in this newspaper centered on a student protest, not all that uncommon in the 1960s.
I was a country stringer, paid by the printed inch to cover news of Stanwood’s schools and the City Council.
The story’s subject matter was women’s rights.
The young men of Stanwood High School, fighting for the right of female students to wear jeans to school, donned skirts and marched carrying signs demanding a change in the dress code that specified young women could not wear pants to school.
The unified protest, and perhaps the notoriety that followed, brought change. Teenage girls wearing tight-fitting Levi 501s, just like the boys wore, were soon an everyday sight on campus.
Jeans – in all colors, with or without stylistic tears, deliberately faded or faded from repeated washings – are still a wardrobe staple four decades later without limitations by sex, age or size.
My mother, my grandmother and my beloved aunts were all women who wore dresses. No blue jeans hung in their closets. They had at least one pair of white gloves in their top dresser drawer for “going to town” and a good hat for church on Sunday.
I thought about all of these things as I stood in front of my closet last week contemplating exactly what I was going to wear to my quilt group’s annual tea party.
The invitation was exquisite and the dress code clear: Hats and gloves suggested.
Facing the closet I saw half a dozen pairs of jeans, two pairs of black slacks, assorted T-shirts and blouses, two very dressy silk outfits that require pantyhose and heels.
I eliminated the silk dress immediately. Not even the prospect of elegant pastries and imported tea sipped from delicate cups warrants the pain that accompanies high heels and pantyhose.
Once you’ve known years of retirement in the comfort of tennis shoes and open sandals, your feet just don’t want to go back to the good old days at work.
I decided my only avenue was glitz and blue jeans. I could be just as eccentric as the old woman in the poem who wore “purple with a red hat which doesn’t go” (“Warning,” by Jenny Joseph).
I slipped on a white tunic, rhinestone studded blue jeans and sandals. I finished it off with a boa made of blue taffeta strips tied to clothesline and a large black hat covered in red silk roses made for a previous tea party.
The only gloves I could find were wool and for cross-country skiing.
Grandma might understand, but my mother would have been mortified.
The tea party was set in a recently remodeled home that had once been a Christian Science Reading Room. A library-study on a raised area that was once a speaker’s platform and a brand-new kitchen share the large open space of the main floor
Counter tops were covered with sparkling crystal dishes laden with finger foods. The tables were set with china teacups, cloth napkins, linen table covers and fresh flowers.
Tea party perfect.
I should not have underestimated my friends who are of similar age and nature. The hats ranged from a rhinestone-covered baseball cap to a plastic hard-hat covered with blinking Christmas lights and twinkly stars.
There were glamorous hats from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s that had been scrounged from attics or antiques stores. There were garden gloves, driving gloves, leather gloves, white gloves, wool gloves and hands that remained uncovered and unashamed.
Footwear was basic – tennies and sandals – except for one especially fine pair of black-and-white polka dot espadrilles worn by a guest from Lake Stevens.
I was definitely not the only one in blue jeans.
Times change and, often, what we expect is not what we find whether it’s a tea party today or a brawl in a small town tavern 40 years ago – my second front page story as a stringer.
An argument between folks in Marblemount and members of the Banditos, an outlaw biker gang, drinking in the town’s only tavern, escalated as the evening went on. Then a local left and returned driving a cement mixer, which he used to mow down the gang’s motorcycles parked outside the tavern.
“Drive up there and find out what happened. Talk to the people in town,” editor Tom Borgford said.
In Marblemount, the tone was somber. The bikers, the locals told me, had retreated across the river to a ranch owned by a gang member. They warned me not to go there.
At the ranch across the river I found a group of hung-over, beat-up men (and a couple of women) wearing black leathers emblazoned with Bandito insignia. They were loading battered bikes and assorted parts into a large moving van.
In the process of exploring their version of the events, one particularly downhearted man said something I’ve never forgotten: “Hitting my bike was like hitting my woman.”
In that moment, he was simply a human being experiencing one of life’s more painful moments that came as a result of his own actions, and I was willing to listen.
Who we are on this Earth has never been about what we wear – white gloves or garden gloves, dress suits or black leathers – it is about our personal values and the way we choose to conduct our lives.
I’m just glad it’s OK for grammas to wear jeans.
Linda Bryant Smith writes about life as a senior citizen and the issues that concern, annoy and often irritate the heck out of her now that she lives in a world where nothing is ever truly fixed but her income. You can e-mail her at ljbryantsmith@yahoo.com.
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