To make up for the previous long-winded posts, here’s a very brief one.
I collect a lot of things. Today’s post shows you, my sewing- and cooking-interested readers, my collection of aprons. As an added bonus to a frequently-overlapping segment of my readers, most of them are vintage. Click on the image to be magically transported to the flickr set that describes them all.
Filed under collections, kitchen, nostalgia, sewing, vintage
Note: This has nothing to do with shoes, or pie, or even sewing.
I grew up in NJ, where the legal driving age is 17. That’s right, 17. I know it sounds strange to the rest of you folks, but we didn’t find it the slightest bit peculiar. If you’ve ever driven the pre-industrial-revolution highway system in NJ, you appreciate the extra year we had to mature.
Although it’s possible to get a learner’s permit at 16-1/2, I procrastinated and didn’t finish my driving lessons (with Corky Wallace, of Wallace Driving School, the school that taught kids to drive on Firebirds) and get my permit until the legal-bare-minimum of two weeks before my 17th birthday. I did not drive once during those two weeks. And yet, somehow, miraculously, I passed my test the first time out, and the State of NJ licensed me to drive on any public road in the U.S.
But I had no car.
My friends had cars. Kim would occasionally let me drive her brown K-car when we were out together. My friend Mike, bless him, would sometimes let me drive his 1971 Dodge Challenger during my lunch period, while he was in class. I never figured out how to adjust the front seat, and Mike was a tall kid, so I wound up driving that beautiful hunk of steel while perched on the edge, meaning that I drove even worse than your average newly-licensed teen. There was a “spare” car sitting in our driveway at home, all it needed was a new choke cable, but my family members shun automatics and my dad refused to teach me to drive stick. He wanted me to learn how, of course. But he knew it would involve both yelling and tears, and he didn’t want to get involved in that. My sister was never home to teach me, and besides, while she was a wiz at teaching me to ride a bike, I thought she was a crappy driver (she hadn’t bothered to get her license until she was in her 20s, so she was new to it as well).
Throughout my senior year, I walked to and from school. After school and all summer long, I walked to and from work. Sure, I wanted a car, but dad’s rule was that I had to pay for the entire thing myself. Car, gas, insurance, repairs. My part-time job at the bakery wasn’t going to cover that. Besides, I would soon be leaving for school in Brooklyn, and who needs a car when you can take the subway? Heck, my college didn’t even allow freshman to keep cars on campus.
By the end of my sophomore year at college, the government was slashing education loan programs, and my family had collectively run out of the money required for tuition. I transferred to a state school. It was cheaper, and I could live at home, further cutting expenses. But now I needed a way to get to school. I’d been saving money from my new job as a supermarket cashier, and scouring the classified ads for a car that would satisfy my dad’s parental concerns, but still be cool enough for me to be seen in. Week after week, nothing hit the impossible triangle of cheap-reliable-cool. Time was running out. Finally, the weekend before class was to start, I gave my dad $1300 in cash (approx $2k in today’s economy) and he headed out to buy me a car while I went to work.
Now, many of you might worry about letting your father pick out your first car, but you have to keep in mind, my dad is a Car Guy. And an artist, so he appreciates a good line, as well as good mechanics. We’d been going to car shows together for years, and I knew he wouldn’t come home with anything awful.
Like, for instance, a 1984, baby blue, Ford Escort.
An Escort. In baby blue. I actually cried when my dad called to tell me. But, when I decided to wipe away those tears and just be grateful that I at least had a car, a new fear came over me. I hadn’t been behind the wheel of a car in two years. And two years prior, I could probably count off all of my driving experiences without running out of fingers and toes. Um, like, oh shit. My stepmom picked me up at work in my new car, so I could drive it home. The 1-mile trip was completely unmemorable, which I’m sure is a good thing. And on my day off, I took the car through the rigorous NJ state inspection. Which it failed. The car needed a new catalytic converter. Dad, thank goodness, paid for it. He felt guilty for handing me a car that he picked out, and saddling me with that not-inexpensive repair right off the bat. I had the work done, I passed the inspection, and I started commuting.
Whenever I could.
See, the car had no power. My dad thought I was just being whiney because I’d really wanted an 8-cylinder vintage muscle car, like maybe that ’71 Cougar that I had very seriously been looking at, but really, I swear, the car sucked. My campus was perched on the top of a large hill, and there was no way to get there without climbing up one road or another. My car would chug along, slower and slower, occasionally pissing off the people behind me. Dad finally believed me, and we took it in to a shop, where we found out that only three cylinders were working. More money, again out of dad’s pocket, and the Escort was back on the road. Until the next cylinder went out. Or maybe it was the same cylinder, over and over. All I remember is being towed more than once to an assortment of mechanics, borrowing my grandmother’s car whenever mine was in the shop (she drove a ’77 BMW so it REALLY wasn’t a hardship for me), and shopping around for a new car. We tried to use the Escort as a trade-in, but no dealership would take it. One salesman even told my dad, “I wouldn’t let you pay me to take that car.” I sold it privately for parts for $500, my compassionate grandmother kicked in a matching $500, and I had a small down payment on a brand-spankin’-new, Aztec Red Nissan Sentra a mere eight months after getting the Escort.
Oh, and I’m still not allowed to mention the Escort within earshot of my dad. :)
Woody doesn’t read my blog. I know that he doesn’t read it because when he asked me what had happened to the pie I was going to make him, and I cut-and-pasted the blog excerpt of the pie that was born from the withering apples of “his” pie, he seemed pleased that I’d written about him. I explained to him that no, I hadn’t. I’d written about pie. Which then made him cyber-pouty.
Good friend that I am, I poke around for any mention of him on my blog, to cheer him up. And I find one, vague reference: I touch on a song I heard on “a friend’s” iTunes playlist in my tale of the WPLJ montage. I send him the link for the post, and passionate music nerd that he is, he doesn’t care about the lame allusion but needs to know WHAT song it was. We squabble for a while, because I’m sure it had been W.P.L.J. by either The Four Deuces or The Hoodoo Rhythm Devils and he is sure that those aren’t in his library. While we’re typing back and forth, I’m listening to the Carol Miller aircheck of the montage. 8:11 in, the song I heard at his place comes on for 4 seconds. He’s right, it’s not W.P.L.J. after all. But with only a snippet of song, and no real lyrics to speak of, I can’t look up what it is. He can’t play RealAudio files, so he can’t hear the snippet. “Well,” he asks, “what are the words?” Of course, he’s not going to be able to get it from that. But I type, “Rock, roll, rock, roll.” Two words, common to the genre, repeated once. No music to go by. No clues, other than it’s something, somewhere, in his library of +/-4,000 vintage tracks.
He immediately types back to me, “It Will Stand by The Showmen.” Okay, he’s taking a stab. This is his first guess. We’ll narrow it down, because I can say “No, the tempo is faster” or “The guy’s voice is lower” and stuff. I head to iTMS to play samples. Hmm… none of them are playing anything that sounds like the bit used in the montage. I broaden my search, and find the whole song on YouTube.
It was no guess. He knew exactly what song it was. Yup, it’s the brief intro to It Will Stand, by The Showmen. It’s short, it isn’t repeated anywhere in the song, and Woody managed to “Name That Tune” in no notes. I tip my hat to you, ’60s Music Geek. I still owe you a pie.
Hi! Remember me? I used to post 5 days a week. Now I seem to post twice a month. It’s something I will try to get better about. I think perhaps I need to get out of the house more.
Okay, so if you know me at all, you know that I collect, among other things, vintage clothing. Always have. Well, as long as I’ve had money to spend, I have. My mom had a beautiful, I’d guess late-1800s jacket that I used to adore as a girl. It was too fragile to atually wear out, but I would put it on, and wonder about how to fix the worn and frayed bits. I have no idea what ever happened to it, or to the gorgeous, ’40s-era ivory satin wedding dress (tea-length, therefore not a gown) that I bought on Canal Street in NYC back in 1990. I spray-painted a pair of pumps to match. I kid you not.
All of the collecting that I’ve done over the years has been with a huge amount of luck, and a small understanding of what it is I’m looking for. I recognize silhouettes and colors and fabrics from the photos I’ve always admired, and as a graphic designer, I can guesstimate an era by the typeface used on the label, but I’ve never done any serious studying. I could be wrong a lot of the time. In fact, I’m sure that I am. So from time to time, I do a little online hunting to brush up and maybe learn a thing or two.
This morning, I was scouring the LIFE archives on Google Images (boundless thanks to Ryan Cochran over at The Jalopy Journal for pointing me there). The image search feature is capped at 200 matches, so I kept finessing my keywords based on intriguing hits. Some magical combination of words let me to a series of photos of a woman’s ankles, wrapped in a variety of large white cuffs. There was a mention of “dim-out fashions.” Of course, I know what a dim-out is, but it inspired a fashion trend? And what on earth could it have to do with these giant anklets? My internal research alarm was buzzing madly, so I went about finding out.
If there is an online archive of LIFE articles, I don’t know about it and can’t find it. I know that these photos accompanied an article that ran in the March 22, 1943 issue. And while I couldn’t find a LIFE archive, I sure know where to find the New York Times archive. On January 16th of 1943, the Times ran an article which explained,
White anklets, which would make New York women pedestrians visible to motorists 100 feet away on the city’s dimmed-out streets, were suggested yesterday by the Public Safety section of the Greater New York Safety Council as part of a five-point program to reduce the mounting number of fatal traffic accidents here.
Ah-ha! Now I get it! There’s also a mention of “college girls” being asked to “help out” which only strengthens my belief that the entire concept was thought up by a bunch of ankle fetishists. I mean, c’mon. Take a look at these photos.
Filed under fashion, Is it safe to remove the gas masks?, nostalgia, shoes, vintage
The year is 1979. My sister and I listen almost exclusively to a radio station that goes by the call letters WPLJ*. It’s AOR, with some great DJs including Carol Miller and Pat St. John (both can still be heard on Sirius). This is before WAPP started up, and their only competition is WNEW (where rock lives). What sets WPLJ apart are the station ID montages that are spliced together by Pat St. John. Each is built around a theme such as New York City or the gas crisis, and each is brilliant. Over the course of a year, Pat spliced them all together into 22 minutes of montage genius. And my sister caught it on tape.
For years, I ask my sister to make me a copy.
For years, neither of us get around to it.
In September of 2000, some old and decomposing wiring in the front porch light fixture of my sister’s house shorts out, causing a fire that takes the house, and its contents, to the ground. Everything that my sister and my brother-in-law own is lost. Their cars, their wedding photos, my sister’s pageant awards, even their beloved cat. And, I slowly realize as the tragedy settles in, the WPLJ tape. Yes, it weighs that heavily in our lives.
Clothes are easy to replace, but everything else takes work. I contact their all-inclusive wedding chapel to see if I can have their photos reprinted, but the cost is too steep. I can’t find a duplicate of the tiara that my sister won as Ms. Petite New Jersey, but for her 40th birthday, I buy her the biggest pageant tiara I can afford. The WPLJ tape, we occasionally think of with a glassy, distant look in our eyes. I even play some of the cuts in my head from time to time. Oh, well.
Last week, listening to a friend’s iTunes playlist, I heard one of the songs that Pat St. John had used a snippet of. A song that I had never actually heard the full version of. And it got me to thinking.
Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I present to you The Big Montage.
(Be sure to listen all the way to the end, so you can hear the first half of a radio ad for the “upcoming” film American Gigolo, which is how I know this montage is, at the absolute earliest, from 1979 and NOT 1978 as the link would indicate.)
*The station took its name from a 1956 song called WPLJ, by The Four Deuces, about a drink concoction made from white port and lemon juice. The song was later covered by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Both versions are in the montage.
shoes and pie 