Short pants, knickers, etc... Short pants were the bane of my early existence, and one of the surprises of my postwar adulthood. In the 1930s, short pants were the mothers' choice for young boys, at least in my part of the world. And, of course, kids had a lot less voice in those days.than they do now. I suspect the mothers knew how many long pants we would ruin by tearing up the knees falling or getting pushed down by one of the bullies at school. Knees could heal. Pants cost money. And, of course, a pair of pants worn or torn in the knees did not qualify as a fashion statement in those days. Truthfully, we did not realize how lucky we were to have short pants. Historical Boys Clothing, for instance, reports that just a few decades earlier, mothers were wrapping their little boys in dresses (yes, dresses!), ruffles, button down collars, Lord Fauntleroy, Peter Pan and Buster Brown outfits and similar sissy apparel. And we know one SeventySomething lady who still boasts about how cute her little brother was when she played "house" and put the poor guy in a dress--even after World War II! After the war started in Europe, the British abandoned their knickers--you've seen them in pre-war British movies--and dressed their young boys in shorts. It was another way to save on materials. And the Fascists required boys under 16 to wear short pants in Italy and Germany because--well, because they were Fascists. Though we were condemned to short pants for a long time, we understand that knickers were popular for small boys in some other--probably more affluent--parts of the USA. But in Houma, Louisiana, at that time, those knee-length pants, usually accompanied by knee-length socks--seemed to be reserved for dress up occasions. You usually didn't have to go to school or play ball in knickers. Knickers were reserved for slightly older boys, providing a purgatorial period of sorts between wearing short pants and being able to wear long ones. The knickers weren't much to anticipate, but I guess we thought they were better than short pants, an opinion that is certainly not shared these days. What were we thinking back then? Anyway, we couldn't wait to grow up so that we could wear long pants like big boys and men did. It was an early macho thing, a symbol of growing up. After moving up to long trousers, guys pretty much forgot about clothing. That was a girl thing. Pants were pants and shirts were shirts and we let our parents--actually our mothers--worry about style, fit, color, etc. Kids who went to parochial school all had to wear the same kind of clothes--usually khaki pants and shirts--but that didn't seem to bother anyone. We just didn't care much about clothes. They were something you put on to keep warm and/or to cover critical body parts Clothing was something that concerned girls, not boys. And maybe we need to hear from them on the subject. It was the same thing with shoes. You had perhaps a pair of dress shoes for church and special occasions and tennis shoes for everything else. And the dress shoes were relatively expensive. I remember my parents stretching the budget one year to buy me a pair of white dress shoes, which I first wore to a birthday party. At the party, being new shoes, they hurt. So I took them off. And never found them again. Somebody snitched them and I caught holy hell at home for taking them off.   I don't remember much else about clothes until the zoot suits became the rage in the 1940s. We couldn't afford either the suit or the long gold chain that was part of every outfit, but I really wasn't interested in the suit, just the chain. It was something you could twirl endlessly, looking hip (or whatever we called it then) by doing so. I think I used some of my newspaper route money to buy a chain. Otherwise, the zoot suits just passed me by, although a lot of guys went nuts over them. During World War II, military uniforms finally made me aware of clothing. Those of us who were still too young to serve envied the army's khaki pants and shirts, the sassy caps, the Eisenhower jackets and even the navy's bell-bottomed trousers. Of course, the sharpest of all were the Marine Corps uniforms. We also liked them because the girls liked them. The military apparel, however, was much less attractive to us when the Korean Conflict required us to wear it, on and off duty. But that's another story. And now you'll see many of us walking through shopping centers, ball parks and even restaurants--in short pants, ugly legs and all. Our mothers are probably chuckling somewhere, sayng..... "See how cute and sensible they are...." --Carroll Trosclair, Vintage 1929 Copyright 2004 by Carroll P. Trosclair   With this 1930 outfit, you bet I was mad!