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

neighborhood 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

nickel (yeah, they were a little beat up, but who cared), and a nice drug store,

and five and dime.

We were always 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 okay.

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

neighborhood. 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

preferred 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 pages).

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.