The Butterbeans remember the Sixties

Remember that good old decade—the Sixties? Well yes, a good share of you don’t remember it since you weren’t born yet. The rest of you are not remembering things too well. So I will help you out. That was the time when all the girls wore long hair, all the cars were Chevys, and all the schools were five miles away with snow every step of the way. For some reason, Chevys were never driven to school.

Life was definitely simpler then. Just ask Father Butterbean. All of the tee-shirts were white and so were the socks. All of the music was mellow; all of the jeans were Levis. All of the phones were AT&T. All of the tennis shoes were Keds. Well, it’s pretty much still that way for Father B.

There weren’t any teen-age identity crises back then because there were only two identities—hoods and everybody else. And once you arrived at school after trudging through the snow, there were only two halls that could qualify as Halls.

If you were rebellious you were a Hood. You still wore Levis and white socks. The only difference was that you carried a pack of cigarettes rolled up in your white tee-shirt sleeve, and you stood in Hood Hall only it wasn’t called that then.

Girls weren’t rebellious much, and they all wore dresses or skirts except for when they wore their Keds with their regulation gym shorts.

I’m not sure how many Halls there are these days. At least half a dozen. If I am wrong, don’t tell me about it, because I grew up in the two-Hall era and get most of my information regarding current high school culture third or fourth hand.

I may have heard of Jock Hall, Cowboy Hall, Skate-or-Die Hall, Stud Hall, Granola Hall, Reggae Hall and Rock Hall. If there isn’t a Rap Hall, I don’t know why not.

Finding a Hall to stand in with so many possibilities available must be excruciating since standing in the wrong hall could be social suicide.

And just because a kid has gotten through the crisis and negotiated the hall maze (figuratively speaking), that doesn’t mean he is through making decisions. Before a high schooler can leave the house in the morning, he has to make several different choices on several different levels. Sooner or later, he has to decide whether his reputation can stand up to blurring the image for one day. Say he hangs out in Cowboy Hall. Can he get away with wearing khakis when his Wranglers are dirty?

Then he has to decide whether to wear short or long khakis and with what. (In the Sixties, shorts were worn only when the temperature exceeded 80 degrees. The cutoff (pun) temperature is somewhere around 20 degrees these days. That may have been because shorts lived up to their name back then.)

Say our dude decides to keep it simple and wear jeans, a tee-shirt and sport shoes. He still has to decide which one of each, and each component by itself possibly has unforeseen implications in terms of image. “Do pink tee-shirts go only with Reggae gear or can they show up in Jock Hall occasionally?”

Shoes, by themselves, no matter which hall their owners habituate, could present monumental problems. You can’t tell me that Cowboy Hallers don’t have anything but Justins in their closets. At the very least, they have basketball shoes, hikers, joggers, something for church, and hunting boots. Can a cowboy’s image survive the wearing of alternative footwear in Cowboy Hall when his boots hurt his feet?

What I really want to know is whether those very baggy, very low-slung pants (they probably have a name that I don’t know of) can show up in every hall. I also want to know whether baggy-pants halls empty out at the same rate as jock halls during fire drills—presuming they still have fire drills at school.

I have never been great at making decisions. In fact, waffling is something I have raised to a fine art. The trick is to use the postpone-and-wait method which means that if you wait long enough you won’t have any choices anyway.

If I were 40 years younger and trying to get ready for school, I wouldn’t be able to decide which shoes to wear unless the dog had eaten every pair but one. And I would be late for school every day and wouldn’t get to stand in any Halls.