CLOTHES HORSE
I’m working my way back into apparel I wore routinely during my teaching career at Whitman – twenty-one years’ worth of low-key dress-up. When I head to the gym, five mornings a week, I am frequently, after the workout and shower, adding my old teaching garb back into the daily mix. It offers a nice departure from my normal jeans-and-flannel, a holdover from the years when I worshiped at the altar of a young John Fogarty. I’m doing it because I don’t like buying new clothes. I’m doing it because there is plenty of life left in the things I wore for two decades in the classroom. I’m doing it to honor and encourage whatever life is left in me.
I don’t agree with much happening under the Trump tent, but I do agree with Transportation Sec Sean Duffy’s objection to people wearing PJ’s on commercial aircraft. We can’t simply go back to those dressier days when the airlines encouraged you to smoke on planes by passing out complementary 4-packs of cigarettes, but it would be nice for people to show an ounce of decorum in public apparel. Not just in airports, but everywhere. Dressing in a fashion appropriate to the setting at hand is a time-honored human institution.
In that spirit, I tended to wear nice clothes to campus – not suits-and-sport-coats nice but at least sweater vests with Oxford cloth dress shirts and slacks. When I was asked to teach “Core”– the two-semester suite on the rise of western civ, required of all first-year students – I also resolved to wear a tie to class, every day. My theory was that the Core curriculum was, among other things, an introduction to fundamental religious, philosophical, political, and scientific ideas, and I needed to set an example for my students: I would in every gesture demonstrate respect for things so ancient and revered. Plus, it occurred to me that many of my charges – progressive West-Side kids mostly from Portland, Seattle, and Northern California – had never seen a grown man in a necktie. I did not wear mine ironically. On Fridays I often put on my Tony Lama boots with fresh, straight-leg jeans, a distinctly Western belt, and a bolo tie. I didn’t want to look like a stereotype professor but I did want my appearance to be true to my roots.
And I often took a page from my father’s sartorial notebook. In fact, I often wore his clothes.
He was necktie man, my dad was, every chance he got. His normal daily dress as an underground coal miner was a set of thick herringbone cotton coveralls, lace-up work boots, and of course the ubiquitous white hard hat – the thing my Aunt Hannah called a hard-boiled hat. But when he took his job as federal mine inspector – 1954; I was three years old – he suddenly had half an office job to go with his time underground. The coveralls stayed with him when he went on mine inspections, but maybe three out of four weeks a month, he worked in a Bureau of Mines field office where he wrote his inspection reports and, later, helped train new recruits. That’s when the clothes horse came out of him.
My dad loved to dress up. I remember him in my earliest grade school days in western Pennsylvania – his place of training and his first office job – showing up at home after a day inspecting, wearing the coal-soiled garb of the underground miner and the scuffed, blackened boots, and, sometimes, a face shining with grime. He wasn’t in production any more, but he still often came home as filthy as the working miners did. Some of the Pennsylvania pits were what was known as “low coal,” meaning that roofs above the working stopes would not permit a miner to stand up. Some seams in fact required access on hands and knees, and when Dad returned from one of those claustrophobic hell-holes, he’d be blackened from head to toe, his eyes gleaming diamond-blue behind an obsidian mask.
The transformation to desk-job-dad would be astonishing. If you saw him on the street, you’d never suspect he lived half his life in filthy holes underground.
He would not venture outside without a hat, and on office days the hat was invariably a fedora – felt in autumn and winter, Panama straw in summer. He didn’t care much for the formality of suits, but he loved sport coats with handsome slacks. His dress shoes tended toward modesty and understatement, except for two pairs he bought somewhere on special order. They were made of identical materials – a ventilated mesh crafted from some kind of jute-like fibers – but the colors were starkly different. One pair black with black crepe soles, the other cream with nut-brown crepe. These were his summer shoes, nice strollers for the many days when he walked to the office, color-coordinated according to the slacks-and-jacket combination.
But his trademark was his necktie collection. Dad’s closet contained thirty or forty ties, gathered over years of visits to haberdasheries and department stores. He had a good eye for color and knew the role of the necktie in pulling an ensemble together. Textures too. Several of his ties were the knitted variety, a kind of open net-like weave which gave them a lot of flex when you cinched the knot tight. I remember one of them was a bright lemon-yellow, another one black.
But pink was his favorite color. He had more than one pink dress shirt, and a couple of his sports jackets revealed rosy threads amid a weave of complex tints. Dad often told me he thought too many men were allergic to color – their clothes as drab as their personalities. Though he was a very quiet man, he liked to catch people’s eye. It was easy for him, as he had the build and look of a decent model: six-foot-two, thin, good posture, an easy glide when he walked, eyes the color of an Alaskan glacier.
As a kid, I took all of it for granted – my dad the snazzy dresser. My dad the connoisseur of eye-catching color combinations. My dad in the always-clean, freshly waxed automobile (we owned two pink Rambler Ambassadors over the years). It took me into my teen years to realize how striking his standards were.
The Utah mines where he learned his craft had started out as “coal camps” – literal tent villages owned by the companies who ran the mines. Over time, some of the camps morphed into genuine towns, with paved streets, churches and schools, post offices, company-owned stores. But the quaint patina of Norman Rockwell tranquility could never conceal the tenuous quality of life there. Underneath each town, or just on the outskirts, ran miles of tunnels and manmade industrial caves, and the work inside those hideous chambers went on around the clock. Blasting caps and dynamite, combustible coal dust and pockets of fatally hazardous gas were the invisible realities undergirding life on the surface. People seemed to hold their breath against the moment – any moment – when the mine siren might go off, signaling an accident underground. And the coal dust lay everywhere. Every camp of any size had a tipple, the coal-cleaning plant, often located right in the middle of town. The tram cars, the rail cars, the diesel trucks carrying coal couldn’t help but spread a constant layer of pulverized black in all directions.
To be clean was an act of constant resistance. To wear a white shirt to church, or a dance at the company-owned amusement hall, was a kind of statement. It said you stood in defiance against the violence, filth, and latent chaos of the work underground. It said you valued the clean things, the normal things, the modest accretions being collected by the middle-class, aspirants all. You placed your tie clip in just the right spot. You kept the seat covers clean. You grew some flowers in a yard you did not own. You lived a life of orderliness if not prayer. To be dapper was not just a vanity; it was a statement.
When my dad died in 1994, I inherited the contents of his closet. We shared the same build, but he was slightly shorter, slightly lighter than I, so some of his clothes were things I could wear, and some were not. With hope in my heart, I tried on the straw shoes but they were a size too small. The neckwear, though, went with me back to Walla Walla. Those were his ties I wore when I taught Core. I would teach bits of Karl Marx, or St. Augustine’s Confessions, and think of my dad as I gently fingered the knot the students could see about the neck of a pink dress shirt. The tie was often one of the knitted ones, most often the one as black as coal.