The Weejun War
Before we got to seventh grade no one paid much attention to what we were wearing to school. Then sometime around our 13th birthday we noticed that we had become junior members of society, and for the next six years we were expected to, and we expected ourselves to, look like something.
Later, that something acquired a name: preppy; but at the time we didn't call our sense of fashion anything; we just wore it. It's tempting to believe that southern culture had something to do with our fashion statements, as the preppy clothing stores around the college campuses trickled down to the high schools.
But for boys entering their teen years, southern culture included a new factor: there were those young ladies to be impressed. Guys in rumpled t-shirts and smelly sneakers were not likely to end up in the slow-dance embrace of an eighth-grade girl who had spent the hours between school dismissal Friday afternoon and after-the-game hop engineering her hair and picking out the perfect skirt and sweater combo.
Back in school, certain items of apparel became coveted. Starting at the top, we, both boys and girls, for what we later learned was casual wear, sported alligator shirts which was a misnomer because the little creature on the left breast was actually a crocodile, but who cared? The point was to be seen in a pullover shirt, with a collar, one of two buttons fastened, and a reptile that quietly and loudly signified our social status.
Boys wore tan, white or khaki slacks, with cuffs and a remarkably persistent crease, accessorized with a solid or braided brown leather belt (bottle-green cloth was also acceptable), fastened by a shiny brass buckle. Socks were regulation height and color: mid-calf and black.
So far, so good. I had the uniform, except where shoes were concerned, and that's where the trouble started.
I was born with an orthopedic birth defect that only mattered because it rendered my ankles vulnerable to sprains, which for an active kid was an occupational hazard. To minimize the risk, my father the doctor prescribed (decreed?) that I should wear sturdy lace-up shoes that had been modified with a little wedge inserted in the hard rubber heel, the effect of which was to turn my ankle slightly outward.
Sensible, right?
Not really, because the dreaded ankle sprains showed up during sports, when those lace-ups sat waiting in the closet while the sneakers, which lacked any corrective devices, were on duty for basketball, tennis, touch football, whatever.
The ankle sprains mounted up. I became an ace at wrapping my ankle in an elastic bandage, called not coincidentally, ace. I played all the sports, in every season of every year of high school, only to quit all of them when I was in college, and my range of physical activities was reduced to rolling joints and changing the record on the turntable.
But I'm getting ahead of myself and I really must confront the traumatic kerfuffle: the battle with my parents over the question of loafers. The Weejun Wars.
Clueless about most things, nevertheless I took notice of what shoes kids were wearing to school. Generically, they were known as penny loafers owing to the slot in the leather on top of the shoe where a penny could be inserted. There were a number of competing brands of penny loafers, but there was one brand that proclaimed one's high status above all the rest and that was the Weejun manufactured by Bass.
They were said to be hand-sewn, like that was a good thing. The leather was a rare and deep shade of reddish brown, known as burgundy or ox blood. It was incredibly thin and soft, yet sturdy so the shoes kept their shape which was undeniably sleek, a feature I first noticed on the girls whose legs had suddenly and without warning become an object of fascination, and whose feet, up to their gently curving ankles, disappeared without a trace into those Weejuns.
The non-aesthetic but critically important features of these shoes were the leather soles and wooden heels. Like bowling shoes, the leather soles allowed the wearer to execute the almost imperceptible lateral slide so necessary to the appearance of competent dancing which, like girls' legs, had also arisen as a salient part of life in adolescence. The wooden heels produced a satisfyingly arrogant click! on hardwood and tile floors.
I knew all this without ever being taught it. Like many other aspects of cultural knowledge, the attractive essence of the Weejun had insinuated itself into my teenaged brain and burrowed deeply into my disturbingly volatile consciousness.
I had to have them, needed them on my feet not next year but now, which placed me squarely in opposition to my father. It's worth noting here that Daddy got his custom-fitted wingtips at the shoe factory in town. He expected that I would show a little deference to his authority in this matter and get myself fitted for wingtips.
I stubbornly resisted (which explains his nickname for me: Mule) and finally, the summer I turned 17, he relented. I bolted out of the house. In less than half an hour I had them on my feet without socks, as was the custom in the summer. I brought home a tin of ox blood polish, a brush and a rag for buffing that leather back to the high shine it came with.
On the first day of 11th grade, I walked into my high school like I was walking onto a yacht (thank you for that image, Carly Simon). For my final two years of high school my consciousness was still volatile, but not because of what was not on my feet.
In that regard, I was cool.
Epilogue
My first year of college was also the first post-Woodstock year. Among all the seismic shifts occurring in the world, barely noticed was the rapidly plummeting status of the preppy look.
Except in a few southern college holdouts, alligator shirts lay undisturbed and rumpled in closets. Loafers were downgraded to beachwear. Like all the other guys, I absorbed the new culture of rugged masculinity and made the change to boots.
The Weejuns, still in the closet.
There's still a pair of Weejuns cooling their heels in my closet. But I only bring them out when I need to believe I'm still cool and can slip unobtrusively into a certain stratum of America.
The author at college, right before a Sha Na Na concert
David Cooper was a pretty conventional student in Lynchburg, Va., public schools, carried his preppy outfits to an Ivy League college but didn't actually wear them, then returned to his preppy roots for graduate school in Chapel Hill. There he met and married Barbara Tyroler after being informed by classmates that she would be a good partner for him which turned out to be an understatement.
His retirement from a career in education came while he was alert enough to play the bass guitar and write short pieces of memoir, of which Too Cool for School is one chapter.