Commentary by Ward Degler
The most embarrassing moment of my life happened when I was in third grade, and I blame Sears and Roebuck for it.
When their fall catalog arrived, my mother noticed they had reduced the price of knickerbockers. She ordered three pairs for me.
I didn’t know what knickerbockers were, but when they arrived, I knew I was in trouble. They ended just below the knee, and you wore knee-length socks with them. Mom ordered three pairs of socks to match the Scottish plaid of the pants.
It would have been OK at some Ivy League private school or in England, where kids wear knickerbockers and fancy knee socks. But we were living in the Missouri Bootheel.
The kids in my class wore patched blue jeans or bib overalls. Several of them came to school barefoot. Not because they wanted to but because they had no shoes.
To make matters worse, I was also the new kid in school. I prayed for invisibility. When that didn’t work, I prayed for a level-five earthquake to destroy the school.
What I got were fights. During recess, two or three of the bib overalls group were waiting for me. I tried to stay inside, but the teacher was one of those fresh-air-is-good-for-you types. Everybody went outside for recess.
After the first couple of fights, I could dust off the shirt and knickerbockers and straighten the knee socks. But after the third or fourth, things changed. The elastic ripped in the knickerbockers, and now the pants sagged around my ankles.
For some reason, the fight squad lost interest in me after that, and something remarkable happened. My pockets ripped out, and I discovered I could carry just about anything in my pants legs. My jackknife, slingshot, lunch money and all of my marbles sank to ankle level and made a strange crunching sound when I walked.
The bib overalls group thought it was funny, the teacher stopped calling on me to go to the blackboard and solve the arithmetic problems and my mother swore she’d never buy me nice clothes ever again.
I was happy.
