T-Shirts and Old Girlfriends

A few days ago I took myself out to lunch and while I was waiting for my plate of cholesterol to be served a couple about my age walked in. The woman was wearing a t-shirt that read, “Friendship League” and the guy was wearing one with the word 'Superman' plastered across his chest. And that was all it took to transport me back to the '80s when Don had one of those silly superman t-shirts only he didn’t wear his like this man did, for all the world to see. Don loved to wear his superman shirt underneath a dress shirt, suit jacket and a tie. It put him in a silly mood, like he had a secret and was waiting for an opportunity to expose that t-shirt at a party, wedding reception or similar dress-up event. I don’t remember him doing it more than twice---once when a hostess couldn't open a bottle of wine---but he wore that shirt under his dress clothing for years, until it got too small and it went into a box labeled ‘Memory Shirts.’ Most of the t-shirts in that box got donated after his stroke and our downsizing to move but some of them ended up in a quilt that I had made. That was probably the best gift I ever gave my husband and he used it almost every day until he died. 

Did you know that t-shirts evolved from the one-piece union suits (underwear also known as long-johns) that men wore in the 19^th century? They’d cut the bottoms off and wear the tops to do farm chores in the summer months and the cut-off union suits also became popular with miners and stevedores. By the 1920s the word t-shirt was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but it wasn’t until Marlon Brando, in the 1950s, wore a t-shirt in A Streetcar Named Desire that t-shirts came into their own as a stand-alone fashion garment. Silk screening on t-shirts for self-expression, souvenirs and advertising was popularized in 1960s, but in between the end of WWII and the '60s they could be found in veteran groups. 

In April of 1970 when I met my husband, silk-screened t-shirts were not universally accepted as proper attire in Don’s family, a fact that I didn’t know when I wore one the first time I met his family. It was navy blue and had two large white footprints over my chest--far from a hippie protest t-shirt but close enough, I guess. It was probably the single most notable thing I did to cause one of his three brothers to spend the next four decades looking down his nose at me. I heard stories a few years later about how that t-shirt became the topic of the family gossip mill, with Don’s dad taking my side and declaring me to be "the perfect girl for Don.” Don, at 29, was the unmarried baby of the family and a mystery as to why he let two perfectly nice girls slip through his fingers when either one would have made a wonderful wife and mother. The t-shirt hating brother deemed him to be immature and lacking an anchor. Those two never did understand what made the other one tick.

One of the girls Don dated before me was his high school sweetheart and I have the photos to prove it. She was a red-head who still lives near-by and after graduation she broke up with him because he didn’t produce an engagement ring in a timely manner. She was engaged to someone else a few months later. We used to see her and her husband at class reunions or house parties back in the day and they came to our ‘Thank God, I’m Alive’ party that I threw to celebrate Don’s stroke recovery at the five year benchmark. I don’t even know how that came about; they weren't invited. I was okay being around her---it was high school after all---but her husband always acted uneasy being around the "high school sweethearts." Don’s second serious girlfriend gave up on getting a ring out of him after five year. She joined the WAC, ended up marrying an Army engineer and lived happily ever after in Fiji. I was always glad I never met her. I suspect she was too classy to ever wear a tacky t-shirt with big feet on the front.

Over the years both my husband and I had many favorite t-shirts. Some from places we’d been on vacation like the Gene Autry Museum and Steamboat Colorado, others made statements like “Kiss Me I’m Irish”---Don was and he wore that shirt once a year until it got too tight. Other favorites were for local causes like “Save City Hall!” and a covert protest tee against a local soap manufacturer that depicted a bar of soap on a rope. A giant bar of "soap" on a robe was an entry in a local raft race and that t-shirt was a gift from the artist who made the raft. We took part in that the race for four-five years. We had an old, ten-man military surplus rubber survival raft with a roof that we made into a turtle one year, a whale another. I see that soap t-shirt in the quilt and all those memories come back.

I doubt logo and silk-screen t-shirts will ever fall out of fashion. Though I don’t wear them anymore since my husband died. I gave them up in an attempt to update my wardrobe, not look like a caregiver anymore or an aged-out hippie. But if I ever see a shirt that says, “Friendship League” I  might be tempted to buy it. While I was at lunch I had a terrible time resisting going up to the woman wearing that t-shirt and asking her, “What the heck is a friendship league and how can I join?” I think that's the reason why my husband loved t-shirts---they're great conversation starters. Even after he lost his speech with the stroke, he'd roll his wheelchair up to someone wearing an interesting logo and point to it. Ohmygod, I could write a whole blog entry about some of the situations he got himself into doing that. And I probably did in my caregiver blog. ©

The photo at the top was taken in 1959 of Don with his high school sweetheart. The photo below is of the t-shirt quilt I had made for Don.There are 19 shirts and five patches in the quilt. It's not a pretty quilt but it was the perfect size for lounging in his La-Z-Boy and a prefect memory trigger.