What Happened....

[Paisley]

My brother was in marble and granite installation and restoration; he worked on the Denver Mint, the D&F Tower, East High School, Tom Shane's house, and many other places.

My brother had laminate countertops at his own house. Good enough for me, too.

 

[EngProf]

Jeans were universally worn by teenage girls in the mid-1940s, usually with an oversized men's dress shirt worn untucked, and a "Sloppy Joe" sweater. The idea that they're some kind of rebel sixties thing is simply a sign that that generation has little or no awareness of anything that happened before they were conscious.

The idea that all people in the Era stood around striking Esquire/Harper's Bazaar poses in immaculately tailored clothing is a fantasy of Hollywood, the Boys From Marketing, and internet clothing fora. The Era was actually a pretty rumpled time -- there were a lot of baggy shiny-seated pants, wrinkled cotton dresses, gravy-spotted lapels, run-over shoes, mended stockings, moth-eaten coats, and worn-out hats. To believe otherwise is to believe that human beings of that time were somehow a whole different species from those of today.

Another unnecessary shot at us Baby Boomers.
As one who was there, jeans were bought for us Baby Boomer kids by our mothers. We wore them first because we had no choice, and second because they were practical and would not be so quickly destroyed by our rambunctious play habits.
We transitioned out of jeans when we got out of junior high.
As for late-sixties "rebelliousness", the long-hair, beards, field jackets, etc. were a far bigger deal than what sort of pants you wore. Totally a non-issue... (As was whether teen-age girls in the mid-forties wore jeans...)

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have granite in my kitchen...in my living room...in my bathroom...on the hearth (with a real Texas limestone surround)...not because I'm trying to show off, but because I'm a geologist and think everyone should surround themselves with as much rock as they possibly can. And to that end, rocks are not delicate pieces of art. They are meant to be sat upon, kicked, poked, scratched, cut, and burned. They were here millions of years before you put them in the kitchen, and will last for millions of years after your house has turned to dust.

You should definitely move up here. All the granite blocks you could want, free for the taking on the shore. Of course, good luck getting rid of the seaweed smell..

 

[HudsonHawk]

You should definitely move up here. All the granite blocks you could want, free for the taking on the shore. Of course, good luck getting rid of the seaweed smell..

You should grab a few stones and keep them around your house. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, you can never have enough rocks.

As for turning that riprap into countertops, well that's the hard part. Granite is pretty tough stuff. That's why is darn near impossible to destroy as a countertop unless you hit it with a sledge hammer over and over.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We always used to bring home chunks to use as grave markers for departed pets.

Much of the granite that was used for various monumental buildings around the turn of the 20th Century came from this area, and there's a lot of chunks lying around that have already been partially worked, so if one was so inclined you could probably come up with enough pieces to build a nice backyard barbecue pit or a scale replica of Penn Station, depending on your tastes...

 

[2jakes]

Another unnecessary shot at us Baby Boomers.
As one who was there, jeans were bought for us Baby Boomer kids by our mothers. We wore them first because we had no choice, and second because they were practical and would not be so quickly destroyed by our rambunctious play habits.
We transitioned out of jeans when we got out of junior high.
As for late-sixties "rebelliousness", the long-hair, beards, field jackets, etc. were a far bigger deal than what sort of pants you wore. Totally a non-issue... (As was whether teen-age girls in the mid-forties wore jeans...)

The jeans my folks bought for me were very long in order that they would still fit
as I grew.

My grandmother’s house had a dining room which we used at lunch & supper time.
In the mornings, sometimes I ate a quick breakfast in the kitchen table before
heading out to fight all them “desperados” in town.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

When I was a small child my parents bought me blue jeans because they were cheap. Not exactly boutique stuff in the early '50s. They picked them off a big stack at People's Hardware in Kenedy, TX. Got them oversized so you could grow into them. Couldn't wear them to school, though. The excuse was that the copper rivets tore up the desk seats. Probably just that they looked white trash.
But by the '70s they were not just a fashion statement, they were a political statement. European youth wanted blue jeans like people want cocaine now. If you went to Europe in the 70s-80s wearing blue jeans people would try to buy them right off your butt. They'd duck into an alley and swap pants with you, paying ten times what the jeans had cost you. Look at those pictures of people dancing atop the Berlin Wall just before it came down. In most pics, everyone up there was wearing blue jeans. It meant liberation to European youth in those days.

 

[2jakes]

Recently bought a pair of “outlaw jeans” with the rivets on the
back-pockets.
I used to wear similar ones in high school.
They fit great then & still do.

 

[Stearmen]

The jeans my folks bought for me were very long in order that they would still fit
as I grew.

My grandmother’s house had a dining room which we used at lunch & supper time.
In the mornings, sometimes I ate a quick breakfast in the kitchen table before
heading out to fight all them “desperados” in town.

My mother would always buy my pants to big, so I would grow into them, of course, I always wore them out first. So I spent my youth in ill fitting jeans! I bet the girls had some kind of nick name for me and my pants.

 

[2jakes]

^^^^^
“High waters” is what they were called in my neck of the woods !


In the days before high school when mom ruled & was dictator
of kid-dom...my "Sunday’s best” were just that...
For Sunday only.

This was my outfit for the most part since the weather was never
really cold except for a month. No snow at all.

There was a trick to running barefoot in the grass where the
stickers in the grass would not hurt me.

“Fast”.

 

[Paisley]

Almost everyone, adults included, wore jeans or a suit/dress when I was a kid. My dad (b. 1930) wore jeans his whole life; so have I. If we're talking about jeans that are in good condition and fit well, and being worn to casual places, I've never understood people adopting a snooty attitude over them. You'd think someone offered them zinfandel or suggested their child go to a community college.
/sarcasm

 

[2jakes]

Almost everyone, adults included, wore jeans or a suit/dress when I was a kid. My dad (b. 1930) wore jeans his whole life; so have I. If we're talking about jeans that are in good condition and fit well, and being worn to casual places, I've never understood people adopting a snooty attitude over them. You'd think someone offered them zinfandel or suggested their child go to a community college.
/sarcasm

Unlike me, my father (b. 1920) never liked to wear jeans.
I believe it was a reminder of his poverty when he was very young.
He didn’t mind me wearing them.

I was wearing jeans long before I knew about Brando or Dean.
I thought they were cool. Still do.

My way of breaking the 501s was to go to the Gulf Coast & soak in all
that salt water & sand.
Go fishing while my jeans dried while wearing them.
I don’t think I could tolerate doing that today, but back then we were young.
This was my own “Shrink-to-Fit” thing.

Perhaps I would’ve felt the same about wearing jeans if I had experienced
the poverty he did while growing up.
I don’t know.

 

[Paisley]

My father said he broke in his jeans riding horseback.

He always got a weekly haircut. To him, long hair (that is, not closely trimmed) was a symbol of poverty.

 

[Fading Fast]

...or a scale replica of Penn Station, depending on your tastes...

When they demoed Penn Station (still one of the great architectural crimes of all time) they had hundreds of dump trucks running an around the clock conga line to the Meadowlands in NJ to dump all of the granite. For years afterwards, I read, people on the Turnpike or Amtrak would see fields and fields of broken / discard granite running on and on in the marshes of Northern Jersey.

 

[scotrace]

My father said he broke in his jeans riding horseback.

He always got a weekly haircut. To him, long hair (that is, not closely trimmed) was a symbol of poverty.

And he was right. The last few years, it's a few months between being able to scrape up $12 spare for a haircut. Shaggy hair, ragged cuffs, pilled collars, run over shoes with scrunched socks to hide the holes are the norm.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That was Depression America in a nutshell. In a world where the average American made less than a thousand dollars a year, there weren't an awful lot of Beau Brummels swanking around. Some of the suits you see in old photos might look swanky, but if you saw them in person you might notice the grease spots on the coat or the fact that the wearer's shirt collar had been turned.

 

[LizzieMaine]

When they demoed Penn Station (still one of the great architectural crimes of all time) they had hundreds of dump trucks running an around the clock conga line to the Meadowlands in NJ to dump all of the granite. For years afterwards, I read, people on the Turnpike or Amtrak would see fields and fields of broken / discard granite running on and on in the marshes of Northern Jersey.

And much of that granite came from Vinalhaven Island, which is a few miles out from where I live. There's a lot of bitterness out there from old-timers at how barbarously their rock was treated by the New York philisitines.

 

[LizzieMaine]

But by the '70s they were not just a fashion statement, they were a political statement. European youth wanted blue jeans like people want cocaine now. If you went to Europe in the 70s-80s wearing blue jeans people would try to buy them right off your butt. They'd duck into an alley and swap pants with you, paying ten times what the jeans had cost you. Look at those pictures of people dancing atop the Berlin Wall just before it came down. In most pics, everyone up there was wearing blue jeans. It meant liberation to European youth in those days.

Interestingly, in the 1930s, certain types of clothing had a similar sense of being a political statement. Particularly during the latter half of the 1930s, the leather jacket was seen as a symbol of militant organized labor -- and more specifically, of the Communist Party USA. Communist organizers were so fond of their leather jackets that party secretary Earl Browder had to plead with them to dress in a more "sophisticated" manner when dealing with company executives or the press.

 

[2jakes]

My father said he broke in his jeans riding horseback.

He always got a weekly haircut. To him, long hair (that is, not closely trimmed) was a symbol of poverty.

That’s interesting.
This might be a contradiction, but my father & other grownups thought
that very close cropped hair was a sign of poverty.
Although my father never wore his hair long & went to the barber regularly.
I recall he would use a word to describe someone that he found unpleasant as having “cropped hair”.
The connotation being that he was poor with lice on his hair & there fore had to be “trimmed”.
I can’t think of the word he used, but other grownups also used that word.

To him, long hair was a sign of young rebels or hippies.

 

[Paisley]

On the subject of pants, the supervisors on the factory floor where I work will zip-tie your belt loops if your pants won't stay up.