My mother seemed the world's leading consumer of bobby pins. A birthday
this month triggered memories of her and such little gizmos and gadgets.
Designed to hold hair in place, bobby pins seemed to have a hundred and-one
different household uses.
Where are they now? Occasionally I've seen them on sale in those drug stores
that sell everything from apple juice to Ziebart mufflers.
Does anybody use bobby pins anymore, or admit to it if they do?
I no sooner get this question out and I'm choked with reality. At a recent
high school graduation I attended I noted that one of the graduates kept
the traditional mortarboard headpiece in place with bobby pins -- and he
was male and the valedictorian.
Bobby pins are intended for use
in the hair, and my mother mostly used them in her hair.
However, they made great fingernail cleaners, and when I needed a small
wire to poke around in a crevice or tight spot, a bobby pin often was much
better shaped to do the job than a paper clip.
Come to think of it, in a pinch a bobby pin made a darn good paper clip.
I recall lots of girls in high school who turned in term papers held together
with bobby pins.
A person can date himself or herself within the 20th century by little gizmos
and gadgets.
Take cuff links, for example.
I have a jewelry box lined with cuff links. There was a time every man wore
them. Now one occasionally may find French cuffs on a tuxedo shirt, but
who wears them on a daily basis anymore?
I remember a comedian saying he had so many pairs of cuff links and no French
cuff shirts to go with them that he was considering having his wrists pierced.
(In this day of pierced ears, pierced nostrils, pierced lips and pierced
tongues, the old joke may no longer be funny.)
Today's world has a similar problem with tie tacks. Men who save all their
old ties can probably pull out one or two that have permanent little holes
in them where they used to be held in place by a tie tack.
For that matter, does anyone still have a jewelry box filled with tie clips?
I can't remember the last time I saw someone dressed in a suit and tie and
wearing a tie clip. I'm all for them, actually, because I have a horrendous
habit of dripping toothpaste all over my tie whenever I rush and brush before
dashing to work.
Although they occasionally make
a nostalgic comeback, gold watch chains and watch fobs are clearly placed
at the turn of the century --19th to 20th. Men's pants were made with watch
pockets, and watches came attached to fobs.
Anyone who wants to check this out should simply ask a teen-ager -- or even
a twenty-something -- to define a fob.
I have pants with watch pockets that have been redesigned for loose change
like the pockets they're now manufacturing in bathing suits.
Let's, however, get back to bobby pins. Even the name conjures questions;
they are related to ``bobbed'' hair and must be related to bobby socks that
marked young women of an earlier part of the twentieth century.
My sister, the oldest child in
our family, was a bobby-soxer, but I don't think she ever ``bobbed'' her
hair.
I don't know if she ever swooned over Frank Sinatra's singing, but I know
she went to lots of sock hops in high school and listened to lots of ``Big
Band'' music. I have vague memories of her low white socks and penny loafers
or saddle shoes.
In fact, she taught me to dance by having me stand on her shoes as she led
me around our living room to the measures of Tommy Dorsey or Harry James.
A dictionary I consulted defined a bobby soxer as a girl in her early teens,
especially ``one who conforms to current adolescent fads.''
There's a socks fad now current in Tokyo. Lots of adolescent school girls
march around with heavy white socks that pile up in ripples above their
shoes. I don't know what these socks are called, but I've nicknamed them
``Clydesdale'' socks because they remind me of those heavy-footed horses.
My wife saw one of these teens
take out a stick of glue and mark a ring around her calf so she could keep
her socks in place above her ankles.
I don't think anyone calls these young Japanese girls ``bobby soxers.''
Of course, bobby pins, cuff links, tie clips, watch fobs and bobby socks
date me terribly.
Worse, when I talk to my son of gizmos and gadgets, he thinks I'm talking
about computer software.
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Allan R. Andrews can be reached at andrews852@verizon.net