Recently I began reflecting a bit on the “good old days”. It started when I got a new baseball glove. I had a really great glove, but I stopped using it about 15 or so years ago when my sons stopped playing baseball, and I lost it in my several moves since then.

I loved that glove! It was a combined catcher’s/first baseman’s mitt – lefthanded. I was a pretty good first baseman in my youth. My oldest grandson is almost 4, so this spring I decided I had better get a new glove. Of course, I got a first baseman’s mitt. I then went to get neatsfoot oil but ended up with what’s called glove oil. I mentioned that I was going to put it into a heavy plastic bag and run over it several times with my car to break it in right. I might as well have said I was going to light it on fire. People had never heard of that. Someone mentioned that I could take it to the local sporting goods store and they would steam it, but why go to all that trouble when I have a perfectly good car? In my day, the only real way to break in a glove was to slather it with oil and run your car over it a bunch of times, and that’s what I did with my new glove!  

I then thought about what we used to do with blue jeans (as they were called then) when I was in high school in the mid to late 1960s. We weren’t allowed to wear jeans to school, and they weren’t readily available in the suburbs, so we would travel up Route 309 to the Montgomeryville Mart, in a rural agricultural area, where jeans were sold for their practicality to farmers and such for their utility, not for fashion. We would buy a couple of pairs for under $10 each. Of course, we needed to get rid of the stiffness and new jean look, so we would tie them to the back of our cars and drag them around the neighborhood to get them that worn look and soften them up. If we weren’t careful, we would wear a hole in them or tear them, and then we would have to make cutoffs out of them. We didn’t make that mistake often, as we used our own money to buy them – our parents weren’t going to spend their good money on clothes that weren’t good enough for school.   

I don’t know if those were “good”, but they were the “old days”, and that was much more fun than paying over $100 for a pair of torn (“distressed”?) jeans, which people now wear everywhere. Maybe I need to look into buying a bunch of brand name jeans, tying them to the fender of my car, dragging them around the neighborhood scuffing and tearing them, and selling them for triple what I paid for them. Sounds like a retirement plan. Anyone interested in a solid investment? Give me a call.

Bill Poole

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