Dec 26, 2012 4 min read

I have a history with clothes.

I bought my first real grown-up suit of clothes when I was 17. It was my high school graduation suit, and it came with a vest and two pairs of pants (one pair matched the coat, and the other pair bore a black and white check design). I paid for it with earnings from my part-time job: a whopping $40. I wore that suit for years until it finally became so unfashionable that it went to one of our local charities.

The fellow who sold it to me was something of a legend in my hometown. He was Manny Morris, and he didn’t just sell me a suit, he instructed me on the proper fashion for young men of my day.

After I tried it on, he marked the pant cuffs for trimming to the right length.

I carefully closed the vest, making sure I had all the buttons in their corresponding holes.

“No, no, no,” he told me. “A gentleman doesn’t button the last button on his vest,” he said, while undoing the final fastener.

I was so proud of that suit. Up until that time I had worn only sport jackets usually purchased in the children’s section of a local sportswear store with assistance (and approval and payment) by my mother. Now, I was acting like an adult. I went to the store myself, picked out the suit (although Mr. Morris steered me to the one I finally bought) and paid for it with my own hard-earned cash.

At that time, young men had to wear ties and shirts and young ladies dresses even though they were covered by graduation robes. In my day (I hate that phrase) if you weren’t properly dressed, you didn’t get a diploma.

It’s very different today. Having covered a few graduations for the newspaper, I have seen young people wearing shorts and T-shirts under their graduation garb. Fortunately, not all school districts allow that, and some retain the standards we followed.

However, my first suit was a turning point in my sartorial self. I bought all my own clothes from that day on. My mother’s one admonition was “make sure it’s permanent press so I don’t have to iron it.”

That mattered little once I was in college. I brought my dirty laundry home each weekend and took care of cleaning it myself, separating the whites and colors, ironing what absolutely had to be ironed and carefully folding everything.

However, I learned the hard way about washing clothes. One weekend, I decided I’d stay on campus rather than return home. I gathered up all my dirty clothes and trekked down to the dormitory basement where we had a laundry room complete with easy-to-use washers and electric dryers. They were free to use, but we had to supply our own detergent. A vending machine dispensed, for a small fee (I think it was 50 cents), a tiny box of laundry soap.

Being a little short of cash (I existed on meals at the school cafeteria that were part of my tuition and $5 a week pocket money my dad gave me), I decided to cram all my clothes into one machine.

Taking them out of the washing machine, I noticed that my whites were a little pink. In fact, they were a lot pink, especially my underwear. I had tossed a maroon sweatshirt into the load, not realizing that I should have sorted the stuff by color.

Scraping up as much change as I could, I washed the underwear again. It was a little less pink, and I only had enough cash left to put my clothes in the dryer.

So, I wore pink underwear in a men’s dorm for the rest of the semester. I made sure that only my roommate saw it. He immediately knew what had happened since he had once done the same thing.

From then on, I knew to separate colors before washing.

I’m thankful that technology has given us detergents that work in cold water and clothes that are really colorfast.

Although there was that time a few years ago when a navy blue bandana got mixed in with my unmentionables …

But that’s another story.

Have a good day.

James Pletcher Jr. is Herald-Standard business editor and can be reached at 724-439-7571 or by email at jpletcher@heraldstandard.com.