The strongest memories that I have about the clothes I wore as a boy was the short pants I wore as a boy. I didn't think much about it as a younger boy in Washington D.C., as a lot of my friends also wore shorts. But then we moved to Colorado and I was the only boy wearing short pants. That was heck of a shock!. We spent a couple years in Colorado and then my dad got a job in Hawaii.

We left Boulder, Colorado late in the summer of 1963. My father accepted a Visiting Professorship at the University of Hawaii; I went to 6th grade at a school not too far from the University. (Hawaii has a University School too, but there was no way to get me in). It was a good school (I actually had to work my proverbial butt off after coasting through the previous four years) in a middle-class, heavily Japanese-American neighborhood. Indeed, my principal, my teacher, and more than half my classmates were ethnically pure Japanese. The rest were a mixture of Chinese, Korean, children of mixed marriages, one Filipino (who true to ethnic stereotypes was the class cut up and could do a perfect rendition of "Can't buy me Love") and two pure Caucasians--or haoles, as we were called, using the Hawaiian word for whites: me and a girl.

Oddly enough, given the year-round warm weather, shorts pants were never worn to school. Standards of neatness were considerably higher than they had been in Boulder--girls all wore pretty dresses; boys wore long pants, sometimes jeans, but more typically nice navy trousers. What I found odd were the hairstyles. Unlike the crewcuts that had been popular in Laramie, boys in Honolulu had fairly long hair, neatly combed and loaded with hair oil. Given that Japanese 6th grade boys in Japan would, in 1963, all have been in shorts and none would have had hair oil, this fashion might seem a bit strange, but that's the way it was.

Neither I or my parents had any interest in hair oil, but since I was already 11 and in the 6th grade and everyone else was wearing long pants, that's what I wore too--to school. Weekends, I always wore shorts and to my recollection that's what most of the other boys wore too. Shorts were playwear; longs dress-up wear. That was true also of younger boys. Only one boy in the entire school wore shorts--an African American boy in the 4th grade (who looked very nice and even slightly sissyish).

A Sidenote. Two years ago, after a 33 year hiatus, I found myself back in Honolulu on business trip, and dropped by my old school. Predictably, every single boy I saw was wearing baggy, knee-length shorts; none of them were wearing hair oil. The ethnic composition of the school had not visibly changed, but in their manner of dress, they were totally indistinguishable from any other group of American kids in warm weather).

That would probably have been it--I would never again have worn shorts for anything other than casual wear, had my father not received a grant to spend a year studying at the Sorbonne in Paris--and I, as a tall, 12-year old 7th grader, would find myself put back into shorts to go to school. For details click HERE.


Author: Bruce McPherson

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Last updated: October 14, 1998