Remember these?

Cat eye glasses. Just take a look at the Garner panoramic picture and examples abound! That’s about the only style we had back then. If you needed glasses to see, you wore the cat eyes. We could not have looked much nerdier. Most of those old 50s and 60s styles come back at one point or another and we call them “retro.” Cat eye glasses never did come back …. Hmmm….. I wonder why? Later on they were replaced by the Jackie Oh huge things that took over your face. At one time I owned a pair of little square gold rimmed John Lennon glasses. I felt oh so cool. Those John Lennon glasses and the cat eyes are having their second life at my daughter’s old high school. She removed the lenses, wore them in several plays, then donated them to the props department. Anytime they need a “nerd” look, I am sure they dig them out and use them.

ID bracelets. At Garner, if you were going steady with a boy, he gave you his silver ID bracelet and you wore it proudly. Then everyone would know that so-and-so and so-and-so were going steady. After all, you could not drive off from school with your boyfriend in his covertible, or have PDAs (public displays of affection). If you showed up with some boy’s ID bracelet, it was quite an accomplishment. If you could snag a promise ring or best of all, an engagement ring in high school, your stock soared unbelievably.

Big Red. Sometimes this was all we had for lunch, along with some vending machine crackers, when we were cramming for Mr. Kuykendall’s  5^th period biology exam , right after lunch, and did not have time to go through the food line. Those of us on the second-run buses who had to wait until 4:15 to start home would walk over to that corner store at Bitters and Nacogdoches and buy Big Reds in bottles. The store owner always lined us up outside the door like cattle going through a feed lot chute. Two exited and two entered, only. He certainly didn’t want his store overrun by high school punks.

Surfer boy haircuts. A lot of the guys were obsessed with looking like Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. They would grow their hair pretty long on top around their foreheads and sweep it to the side like a huge comma. If the eyes were partially covered, that was even better. It didn’t really qualify you as one of those dreaded long-hairs because the rest of the hair was pretty short

Hair yarn. Big thick stuff girls would hide their elastic hair bands with. If you wore a pony tail, you tied a bow around it with hair yarn. They wore big bows of hair yarn on top of their heads too. It came in all colors and was usually matched or coordinated to the outfit.

Collins box bags. Those little and not so little boxy wooden purses which usually had big plastic jewels pasted all over them in a pattern. Were they made up in New Braunfels? Scrivener’s sold them. At least that’s where I got mine. They were pretty uncomfortable to carry around and you had to be really careful not to knock them against somebody in the hall or you might leave a bruise. They could also bruise your hip bone! I still have mine. At one point I removed all the jewels and painted it white and lined the inside with red polka dots. My daughter played with it as a child.

Kickers. You had to have courage to be a kicker in the late 60s, listening to the country western stations, and driving a pick-up truck. It was just not cool. Most of us were chilling to the Beatles, the Stones and the Byrds. Remember that this was far before the take-over of the music world by country and country-rock. We thought that kickers came from another planet. Behind their backs, we called them Rexall Rangers, because the Rexall drugstores used to sell a lot of western wear and we joked that most of them could not tell one end of a horse from the other . This was probably not true. Today, I congratulate those of you who had the courage to be and act differently while the rest of us ran around being homogenous. Now we all own a pair of cowboy boots and a Stetson. Some of us even ride horses when we can. Kickers had it all down before the rest of us did.

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