My Underwear Misadventure

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September’s archived blog about Dad airing out his long underwear by standing them in the corner got me thinking about my own traumatic underwear mishaps. I’m proud to say that I’ve never aired out my underwear by standing them in a corner, but this is not to say I haven’t had my fair share of underwear misadventures. 

One day when I was in first grade I was digging frantically through the laundry basket looking for a pair of underwear when Dad yelled that the school bus was coming.

“ I guess you’re going commando today,” he said with a shrug, shooing me out the door.

“Good morning class”, my teacher, Mrs. Poke, said once all the students had settled in their seats. “Because today is Student Health Day, we are going to the gym to get checked out by visiting nurses. Please strip down to your underwear and line up by the door.”

But I don’t have underwear! I thought, as panic rushed through me. I shot my hand up. “I-I-I don’t want to go,” I stammered when Mrs. Poke eventually saw my hand and called on me.  

“Well, the permission slip I have from your mother means she expects you to be there,” Mrs. Poke said with a sternness that told me there would be no point arguing with her.

Kids were already piling clothes on their chairs and scurrying into line, hopping from leg to leg and rubbing their arms to ward off the chills that come from standing around in one’s skivvies. 

Slowly I peeled off my shirt and jeans and shimmied between desks, making my way stealthily to the girl’s line. Amazingly, no one noticed I was naked down to my cowboy boots. Mrs. Poke opened the classroom door and began leading us toward the gym. Other classroom doors opened and soon the entire first grade filled the hall, but still no one noticed my nakedness. I began to think I might get away with it. 

It wasn’t until we reached the gym that my precarious situation was detected — by the principal, no less. 

“Miss McManus, why aren’t you wearing underwear?”, his shocked voice boomed across the gym. The room went silent as my classmates turned to stare at me. The principal raced over, grabbed me by the arm and hastily dragged me behind a screen in the nearest examination station. 

“Where is your underwear?” he gasped in a voice several octaves higher than usual.

“Can you repeat the question”, I asked. “I can’t hear you over all the laughter.” 

“This is atrocious,” the principal groaned. “You should know you can’t come to school buck naked!”

“But Mrs. Poke said I had to be here,” I whined. Clearly, she was the one who should be in trouble, not me. “I didn’t want to come.”

“I should say not,” he said. “Now stay here while I find you a towel.”

By the time I emerged from behind the screen wrapped in a gym towel, the teachers had managed to get the riled up first graders under control, but I could still hear their whispers and giggles as I passed them on my way back to my classroom.

That night I handed Dad a note from Mrs Poke. 

“What’s this about?”, he asked, looking at me warily.

I glared at him and said, “You're in trouble for sending me to school butt naked!” 

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Recipe of the Month

Every Halloween Mom made popcorn balls. They were delicious and she had to hide most of them so there would be some left to hand out to the trick-or-treaters. 

In those days, at least in our blue-collar neighborhood, kids didn’t have highfalutin Halloween costumes from a store. We made our own from whatever we could find around the house. My sisters and I raided Dad’s closet for worn, moth-eaten shirts, old ties and ratty knit caps. He had plenty. Once we were dressed up as little vagabonds, Dad used a stick of charcoal to draw beards and mustaches on our excited faces.

One year we couldn’t find any charcoal. This was a travesty! Without our beards we looked like our usual ragamuffin selves and no one would give us candy! Luckily, Mom saved the day. She scooped old coffee grounds from the compost bucket and stuck them to our faces with petroleum jelly. Finally, armed with flashlights and pillow cases to hold our bounty, we raced out into the night.

Side note: Many years later, our youngest sister, Erin, was allowed to pick out a Halloween mask from the local five-and-dime. After careful consideration, she made her decision... her first Halloween mask would be — a vagabond! 

Mom’s Colorful Popcorn Balls

2 c sugar 3/4 c frozen fruit juice concentrate (grape, orange, limeade, lemonade) — I only recall Mom making the orange juice version

3/4 c water

1/2 c light corn syrup

1 t vinegar

1/2 t salt

5 quarts unsalted popcorn

Combine sugar, fruit juice concentrate, water, corn syrup, vinegar, and salt in a heavy saucepan. Bring to boil. Lower heat and cook until 250º (mixture will bubble up in pan). Pour hot syrup over the popcorn in a large bowl. Mix until well coated. Let stand 5 minutes or until it can be easily formed into balls. Makes 18 - 3 inch balls. — We rubbed butter on our hands before forming the balls so the syrup didn’t stick to them.

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McManus Quote of the Month

(Also inspired by Dad’s underwear blog, the visuals of which I can’t seem to shake from my mind…):

“Baths are bad because soap and water will eat holes in your protective crust.” 

— Rancid Crabtree 

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From the McManus Archives

Pat's Blog October, 2009

Herbie Getts was a couple of years older than Norm Nelson, Vern Schulze and me. Our little group was about 10 on the Halloween night of which I am thinking. The major difference between us and Herbie was that we considered Halloween to be a single night. Herbie regarded it as a season.

Long before our little Halloween outing for treats, Herbie started raiding the homes along our stretch of the highway. He didn’t bother with treats but went directly to tricks. He was a purely destructive force. Outhouses were toppled, car windows waxed over, mailboxes torn off their posts, gates sabotaged. As the three of us set out on our Halloween night of trick-or-treating, Norm, Vern, and I had no inkling of the rage Herbie had aroused among the neighbors.

In the unlikelihood homeowners would fail to give us a treat, we planned to play a mean trick on them, putting a little squiggle of soap on one of their windows. We laughed uproariously over this brazen fiendishness. At the McWilliams, the home of a gruff, busy logger, we trooped up onto the porch and bravely knocked. No response. We waited, then knocked again. Already starting to draw our bars of soap, we suddenly heard the backdoor of the house open and close quietly. Someone was trying to sneak up on us! Norm and I cleared a picket fence like two gazelles and streaked off into the darkness. Vern, for some unknown reason, crouched down to hide behind a tree no more than three-feet tall.

McWilliams caught him, of course. The sound of a gruff, angry voice, no doubt yelling at some quivering object crouched down behind a tree, drifted out to us. Norm and I were still picking up speed, so it was difficult to know what was being said. Both of us figured that was the end of Vern. Since he was our leader, we were momentarily confused as to how to proceed with our trick-or-treating.

Presently, Vern caught up with us. He had managed to persuade Mr. McWilliams, that he was innocent of all previous mischief, part of which had consisted of toppling the McWilliams’ outhouse. The toppling of the privy apparently required considerable strength, it being occupied by Mr. McWilliams at the time. Herbie said later that he understood it had been accomplished by means of a pry pole and a block of firewood used as a fulcrum, but he couldn’t be positive about the facts, because he had only heard them second hand.

Herbie had been extremely clever in covering his tracks. For one thing, someone had slipped into the Getts’ garage and waxed Mr. Getts’ car windows so thoroughly he was unable to drive to work the next morning. We heard about this from Herbie himself. He had seemed pleased at our amazement over the viciousness of the deed. Mr. Getts, being no fool, suspected Herbie, as we found out later, but he had no proof. As it turned out, Mr. Getts wasn’t the kind of person who needed proof, and Herbie ultimately paid a penalty of some sort.

On the night of our Halloween, however, the folks living along the highway were on the alert for any tricksters that might come their way. At one place, a big dog began to bark and tug at his chain as we approached along the driveway. The door of the house opened. We dived into a field of weeds. A man came out on the porch carrying a shotgun. His wife emerged and stood next to him. She played the beam of a flashlight over the weeds as we flattened our bodies into the Earth.

“You see anything, Pa?” The wife said.

“Nope. There’s something out there, all right. If it’s them Halloween tricksters, they’s probably smart enough not to fool around here.”

He was right about that.

Vern, Norm and I headed home, without a single treat in our little treat bags, at least none that I can recall.

We did one trick that night. On our way home, we decided to play a joke on a farmer who was notorious for being lazy. We thought we would cause him some work. So we hauled a number of large rocks and placed them in his driveway in such a fashion that he would have to get out of his car and move them. As we were going by on the school bus next morning, we saw him steer in and out around the rocks without touching a single one! It was a major disappointment. Those rocks, in fact, remained in his driveway for years afterwards.

Every Halloween I think back to that night so many years ago, the night we put the rocks in the farmer’s driveway. One Halloween during a book tour I was staying at a hotel in a large American city. As I recall, the local citizens referred to Halloween as Devil’s Night or some such thing. I couldn’t get dinner in the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel, because all the tables had been reserved. The restaurant provided the diners with a wonderful vantage point to watch the fireworks — namely, the local pranksters setting fire to buildings! “Ooohh! Look at that one!”

I watched the fireworks display on TV in my hotel room. (Mostly, I wanted to make sure I didn’t see my hotel featured.) Here all these years I had felt bad about putting those rocks in the farmer’s driveway, even though they hadn’t seemed to bother him all that much. After watching Devil’s Night, I didn’t feel bad anymore.