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To begin with - buying school clothes.
I remember having one new outfit to start back to school. Usually mother made it, taking apart dresses given to her by her younger sister in Washington, DC and her friend (she in turn sent them bags of farm produce ie, peanuts, pecans, and in cold weather other non-perishable items). In this photo I am wearing a dark green wool silk with white satin blouse (made from my Aunt Nellie Faye's old suit). I remember that mother curled my long red hair which I usually wore in pig tails. We were told to "dress up" for the group photo and I did.
Click to enlarge photo
Look at the clothes in this photo of my classmates at Curtis, our country school. Most of the boys wore blue denim overalls. They mostly had one jacket or sweater and wore it every day. I look at these photos and can recall many of the jackets. Most popular were wool plaid ones. I doubt that any of them had fashion labels sewn in them. And shoes... mostly they wore high top "brogans" because they lived on a farm and were outdoors helping with chores before and after school. The basketball players usually had a new pair of black high top tennis shoes.
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| Penny Loafer |
I remember a new pair of shoes I had in the 8th grade - brown and white saddle oxfords and the next year I saved my money from picking cotton and bought a pair of brown penny loafers. You inserted a penny in the band across the top of the shoe. I would remove the penny and shine it when I polished my shoes with either wax or liquid shoe polish. I'm not sure you can even buy shoe polish these days.
Girls could not wear pants to school until I was in the 9th grade. We had one pair of blue jeans and the girls would get together and decide what day we would wear our jeans to school. Boys mostly wore blue jeans after the got to Jr High and white t-shirts (no graphics).
This is all about shopping for school clothes. Now for supplies. My dad went to Grimes General Store and picked up notebook paper and tablets, pencils, etc. for us. We had to buy our books back then and usually you could buy used books from someone the year before. No internet or even a school library so we pretty much learned all we knew from reading the textbooks. We had Weekly Readers that we got current news from (nobody had a tv back then). I remember reading that there were over 52 million people in the US back then from reading in the Weekly Reader. I wondered where all those people lived??
Over the years we have helped our granddaughters with their school supply list, and shopping for clothes. This could be a pretty big bill if you have more than one child.
