Keeping in style has always been a problem for me. The only way I can keep up is to wear the same clothes for several years – and hope they are in style part of the time.

My mother bought me a double breasted suit when I was a senior in high school, so I would be in style for graduation. Those suits were so ugly they were out of fashion before I got off the stage with my diploma.

But the double breasted keeps coming back. And when I graduated from college four years later, the old suit was right on target again. I still have that suit somewhere, but I hope I never need it.
Just recently I was feeling sorry for folks who wear those faded jeans we see around town. Then my wife told me those jeans are still in style. They’re called “acid washed,” she said.

Clothing experts say acid washed denim is produced by washing the material with volcanic rock that may have been pickled in hydrochloric acid. This produces a bleached-out look, reduces the fabric’s durability by 25-50 percent and raises the price several dollars.

Some of the new jeans have holes in them, and others are so thin you can see right through them. We had pants like that when I was a kid, but ours got bleached from wrestling with tractor batteries or falling down in the barnyard. In those days a person wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of faded, white jeans like people are wearing now.

Our pants were called “overalls,” and there was nothing tougher for daily wear. These pants were called overalls because they could be worn over anything. On a cold winter day, the average kid might be wearing three or four pairs of pants at any given time.

There were five boys in my family, and Mother always ironed our overalls so they would look nice. That was quite a chore before she got her mangle iron – this was a piece of machinery!

The mangle iron had a big, round drum which I think rotated against a concave shell to press the clothes. You sat in front of it, feeding the overalls into the machine, much as you would feed a wringer-washer. The drum was operated with a foot pedal, and each time the concave was pressed against the clothes a big cloud of steam would belch toward the ceiling.

Talk about power – using a mangle iron for each wash day was like taking a road-roller to a cookie bake. This machine would iron any kind of clothes, but my mother only used it for overalls. If you put a tan shirt through the iron, the garment came out looking like a brown grocery bag.

Overalls rolled from this machine like paper from a typewriter. These pants were brittle. You had to bend them over a chair and jump on them a few times to loosen them up so you could crawl in.
Styles change, and durability was a lot more important than it is now. Acid washed jeans wouldn’t have lasted two weeks at our house; Mother’s automatic iron would have eaten them alive.

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.