Trad-Ivy Tuesday: Back to Basics—Birdwells and Topsiders

I’m not making this up… “LFG, your foot is almost big enough to wear the smallest size women’s Belgian loafers. Would you wear a pair if maybe in a few more years I got some for you?” Her reply… “Maybe to a costume party.” The woman has decided tastes and opinions and at twelve years old, she now parses them out liberally, transparently and without so much as a flinch. From where her traits come, I don’t know.

So LFG let it be known that the only shoes…Belgians and huaraches… I packed for our recent vacation “embarrass me, dad.” I know, I know…a dozen of you have told me that this is only the beginning. She’s a bit weary of seeing me almost exclusively in Belgians on the weekend and my cheap, buy a pair every other summer, huaraches that for some reason were ok last year but were met with the tisky of tisk tisks last week. Huaraches? I mean come on…if they were good enough for Dean Acheson then they should be good enough for me.

Oh, and my fifteen dollar Gap Outlet bathing trunks/board shorts (The idea of me being in something called “board shorts” at my age is funny. Maybe bored shorts) she also found appalling. And I’m sure, based on the photo above; many of you will find them appalling too. So let me get defensive in advance. First, they were too long so I cut them off. “Quelle horreur” my not so little LFG declared, having aced 6^th grade French with straight A’s all year long. Butcept when she expressed this while in South Carolina, I kinda figgered it would be pronounced Kale (as in the leafy greens) or better yet Cale (as in my boyhood hero Cale Yarborough) har (as in hardy har har) are (as in how are you doing?) Kale-har-are? Come on baby, it’s just a pair of swim trunks and we are headed to Delaware, not Capri. But still LFG declared that the only thing I could wear swim trunk wise that wouldn’t elicit that Kale-Huarache revulsion would be a solid color trunk. Listen, I’m coachable but I do need, like most people, specific direction on what needs to be tweaked.

And one more thing before I move on from the swim trunk thing. The record shows that I’d have at least another 150k in the bank if I hadn’t indulged in my sartorial passions. Wait, I take that back. If it wasn’t clothes it would be the Mercedes SL that I still covet or shotguns or art or a boat or something. Thanks. I needed to get that rationalization codified for the delusional record. But I don’t spend big money on swim trunks.

In order for me to be excessive in some areas, I must be frugal in others. Case in point was my lunch yesterday. Courtesy of CVS in Old Town.Y’all can buy those Villabaququi’s if you want to. I’d rather put that kinda silly money towards a pair of Belgians—that LFG is tired of seeing me wear. When was the last time you had Funyuns?

I’ll get back to the swim trunks dilemma in a moment but for now, let’s stay with the casual shoe issue. I’ve no shortage of other casual shoes including various Bean camp mocs and bluchers and canvas Sperrys etc. But the current LFG shodding arbiter sieve won’t allow any of them to pass. So my casual goof-off shoe line-up is suddenly in kidney stone mode. And trust me; I’ve had a kidney stone. When amidst such an event, you’ll do almost anything to mitigate the traffic jam. So LFG and I set out to a place that sells surf gear and sunglasses and flip flops and TOMs shoes for kids and Toad’s second to Topsiders favorites…Crocs.

Never in a million years did I think I’d be back in a pair of these. But alas, here we are. I wore these standard fare Sperry Topsiders in college when I wasn’t wearing one of the three versions of Weejuns…brown, navy blue or tan pebble grain ones. Literally, those were all the shoes I owned. But then I discovered Bean camp mocs and bluchers and dropped Topsiders during college. After a few more years of even fancier offerings courtesy of Gucci and Ralph driving mocs and Topsiders were off my Trad radar screen forever. 

Topsiders just began to look inelegant compared to almost every other option…leastways to me. So why did my Bean mocs and bluchers not fall prey to the same inelegant designation? I don’t know. Might be something about the brown soles and the rusticated Adirondackness of them that left my mind’s eye settled on the fact that the Bean line-up in all of its inelegance by design was still less twee. I don’t know. Don’t press me on the issue any further. Oh, and maybe if I’d been a sailor, the classic Topsider would have remained in my cache.

Nothing against the classic boat shoe and God knows that my best buddy Toad loves Topsiders and has a gaggle of ‘em at all times. He’s sporting a pair of blue ones in his Father’s Day post and I think, without going back to verify it, that he gave one of his young’uns away in a seaside wedding ceremony…in Topsiders. And I eventually had blue ones too…when in undergrad. But they were Docksides, not Topsiders. Whatever that means to some retentive “get the story correct” boat shoe historian out there. Shut up. Blue boy.

So my LFG goes straight to the Topsiders at the store and says “here…get these.” I was mildly flummoxed and immediately sought clarification and validation from my little boss woman. “Yep, these are fine dad.” “Ok, are you certain that I won’t embarrass you when publicly preening…shod in these?” (You think I don’t really use those actual phrases when talking to my kid, don’t you? Wrong.) Once I was sure of her seriousness and clarity on the issue, the deal was done. Elegant? No. Functional and acceptable? Yes. LFG tisk-tisk eye roll minimization? Worth every penny of the almost seventy clams I paid. Cheaper somewhere else? Probably. But I needed to turn back the humiliation tide post haste. And I'll learn to live with the embossed logo dooky that now adorns them and didn't...way back. Then.

But we still needed to solve the swim trunks issue. LFG’s next charge was to look around the zillion pairs of board shorts and whatever the latest vernacular and brand centric truths that were on display. They had every brand about which I know nothing. Other than the Gap Outlet cheapies, I’d been wearing whatever running/workout/gym shorts I had available to me. Things aren’t a problem until they are defined as a problem. And to date, no one ever identified my swimming tog choices as problematic. Little five year old LFG didn’t seem to have a problem with my elastic waist draw string ditties from Target seen above. But then again, they were a solid color. And no funny comments about the left leg of  my Target draw string ditties being longer than the right. We all have things that must be accommodated and coped with. Shut up.

LFG wanders over to the swim togs rack and pulls these out. Bam! Birdwells. Then the child thought for sure that my head had jumped timing. I was, surprise, completely animated and energized by my Birdwell recollections (You can read about it here) and launched into one of my storytelling autodidactilated verbal spews. 

I was fueled surely, by the memories of my seventeenth summer which was one of my greatest...ADG the one hundred and thirty pound lifeguard is seen above. Thanks be to the good Lord that nobody needed saving at the Country Club of South Carolina. But then I caught myself. And stopped. And asked LFG if the Birdwells met her approval. Upon affirmation, I tried them on for size and we were at the register and out the door in no time. All’s well that ends well. What goes around comes around. We could cliché this one forever but I won’t. What I will say is that I’m happy when LFG is happy and our mission was accomplished…

…till we got home. “Dad, your Sperrys look too new.” It’s always something, no? So my Sperrys were  brined in a sorta Delancey Street pickle barrel dirt melange for a week.

LFG and I have another week’s vacation starting this coming weekend and hopefully now extricated and baking in the sun, the Sperrys will be a bit, shall we say, “curated-cured-weathered-dirty-personalized?” Whatever.

Onward. Birdwelled. And not the least damned bit embarrassed.

ADG II

Birdwell Summer

R.G. was the first guy to have a pair. I saw them when we were at the Elks Club pool one day. He had a hippie sister in California who sent them to him which made them that much more out of reach and desirable. You see I was already hooked on the proverbial back story, the collateral lore that accompanied things…and I was only in grammar school.

It would be several more years before any store in my hometown would purvey something like Birdwells. We weren’t backwater per se but we were…well…comparatively quaint I suppose. The other challenge would be for me to find a pair small enough. Would they even make something like this in a twenty--whatever waist? Maybe the Myrtle Beach surf shop would have them. We would stop at Mammy’s Kitchen for lunch in Myrtle Beach en route to Ocean Drive…North Myrtle Beach. By the late sixties and early seventies North Myrtle Beach remained a holdout for local Carolinians who clung to wood frame beach houses with screened front porches and no air conditioning. Myrtle Beach by then was well on the way to rightfully earning it’s moniker of “K-Mart by the Sea”.  Sixty five miles away in mom’s station wagon and with a low key whine (too much of a whine and my mother would reach back without looking—and I’m talking about reaching all the way to the “back-back” of her VistaCruiser station wagon and slap me naked) en route and maybe my mom would stop and I could get a pair.

Long before the national chain surf shops, the one in Myrtle Beach was a family owned independent enterprise that was a retail outlier in the truest sense. It appealed to a leisure life that was in my elementary school eyes…randy and rowdy. How long would it be before I weighed enough to wear most of the stuff that the older boys bought from this one-off purveyor of cool? And would I ever be able to enter such an establishment without my mother—the exchequetrix and facile roller of the eyes…eyes that said…“I don’t know what’s going to become of you if you fall in with this crowd”. Damn mama, it’s only a pair of swim trunks.

I’m sure the LaJolla characters in Tom Wolfe’s The Pump House Gang would have laughed at the North Myrtle Beach of my childhood. All the cool stuff started in California…surfing…skateboarding…tie dyed t-shirts…they say some of the best cannabis came via California…I wouldn’t have known. Kids surfed in the Carolinas but come on…where was the real surfer subculture? The best of the Carolina surfing best would be hodads in California. What I did know as a grammar school kid was that everything for sale in that surf shop seemed not only out of my reach but also illicit…and this wasn’t even a head shop. My mom would have been back out the door in a heartbeat if there had even been a modest display case of hash pipes and roach clips. 

Things as benign as Gordon and Smith t-shirts and surfing accoutrement, as well as the skateboards and other kit therein spoke to me a lifestyle that my mama wouldn’t let me take on. The round puck of Sex Wax made my pulse quicken as a kid. Why did they call it that and why couldn’t I have a cake of it? …Even though I didn’t have a surfboard. Wouldn’t it be cool just to have one? Kinda like that condom I would slip into my wallet several years later only to replace it every couple of years…new old stock I suppose…wallet worn but certainly never used. So I prevailed…at least in matters Birdwell. My mom bought me the smallest pair offered and my color choices were—nadda. I could have the blue ones or the blue ones.

My memories of this time…so early in my life’s journey, are inextricably tied to Vietnam. I didn’t know what it was all about. I just knew that my much older cousins…the guys that were for me, the arbiters of everything cool…were being drafted. My mother, the youngest of ten, had older brothers and sisters whose kids were being shipped off to Vietnam by the busload. My cousins…Carroll, C.H., David and my oldest cousin Nancy’s new husband, Bill, all shipped out for Vietnam the same summer I got the Birdwells. David ran the rivers on a Swift Boat and came back a mess. *UPDATE...I've been made aware that the photo above is from our current conflict...not Vietnam

We always shot tons of fireworks on the 4^th at my Uncle Connie’s. The next summer when David came home from killing people on the riverbanks of Vietnam, we didn’t have fireworks at Uncle Connie’s. David, Connie’s son, stayed in his bedroom the whole day. This was probably around the same time that Ernie, the guy who worked at the trad haberdashery with me many years later, sat on his lifeguard stand at Ocean Drive, maybe in Birdwells, waiting to be drafted.

I love the movie Big Wednesday. I love the surfing stuff but the conflict manifest in being too lazy and too in love with surfing to sign up for the Draft intrigues me. I suppose that there was less of a moral issue with war than there was a desire to not interrupt what was probably the best summer of their lives.

I also correlate those first Birdwells with Coppertone. The white gunky stuff that mom used to smear on us. I also remember my older girl cousins being sunburned and putting Noxzema on each other. I probably got a nano glimpse through a cracked bathroom door…of a pallid budding breast made more pallid by encircled sunburn. Or maybe I just think I saw one. Ten-O-Six lotion, Stridex Medicated Pads and Dipity Do seem to channel through my recollection of the Birdwell Summer. All things that would be on the dresser of one of the beach house bedrooms…along with those heated curlers…props and unguents used by my older girl cousins.

I think I went through another couple pair of Birdwells before moving on to other board shorts…Ocean Pacific I think, was probably next in the queue. I even had the corduroy OP shorts. My tobacco farmer grandfather couldn’t get his mind around the fact that one would wear a winter fabric as a pair of shorts…especially in bright colors. He and Longwing.

I snooped around a bit while thinking about this post and discovered the Carrie Birdwell family is still cranking out the Beach Britches just around the corner from where she first began all those years ago. Her decidedly low tech website is a personification of the pluck that’s probably been a key ingredient to her survival all these years. I doubt that the Smithsonian has a pair of Birdwells in their archives but they should. I’m thinkin’ I’ll pounce on another pair—probably not in a twenty eight waist this time.

Onward … ADG—Hodad