In 1973 one of the standout tracks from John Prine’s memorable LP Sweet Revenge was the semi-novelty song “Dear Abby.” It was very funny—still is—and I wonder if Prine, like millions of Americans, read Abby’s column every day. I did, and had since about 1965, along with Ann Landers, who always struck me as more barbed than her twin sister, handing out euphemisms about teen sex, which was a prime topic for friends and me. Abby and Ann are long gone, and never suitably replaced—although Dan Savage’s “Savage Love,” which appeared in 50 or so weekly newspapers in the 1990s, filled the prurient gap in spades—which was a shame.
Fairly liberal, Abby and Ann nonetheless stand now as nostalgia figures in a Norman Rockwell way. In the late-1960s my mom and I figuratively wrestled each other for the afternoon newspaper Newsday (incredibly, that paper had a 90 percent penetration on Long Island) to read Abby; we’d gone over Landers already in The Daily News, which confounded my dad, who had no patience for such “fluff.”
Skimming The New York Times earlier this month, I came across Vanessa Friedman’s “Ask Vanessa” weekly column, ostensibly about fashion, with a ridiculous amount of politically-correct posturing and nothing juicy like Abby and Ann. Vanessa received a letter from a high school teacher in Kansas—could’ve been made up, like Penthouse “Letters,” but that doesn’t matter—who wondered, as her students said that she’s out-of-touch for not wearing socks with sandals, if times were changing. Hardly a rage-inducing topic, but it was nominally more interesting than whatever Maureen Dowd, Michelle From Brooklyn or Ezra Klein had to say on that day.
Friedman’s lead: “Socks and sandals are like the Romeo and Juliet of fashion: forever being torn asunder, only to find their way back together.” She adds: “[The issue] is also about our fraught relationship with feet, which have always been a controversial body part. Sometimes regarded as obscene, sometimes offensive, often a symbol of class and social status, they are even occasionally the subject of legislation.”
Caught your breath yet? This brief treatise is about… sandals? I’ve never thought of feet as “offensive,” “controversial” or a “symbol of class and social status,” but perhaps I waded into the Times Lady Section by accident.
There’s a picture of me on the first day of kindergarten in September of 1960, and Dicky Howard and I are both wearing sandals with socks. I shed that footwear shortly after, when my mom allowed me to pick clothes for school, and didn’t get back into the fold until visiting my brother Gary and sister-in-law Teresa at their apartment on Grove St. in San Francisco at the start of 1974. On one of many visits to Berkeley during that 15-day span, I purchased a pair of hand-made huaraches, $12, because to an Easterner, they qualified as exotic, just like the Telegraph Avenue strip and the array of Malaysian, Indian, Thai and Szechuan restaurants, which were just starting to pop up in New York City, but definitely not Baltimore, where I was at school. Baltimore’s “Chinatown” in the 1970s consisted of Mee Jun Low (acceptable Cantonese) and “The White Lice Inn.”
I wore the huaraches often, alternating with tangerine-colored cowboy boots my friend from Texas sent me, and Converse sneakers. In the winter, my Day-Glo orange socks from the Red Shed boutique on Greenmount Ave. were underneath (like a lot of college students, doing the laundry was a low priority, although it was mortifying, while studying for final exams in the library, my friend Peter, not-so-subtly moved to another table, such was foul odor from my unwashed socks) and in the summer went without hosiery. No difficulty, although when hawking beer at the Orioles’ Memorial Stadium, I took a near-spill twice while climbing the upper-deck step to “my customers,” who felt more comfortable buying from a white kid than a black vendor. It was embarrassing—vendors hung out in bars after the game—but I still took their tips, which increased from inning to inning.
I can’t sign off without mentioning, with melancholy, the 10-word jousts the late J.D. King and I reveled in after another one of John M. Harris’ (he wrote for Splice Today for six years) columns that detailed his love of short, tight khaki shorts and “hand-tooled” sandals. His superbly-written essays were usually a send-up of media figures and politicians, but J.D. and I took them, nominally, at face value. One excerpt: “’You look like you’re humping God’s morning air, John,’ Mother rasped this morning on observing me with my khaki shorts down around my sandaled feet. ‘I think I ought to fit you for a catheter.’”
An early-riser, J.D. taunted me on Twitter, posting something like this: “Hey, Hippy Rusty, Harris has some advice for you! Make sure nothing happens to your huaraches (or Brautigan novels)! You wouldn’t to soil those antiques!” Harris wrote about sandals often, and J.D. always took the opportunity to make an off-color funny. We’d go several rounds, and the only way I could shut him up was making fun of his devotion to Henry Mancini and Bobby Goldsboro.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023