Nice Shirt

This is one of my favorite shirts. Why? Well, it is all cotton. It is subtlety colorful. It fits. But none of that is really important. What is important? What is important is that almost every time I wear it publicly? Some one utters something like, " so, what are you using for drapes?"

Today this shirt set me to thinking about the economy, and how we are all coping what we hear is the "worst recession" since the great depression. I was born a little after the depression ended, but my parents didn't readily give up the habits they'd developed during that era.

I can't remember my dad buying anything retail until I was a teenager. He would show up at the local grocery store early in the morning when the bread truck finished it's delivery. He knew the driver would have a few loaves of sourdough left and dad would take those loaves home for pennies.

At about age ten, and I was going through a pair of socks a day, he saw a Sears and Roebuck ad for kids socks for 50 cents a piece, or something like that. He dragged me into the car and we drove to downtown L.A. to buy 50 pair.

But what really impresses me in reflection, is how inventive that generation became in order to survive. Long after THE DEPRESSION, I was working at General Mills tossing around flour sacks of all kinds. One of the more interesting products was La Pina Flour (with a tilde over the 'N'.) The flour was packed in these very colorful cotton sacks. (not unlike my drape shirt) La Pina (with a tilde) is essentially used to make tortillas and other Mexican and South West food staples. And had you looked around in a crowd in the 30's and 40's, you'd see people wearing shirts and blouses that looked a lot like La Pina (with a tilde) sacks.

My memory isn't so sharp that I can confirm this, and while my mother listens to me from Heaven, she refuses to answer my questions. I'm almost sure she made a few a those shirts and blouses for us early on. If not out of La Pina (with a tilde) sacks, something like them.
(If I'm making all this up in my mind my sisters will quickly amend this posting.)
(Lucky for me Peggy is on the phone with my mother-in-law, Esther, who confirms she made flour sack dresses for Peggy and her sister when they were toddlers.)

Seems to me people were making things (maybe clothes) out of burlap potato sacks, too.

So say, with this economy that is as bad as the Great Depression, why don't we start making clothes out of flour sacks. Well folks, we're too late. I started looking around the Internet to make sure I wasn't making all this up? There were quite a few BLOG postings from folks my age and older reminiscing about their flour sack shirts and skirts. But then...as I continued to surf, I discover there are a whole bunch of people, all over the World, manufacturing flour sack clothing of all kinds. (I saw one for 20 dollars with a vegetable sauce recipe on the front.)

Quite a few of these products are coming from the Far East. So if you figure in the labor costs, it is pretty clear you'll be able to buy them over the Internet cheaper than making them yourselves.

(I mean how many Enchiladas can you eat in a week?)

So I guess what I'm saying is we need to come up with something like "flour sack" casual-ware if we are going to be able to tell our grandchildren about living through the "GREATEST RECESSION since the GREAT DEPRESSION" ( Let me tell you, they no longer buy the, "In my day we walked ten miles to school in the snow, up hill both ways." We need a hook, something that expresses who we are, and what we're going through.

So, got any ideas!