The Perfect Storm

I want to say this was my brother's preppy girlfriend's house, but the memory, like the picture, is fuzzy.

Reading other blogs, in particular one with an eastern, rural setting that most of us know and love, has gotten me to thinking about my own beginnings, and how my interest in preppy aesthetics began. I went to public school in the 1980s when it was trendy, of course, but I like to think that perhaps it has an even deeper meaning with legitimate roots. Some may view this as wishful thinking--there are no known Jamestown settlers in my family, no prep school educations, and very little college. But as time passes, I've come to see that there were subtle influences in my upbringing that may have made neo-traditionalist living desirable long after my peers had traded in their Fair Isle and Bluchers for tunics and tights.

With the Clark's chain in Greensboro, NC in the late 1960s. My brother got the sense of industry, I got the goofy grin.

I sometimes think that much of my unfortunate propensity for shameless social climbing came from my father, who for a time had a successful career in retail and was the first manager of the J.J. Newbery store in Waynesboro, Virginia when it opened in 1955. He was the typical "organization man" of that era, the proverbial "Man In the Gray Flannel Suit" who built the underappreciated postwar world that those of us over the age of 40 grew up in. He was active in the Freemasons and had a membership in the Waynesboro Country Club, and later in life he spoke often of the good thing he had going there. Regrettably, he also walked out on his first wife and their three children for reasons I won't discuss here. Suffice it to say, such personal transgressions were frowned upon by the front office in those days, forcing him to take to the road as a journeyman of sorts, moving wherever there was a discount store that needed a sharp mind to run it.

Hippest kid in Morrow, Ohio, circa 1975. Even then it seems I had to have my collar up...and it wasn't even cool yet.

My mother's family, meanwhile, worked as small-scale farmers in the nearby hinterlands of Augusta County, and owned about thirty acres of property which they purchased during the Depression when land was cheap. By the time my mother returned there in the mid-1970s with my just-retired father, my teenaged brother, and six-year-old me in tow,  this had a very different meaning from the idyllic "gentleman farmer" image one might associate with it. Time had basically stood still, the place had gotten run down, and most of the land was leased to neighboring farmers who raised cattle and grain on its hilly expanses during my formative years. In retrospect I've come to think of this environment, in ways both snooty and sardonic, as our very own "Grey Gardens."

From organization man to country squire: Dad on the farm about 1978.

My father, however, took to these surroundings well, and before he became too old to do the work and I became too hormonal and recalcitrant to help, he enjoyed some minor success as a hobby farmer. He set up grape vines and a small stand of fruit trees, and we grew most of our own vegetables. We picked raspberries and blackberries in the woods on our property and sold them to local grocery stores. For a while we had a few ducks, and one year my dad bought six pigs which we raised for slaughter. I remember the work of feeding and watering them as one of the last jobs on the farm that I actually enjoyed--and it was some of the best sausage I ever had in my life.

Sometimes my dad took contracts for commercial signs, such as this one. I wish I remembered where this place was!

For relaxation, my father painted, and in the early years back in Virginia he took up wood carving, which eventually morphed into a full-scale woodworking shop that turned out tacky lawn ornaments by the pickup load. We were regulars on the local arts and crafts circuit, and sometimes even I got into the act, entering my artwork in the children's divisions of various shows, a couple examples of which won prizes. Mom and Dad both took an interest in my intellectual development, and there was never a book I wanted for, although my obsession with the space program wore thin with my father in a huge hurry. He preferred to lose himself in the Foxfire books, or the coffee-table volumes of Eric Sloane--relatively dry reading which failed to excite my modern gray matter at the time. Furthermore, the house was always full of intellectually stimulating and sometimes highbrow magazines: National Geographic, Southern Living, Shenandoah Virginia, and Smithsonian were all in the regular rotation. And although we seldom ordered anything, we were on the L.L. Bean and Vermont Country Store mailing lists for years. There was nothing Mom loved better than a canvas tote, and it was always the "thank-you gift" she picked when donating money to the local public radio station. In 1985 I was probably the only 14-year-old in America who thought Garrison Keillor was the funniest man alive.

My uninspired entry in a 1980 Halloween window-decorating contest. But note the JC Penney display behind it!

Many of my friends were also farm kids, and lived in circumstances similar to my own. Some were wealthy and some less so, but for a multitude of reasons, I didn't really fit in, and it was in the midst of this pre-adolescent confusion that the Handbook-inspired oxford-and-Aigner wave hit. Because it was what the "cool" kids wore, the preppy fad of the early 80s ironically came for a time to symbolize the flip side of the relatively safe, comfortable environment I enjoyed at home. It carried mean, unhappy connotations which on one level I still haven't gotten over, and was a road I wasn't prepared to go down at the time. Still and yet, I couldn't help but like it. Perhaps there was something mildly masochistic about this. But I prefer to think it was a subliminally ingrained instinct. It was still on my mind later in the decade when I started working for a local public library, another place where time, in that pre-digital age, had seemed to stand still. As a young adult, I actually felt comfortable among the genteel blue-blood housewives who manned the front desk in their scrunchy white turtlenecks and safety-pinned wool kilts. Unlike my school chums, they seemed to admire my work ethic and didn't rip me on a daily basis for having pretended I had gone to the moon when I was 8. The feeling didn't last, but it was a valuable point of reference along the road to "full flower" in my appreciation of traditional style.

Some of the gals (with a couple of charming fellows) who I knew and loved in 1983. Alas, the feeling was not generally mutual.

All this predated my first look The Official Preppy Handbook, which I finally got my hands on in 1988 after years of knowing curiosity. It would still be quite some time before I consciously connected the dots between all these landmarks, but I believe a common set of core values flows through them all, one which deep down, I could always get my brain around, if not my arms. As one of my fellow bloggers said to me the other day of her own similar experience, there was never any over-thought, regimented, how-to-do-it formula. It just was.

Some of the livestock. Not in the same league with Muffy's chickens, perhaps, but the eggs were tasty. And yes, I know these are drakes.

My parents are long since deceased and the farm is now on the market, gone entirely to seed. The unpleasantness of later, even more checkered family circumstances neutralizes any personal desire I may have once had to save what's left. Recollections of my high school experience, its sartorial awesomeness notwithstanding, likewise inspire little sentiment. But after a long period during my twenties and thirties of trying to figure out just who I am and what I represent, these memories do provide a foundation of sorts for the direction I seem to be heading. Although it took the better part of thirty years to fully take root, I'm exceedingly grateful for what I see as the positive intellectual, spiritual, and even cosmetic influences of my early life, even as I occasionally lament the things that I wish could have been different. 

"Preppy come lately, preppy come never, preppy forever," goes the line in the film Making the Grade. Perhaps in my case, one might say "Better preppy late than never."

The one useful thing I learned in school: how to rock layers with je ne sais quoi.