Letter sweaters and jackets were the most impressive things guys could own back in my high school and college days in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Convertibles might have been a notch higher on the list for boys with a rich daddy, but the rest of us felt important in those coats and sweaters with the oversized block letters.
Sweaters and jackets in school colors were awarded to students who “lettered” in sports. They were major status symbols in the halls of high schools and on college campuses.
But somewhere along the way when I was not looking, those heavy sweaters and bulky wool jackets with the leather sleeves must have stopped being so stylish.
Harvard started the letter jacket craze in the 1860s, and every high school and college in the country joined in. But research shows the popularity of school letter apparel is diminishing.
Maybe it’s global warming. Football jackets were ordered in the winter after the season and were not delivered until late spring. Wearing them then probably caused a lot of heat strokes.
Athletes had to play a certain number of games or quarters or whatever to earn a letter. I ended up with several letter jackets and sweaters for being a high school and college trainer.
Taping ankles and swabbing Merthiolate on wounds was a lot easier way to become a letterman than trying to tackle fullbacks rumbling up and down football fields like Sherman tanks.
One of my proudest moments as a teenager was the day my black and gold Springhill High School letter jacket arrived.
Not that I ever wore it much, but the jacket made it easier to get a girlfriend. A lot of them considered it chic to wear a letter jacket even if it belonged to the skinny guy who taped ankles instead of the star quarterback.
As much as I thought at the time that I would never part with that jacket, I have no idea what happened to it.
Maybe I forgot to get it back from an old girlfriend, or my mother could have dumped it when I went off to college like she did my collections of baseball cards and comic books.
It is sort of symbolic that the jacket went missing since the school has disappeared too. Springhill High was replaced by a consolidated school with a different nickname and school colors.
In college, we got a purple sweater as a first letter award, then a white sweater, a purple jacket the third year and a big letter blanket as a fourth award.
Those four college letter awards that seemed so magnificent at the time have vanished like the Springhill jacket. I know exactly what happened to three of them but not the other one.
When I graduated and moved to New Orleans to work at The Times-Picayune, I hauled everything I owned in the bed of a borrowed pickup truck.
It was covered with the purple sweater and blanket that were tied down with ropes to protect all my worldly goods.
There were storms all the way from Natchitoches to New Orleans. The sweater, blanket and some other possessions didn’t finish the trip.
My white sweater and letter jacket survived, and I kept them for years. Then the leather sleeves of the jacket started peeling and shedding on things when I wore it, so I discarded it.
The white sweater was stained and frayed, but the purple letter still looked good. Regina reluctantly wore it to a 1950s party at my request soon after we married 20 years ago.
We uncovered a picture from that event recently, and it reminded me of all this.
The sweater went missing not long after that. I didn’t get rid of it, so the other person who lives in our house must share the opinion of folks who think letter sweaters and jackets are not fashionable anymore.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES