Wearing Baggy Pants
Bagging pants that sag below a person’s waistline and sometimes beneath the butt weren’t brought into fashion by prisoners and “wanna-be” thugs of recent years. Events like that occurred many years prior. Let me share a few examples. While visiting my grandparents Ray and Becky Rugg Miner’s house, my father Carl Beck happened to walk by the bottom of the staircase as Gram was walking upstairs. Ceilings in the old farmhouse were twelve feet high and the stairway was long and lined with a dark oak banister. Gram’s arthritic knees and feet made the ascension up the stairs slow. She held tightly to the banister for assistance. Dad saw something unusual. Apparently Gram forgot to raise her underwear from half mast while using the bathroom. Part of the white cotton garment was visible dangling below the hem of her house dress.
I’m not sure whether Dad was actually being gentlemanly or whether he was too embarrassed and afraid to say something to Gram, but he found my mom Sybil Miner Beck and advised her of Gram’s problem. Mom went upstairs to help correct the situation.
My sister Kathy Beck Basinger picked up the nickname Droopy Drawers. Our mom took a photo of her wearing only her cotton underwear as she rummaged through a dresser drawer where Mom kept her purses. The underwear weren’t really baggy, but they looked as though they drooped in the seat.
My uncle Theodore, Ted was stick thin. He would cinch his trousers with a heavy belt. When he felt his pants droop, he’d put his arms against the sides of his pants and try to wrest them upwards, He called in “rootching” his pants.
Another memory of baggy underwear I have, I know I’ve shared before. When my wife Cindy Morrison Beck and I were first married, we had to count our pennies making each dollar count. One day she walked past me as I sat in the living room. The underwear she was wearing had the elastic separating from the panty’s cotton material. It gave the panties a lopsided appearance of a person who’s had a stroke where the one side of the person’s face droops down. I said, “Surely we have enough money to buy more underwear.
She replied, “I can still wear them. They’re good enough for everyday.”
As she strolled by me the next time, I snatched them, separating the elastic and panties even more and I said, “Now they’re not.” I knew that she hated mending clothing and this was beyond her usual repair from a bevy of safety pins. She stopped, turned and said, “You tore them, you’ll have to buy me new ones.” And I did. Every year for Christmas, Cindy was assured of one gift…new underwear.