My Life in Brain Injuries

Throughout the 50s and 60s, at least in the mill town where I grew up, girls were required to wear skirts or dresses to their academic classes. There was a spell after the mini skirt became popular that girls wearing skirts considered “short” were required to kneel by the teacher’s desk. At the outset of this process, the hem had to touch the floor, but eventually, as the mini skirt continued in popularity, the school’s administration loosened their rules.  The suspect girl still had to kneel, but a yardstick was used to determine compliance. The hem had to be within an inch of the floor. Later, two inches became acceptable. By the time I graduated from high school, the administration had agreed that the following year girls would be allowed to wear pants to class. That had to mark the beginning of the end of the onesie in our school district.

The onesie was the required PE uniform for girls throughout the 50s and 60s. It was a garment intended to democratize a group of girls by making them all uncomfortable. At a time when skirts or dresses were mandatory classroom apparel, changing into something “athletic” was a necessary piece of physical education.  (And female humiliation.) We had a locker room where we changed into and out of our onesies, and, if we walked barefoot into the shower, contracted athlete’s foot. The lockers and shower smelled of pubescent armpits and other nascent hormones as well as dirty socks.

The old gym – an empty, dark, wood-lined warehouse of a room – was where the girls’ PE classes were often held. It was no longer used for sports open to the public – the “real” sports, which all involved boys. Those were played in the new, well-lit bright and shiny gym. (The really old gym was said to be in the basement of the school, beneath the banks of lockers. Access was through trap doors that only the most adventurous among us dared to breach. I was not at all adventurous.)

One fateful day, my 7^th grade PE classmates and I, all decked out in our onesies, entered the old gym to find the volleyball net stretched only a couple of inches above the floor. Our teacher told us we were to play volleyball, but using a different ball. She brought out the medicine ball, a huge, approximately 15 pound, not quite spherical object introduced to “health regimes” by none other than Hippocrates. I wonder now whether our PE teacher thought it would be hilarious to watch us try to play.

I don’t remember much after her brief introduction because on an early volley the ball hit me directly in the face. Our culture’s treatment of children has changed dramatically since the 1960s, so it’s hard to believe, but I came to in the locker room, completely alone, still in my onesie and late for English class.