Calvin Trillin, The Ivy Look (and GHW Bush)

When I was home during a Yale break, my father would usually insist on taking me for a clothes-shopping expedition that I look back on as something close to a parody of the cultural tensions in store for a Midwestern family that sent a son to a place as removed from our experience as Yale then was. Even if I had gone to the University of Missouri, shopping for clothes would have presented a problem for us. My father was a strong believer in highly shined shoes and carefully folded pocket handkerchiefs; by his standards, I was only sporadically presentable. The outings were doubly complicated by the fact that what was to be called the Ivy Look had not yet made its way across the country, so the clothes for sale in even the best stores in Kansas City simply didn't look much like what people at Yale wore. Somehow, I couldn't get this across to my father. As we drove home from Wolff Brothers and Jack Henry Men's Clothing, having bagged only a single shirt or a pair of trousers I knew I'd never wear, the silence in the car was less comfortable than the silence had been in those drives to the city market.

Source:

Messages From My Father: A Memior, Calvin Trillin, 1997

Alice and Calvin Trillin on their wedding day, 1965 (NY Times)

Bush's Munchies A Preppie Journal: Up From Pork Rinds

By Calvin Trillin

I realize that I was expected to take a stand on pork rinds right away. Last month, when George Bush mentioned his love of pork rinds as an example of why he has been unfairly typed as a rich Eastern preppy, it was my role as a columnist to say something like, "That does it: Anybody who eats pork rinds is a regular guy." Or, if I had remained unimpressed, "Pork rinds served in silver bowls that have been in the family for generations don't count."

Before I discussed the matter, though, I wanted to consult an old college friend of mine who's a rich Eastern preppy. I wanted to find out whether a rich Eastern preppy who was caught eating pork rinds would lose his certification. But my friend, Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, was away on a yachting trip.

I might as well admit that Thatcher Baxter Hatcher is not the only rich Eastern preppy I number among my acquaintances, even though I'm a regular guy who enjoys nothing more than a package of barbecue-flavored corn-nuts washed down with a six-pack of Grain Belt. I know several rich Eastern preppies, all of whom have three last names, and the sort of nickname you might give a hound dog - Brewster Barton (Pudge) Brewton, say, or Thorton Horton (Mutt) Houghton.

But I decided to wait for Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, because he's a particularly authentic example of the type. He has three last names, of course, and a nickname (Tush). He wears pink button-down shirts that he bought in 1954. He talks with his teeth clenched, in an accent most scholars of the American vernacular refer to as Locust Valley Lockjaw. He plays a game called court tennis, which has rules so complicated that you can understand them only if your grandfather understood them.

A long time ago, Thatcher Baxter Hatcher took me to some parties at the fancy clubs he belongs to. I sure didn't see any pork rinds. I would have noticed if there had been any, because, considering the food I was given at those parties, I would have been grateful for the appearance of a package of stale Cheese Doodles.

I discovered that people in a truly fancy club eat food that has no taste at all; I later realized that they associate spices and garlic and schmaltz with just the sort of people they're trying to keep out of the club.

Anyway, as soon as Tush Hatcher returned from his yachting trip, I dropped by to see him at his place in Long Island. He brought a tray of drinks out to the porch, and I was astonished to see that what he brought for us to nibble on was a bowl full of Doritos jalapeno-flavored taco chips.

"I didn't know you folks ate this sort of thing, Tush," I said.

"They're my favorites, except maybe for smokey bacon-flavored potato chips," he said.

"Well, I'm amazed, Tush," I said. "I just assumed that what you would have with a drink was some of those finger sandwiches that taste like balsa wood."

"Then you remember the food at our clubs," Thatcher Baxter Hatcher said. ''Well, boarding school food is even worse, so all of us get hooked on packaged junk. We all ate so many of those little packages of crackers with peanut butter that some people think that's why we can't separate our teeth when we talk."

"I never knew, Tush," I said.

"Beer nuts," he said. "Beef jerky. Corn chips. Cheese-flavored popcorn."

"But surely not pork rinds," I said.

"Oh, sure," Tush said. "Remember Parsons Peyton Perkins?"

"Pork Perkins?"

"Exactly. How do you think he got that name? Eating pork rinds at the St. Paul's School."

I guess George Bush is going to have to come up with something else to eat if he wants to get de-typed. I suggest that he reveal an addiction to Frito Pie, a Texas specialty that's made by pouring chili - canned chili in the absolutely authentic version - into a package of Fritos and shaking vigorously. I'm sure it's safe. Thatcher Baxter Hatcher had never heard of Frito Pie, and when I described it to him he just shuddered.

Source:

Bush's Munchies A Preppie Journal: Up From Pork Rinds (August 18, 1988)

"shoe"

"In the early 50s, friends of mine and I picked up from somewhere a bit of verbal play which involved categorizing almost everything and everyone as shoe or unshoe. As new alumni of an Ivy League university, we obviously considered being shoe a compliment.

I remember that in clothing, button-down shirts, striped ties and gray flannel suits with narrow lapels were shoe. Anything less conservative was unshoe. The Ivy League and kindred schools were by definition shoe. State colleges were definitely un. Professional careers were generally shoer than business ones. Shoe people were confident and casual, unshoes insecure and overeager.

We grew up and less smug, of course, but for a short time, with our whole adult lives before us, we felt unafraid, undefeatable, immortal and very, very shoe.

Winifred G. Newman
New York, New York

Source: "Gimme the Ol' White Shoe" from No Uncertain Terms, William Safire, 2003

...

"When Denny and I were at Yale, one of the adjectives in common use was "shoe" - presumably derived from "white shoe." I still see "white shoe" in print now and then, used to mean patrician or old-money WASP: the Times has referred to, say, Morgan Stanley as a white-shoe investment-banking firm. "Shoe" meant more to us than "white shoe." It could indeed indicate a background of boarding schools and trust funds - something like what "preppy" came to mean a decade later, although without the scorn that term carried with it. It could mean dress or behavior that reflected such a background, even if the person involved came from entirely different circumstances. It could also mean something approaching cool or suave."

"I've been told that a few years before we arrived the term "white shoe," which we didn't use, was often heard at Yale, along with "brown shoe" and "black shoe." The white shoe people were, of course, shoe. Apparently, the brown shoe people were the bright student council presidents from white middle-class high schools who had been selected by Yale to be buffed up a bit and sent out into the world, prepared to prove their high-school classmates right in voting them among the most likely to succeed. Black shoe people were beyond the pale...They were called weenies."

Source:

Remembering Denny, Calvin Trillin, 2005
...

At Yale there is a system for pigeonholing the members of the college community which is based on the word “shoe.” Shoe bears some relation to the word chic, and when you say that a fellow is “terribly shoe” you mean that he is a crumb in the upper social crust of the college, though a more kindly metaphor might occur to you. You talk of a “shoe” fraternity or a “shoe” crowd, for example, but you can also describe a man’s manner of dress as “shoe.” The term derives, as you probably know, from the dirty white bucks which are the standard collegiate footwear (you can buy new ones already dirty in downtown New York to save you the embarrassment of looking as though you hadn’t had them all your life), but the system of pigeonholing by footwear does not stop there. It encompasses the entire community under the terms White Shoe, Brown Shoe, and Black Shoe

White Shoe applies primarily to the socially ambitious and the socially smug types who affect a good deal of worldly sophistication, run, ride and drink in rather small cliques, and look in on the second halves of football games when the weather is good. They try so hard not to be collegiate in the rah-rah (or, as they would say, “Midwestern”) sense of the term that they are probably the most “collegiate” types now in college. Brown Shoe applies to the general run of those who are socially acceptable but above thinking that it really makes any difference. They constitute the general middle class of the college that overlaps somewhat into both White and Black; their ambition is to be the average citizen raised to the highest power compatible with being a cultured and relaxed gentleman. Black Shoe implies some of the attributes of the “grind” and is applied to those who participate a little too eagerly in seminars, literary teas, and discussions of life, literature, and the pursuit of philosophy. They are in college because they consider it primarily an educational and not a social institution; they mind their own business rather intensely, are probably in love with the girls they will eventually marry, and in many respects appear a good deal more sophisticated and  grown up than the White Shoe crowd.

The shoe categories obviously allow for a great deal more precise definition than this, as I have no doubt the first Yale man you meet will tell you. But pleasant as it is under the elms of New Haven, let us move into other groves of academe. We will have to take our “shoes” with us, however; the terminology may not be the same in all the colleges, but we will keep finding men whom the shoes will fit.

Source: Esquire - September 1953 "How Shoe Can You Get", Russell Lyne
...

A friend of mine was at Brown in the 1950s. At the time the phrase for being cool was "shoe."

Yes, "shoe." And the "shoe" guys wore brown or burgundy penny loafers.

Only the Slide Rule Brigade wore black loafers, according to Val. They might have been genuises, but they were not "shoe."

Source: Andy's Trad Forum