Swell: One of High Social Standing or One Fashionably Dressed
Living around a teenager day after day, has prompted me to write about teenagers this week. Not just the modern cool, sweet, awesome 1985 teenager. I am also talking about the swell teenagers of the forties and fifties.
Last week, “Trixie” and one of her live-in weekend house guests, (you know the other half of the teenager pair that is seen most often on the weekends, in the kitchen looking for something.to eat). convinced me to crack open my Mom’s old trunk that has been sitting around gathering dust for the past thirty or forty years. In this old trunk we found the pictures of my high school classmates. I had forgotten how much fun it is to look at the pictures of the people who were so swell way back when. Not only was it swell to look at the old pictures, it was swell to read the little words of wisdom that everyone had written on the back of those swell pictures.
The first thing I noticed when I looked at those old yellow photos from Link’s Studio in Longmont was…teenagers in the forties and fifties looked a lot older than the teenagers do now. Girls had flat hair, red lipstick and bangs across their foreheads. Boys had white sidewall haircuts, white shirts, neckties and suit coats. It was very obvious that eye-make up and T-shirts were not the “IN” thing for the forties and fifties teenagers. We all still looked like our mother dressed us to have our picture taken. Things sure have changed in-the appearance department since that time. “Trixie” and her friends walk out of the closed door quarters that they refer to as “my room” with hot pink paisley cropped pants, light pink tank top, black sweater, hot pink shoes, and pearls. With rainbows painted above their eyelids. It is no wonder that today’s teenage girls lock themselves in the bathroom for a minimum of two hours everyday…great works of art can not be created in a matter of a mere fifteen minutes. Maybe someday someone will market a paint-by-number make-up kit as a time saving device for teenage girls. It certainly didn’t take us old time teenage girls two hours to put on red lipstick. roll our white bobby socks down to our saddle shoes and fluff our bangs.
While reading the back of the pictures, it brought back memories of the slang that the teens used in the “Good ole days”. Now the teens “in” words are cool, hot, sweet and a lot of others that we old Mom’s haven’t heard. In the forties and fifties the “in” word was swell”. Everyone we know was a “swell kid’” with a “swell personality”. The sophisticated teens of the forties and fifties also had cornered the market on clever. On the back of one of the pictures it said…“To a swell gal, with a swell-personality. If you want to get rid of mice pin this up and they’ll drop dead on the spot”. Now that’s a clever bit of swell advise.
So if you have nothing to do on these cold wintery days that are upon us, might I suggest that you dig out your old high school chums pictures or your high school annual. You will find out things about yourself that you have completely forgotten about. Seems to me by reading all the things that they said about me, my high school years must have been swell. I Just wonder…If my Mom and Dad thought they were swell.
