Chapter 1 - Maundering

Maunder. A good, old-fashioned word. You don't hear it much these days unless it's in the cliché about old people maundering on about the past. Since I just hit my 70th birthday, I guess I'm licensed to maunder, so here goes.

This is going to be part fiction, part autobiography, part speculation, part rant, and certainly part bullshit. It's the story of what I refer to as my 'stealth transition.' I was born in 1950, when World War II was still fresh on everyone's minds. TV was brand new, electronics ran on vacuum tubes and transistors were just coming out of the laboratory, cars had fins, men were the providers and women stayed at home and cooked and cleaned house.

At least that was what many people wanted to believe. They tried to ignore the thousands of women who worked in factories producing the guns and ships and planes that the men were using to fight the war. Women were welders and plumbers and pilots and just about anything else, and they got booted out the second the armistice was signed.

My Mom was one of those women, and my dad, while he never was in the army because he was working in those war material plants, got to know a lot of those working women and he had his consciousness got raised, to use an anachronistic phrase. You'll see just how important that was to my life as we go on.

Despite being old as dirt, at least according to my smartass son, I do enjoy using a computer and can do pretty well at it. The other day an image popped up on a Google search that took me back to my teenage years, but before I reveal just what I saw, let me remind you of what life was like when I was about thirteen years old.

We had one black-and-white TV in our living room. The screen was maybe twelve inches across. Next to it sat a table with our one and only black, corded, rotary telephone. It was a party line, so you had to listen to the coded ring before you picked it up to talk. (Well, unless you wanted to listen in to the neighbors for the latest gossip.) Regular news came in two ways - the wooden, tube-filled radio or the newspapers. That's right - newspapers in the plural - one in the morning and one in the evening.

Of course there were magazines. Mom got The Ladies Home Journal and dad got Popular Mechanics. The family got Look and Life, filled with real pictures, some even in color. I really don't remember when I discovered Dad's stash of Playboy in the garage, but they surely did have some fine color pictures in there. They did leave some mystery about the female body at that time in my life; they had yet to break the pubic hair barrier and there was always something strategically in front of the place where her legs joined the body. Me and my buddies were always wondering what a real woman would do if there were a staple on her body at that particular place. We got pretty silly about it.

Naturally, I couldn't reveal I had found them, but if you wanted to see women with at least some of their clothes off there was one place you could look and not fear exposure. That place was the Sears Catalog. If you were lucky your family got the Montgomery Ward Catalog, too - twice the pages of women in their unmentionables. That's another interesting word, since my buddies and I mentioned those pictures a lot. And that's the image I found in my searching - a page from one of those catalogs.

Now if there's anything going to set an old man maundering, it's something meaningful from his youth. That catalog page brought back the sessions Alvin and I had ogling the women in that catalog. Well, Alvin was ogling the women. Me? I was ogling the underwear the women were wearing. Alvin talked about how you would get something like a girdle off a girl. Me? I thought about how to get a girdle on my body.

I did have one question, though. Just why did they have those little ribbons hanging down from the girdle? I couldn't figure that out and knew better than to ask!

Of course I went along with Alvin (or Justin or Herb or whoever was there that afternoon) and made the proper noises to convince my buddies that I was rarin' to go and couldn't wait to get that babe in bed. Of course I hadn't a clue about what I'd really do with a babe in a bed; sex education was something you didn't talk about in those days, either in school or at home. I was clueless.

I knew from gym class that there were a wide variety of penis shapes and sizes, and I figured out from the locker room talk the whole idea was to get your penis into the babe in the bed, but really - I had no idea just how you did that.

It was pretty obvious from the picture in the catalog that the babe didn't have anything like a penis between her legs, not with the close fitting shape of that panty girdle, but how did I get that floppy thing between my legs to go anywhere? I was still a couple of years from puberty. I was a late bloomer and, frankly, never blossomed all that much. That turned out to be a good thing in the long run but back then, giggling at women in their underwear in the garage, it seemed a tragedy.

Things got even worse when there started to be color printing in those catalogs. Black-and-white girdles fired my imagination like the rockets NASA had started sending into space. I was a Space Junkie and had a scrapbook full of clippings and pictures of the astronauts and anything to do with space, which seems pretty odd when you think of it. Here I was idolizing those super-macho dudes and letting my mind fly up into space with them and at the same time wishing I were a girl and could wear those wonderful, elastic things I saw in the catalogs.

The human mind is a wonderful thing, it is marvelously flexible, capable of doing the limbo around any inconvenient facts that enter into its confines. Which brings back something else to maunder about. Chubby Checker had a hit with The Limbo Rock around that time and I was a limbo champion. My pre-pubescent body was able to bend backwards far more easily than my more masculine friends. I still have a trophy somewhere that I won at the roller rink in a limbo contest.

How's that for championship maundering? Now where was I before I got distracted? Oh, yeah - color in catalogs.

The first thing that caught my space-addicted eye was the Heavenly Bodies tagline in the ad, quickly followed by the stunning fact that the models were wearing blue and yellow brassieres and girdles. And they had stars and moons on them! Why oh why was I born a boy? It just wasn't fair!

That ad did answer one of my questions, though. Those ribbons that had confused me in the black-and-white ad had to be the things you hooked your stockings to. Garters, I found out later. Most women were still wearing gartered stockings around that time, and there was still a strong feeling that a woman who went out in public without a girdle was the next best thing to a slut. Pantyhose were just becoming popular and may have been part of the reason that girdles lost their popularity.

I guess I have to maunder on about my family life at this point, so you can get a feel for what happened when I saw that ad. We were pretty well off, Dad sold insurance and was pretty good at it. Back then, he was a one-man operation, but he was successful enough that he expanded and had a pretty good size agency going for him at the height of his career. That, as you will see, made a big difference in my life.

As a kid, I never really had any money worries with my allowance and the occasional neighborhood chores, so not the least of my popularity with my buddies was my ability to treat them to an ice cream or a visit to the penny candy counter at the Woolworths. I had a decent stash of cash in my bottom dresser drawer as well, over fifty dollars, which before inflation was pretty impressive.

Actually, some of that money was specifically for buying clothes. When my mom went back to work, my folks decided I was old enough to select my own clothes without them, so I got a clothing allowance. Believe me, I learned how to shop for bargains in order to stretch that money. It also helped that Jimmy gave me some of his old stuff when he outgrew it. I told you I wasn't the most manly of men, but Jimmy must have gotten a shot of growth hormones instead of his vaccinations when he went to the doctor. The coach wasn't happy that Jimmy didn't give a damn about sports, he could have been half the football team all by himself. OK, so I exaggerate, but he was just enough bigger than me that I got the benefits. Too bad I couldn't cut a deal with his sister Chris…

Yeah, like that was going to happen.

Mom and dad were pretty cool. You could say that my dad was in the forefront of the transition between the whole father-brings-home-the-bacon and mother-runs-the-house ethos and the Hippie Generation. Mom was right there with him; by the time I discovered my interest in girl's clothes she was working part-time at the local Woolworths store in the fabric and ladies fashions departments.

Dad did have time for me. (I was an only child, by the way.) I was fortunate in that he wasn't into the whole macho thing, not a sports nut or anything and his 97-pound weakling son didn't bother him a bit. Which brings to mind another ad you saw on the back page of half the comic books of the era. That ad did not interest me in the slightest!

I guess you could call my folks hippies-ahead-of-their-time. They had the laid back attitude of the sixties while being in the generation before the hippies. Not quite beatniks, but perfect for me. They taught me to stand up for what I believed in, to work to get where I wanted to go and to think for myself. Sure, we had some angst-ridden teenage quarrels along the way, but we got along pretty well and we were still close until they left the planet a while back. I still think what would Dad do? or what would Mom wear? when I have a decision to make.

When I started to get interested in bras and girdles I was pretty much out-of-luck, no sister and my mother was considerably larger than me so nothing fit. I know, I tried. Now if you look on the ad, you'll see that back then the bras and garter belts went for $1.49, the girdle was a whopping $4.94. That was a total of $7.92, and even with shipping would hardly put a dent in my savings. I could actually buy that stuff and try it on!