PE at school

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I was rather removed from many conventions as a kid. I lived on a farm/ranch far from town. Other than doctor's visits and clothes shopping and farm stores, I didn't go into town much for anything other than school. In the summer, I would be out working on the farm and rarely saw anyone my own age except at church on Sundays.

So when the first day of PE was announced, we were told that we needed to wear shorts. I had never heard of gym shorts and had never seen any. So I found an old pair of 50's plaid shorts (not gym shorts) that fit and wore them. Something like this:



but more garish.

So it was the first day of PE and we came out, me wearing those shorts. The other boys looked at me rather pitifully, but some of the girls in their own PE class a couple of hundred feet away saw me and it really cracked them up.

Getting changed naked in front of your peers, getting screamed at by an Austrian sports coach in a thick German accent, running marathons in sweltering heat and getting picked last in team sports.

How I miss school PE...

Spare a thought for 1970s Australian school boys, we had to wear "bikini" swimming trunks...

Ours weren't much different.

Our gym shorts were also the old style gym shorts that are now very much out of style for men.



I haven't worn them in maybe 20 years and so I still have about 20 or 30 of them sitting around. I used to be able to get them at a sporting goods store for about $3 to $4 each.

When I move back out to the farm, I'll probably start wearing them again while working outside since there won't be any need to carry keys and billfolds around.

I was in a very small school. We had a choice of PE or sports, but I was never an athlete. Plus, if you were an athlete, you had to stay another couple of hours and work out, but I had to catch the school bus for the ride home (about forty five minutes).

So we usually only had about 10 or 15 kids for PE.

One year we played baseball a lot. It turned out that I could hit the ball pretty far and so when I came to bat, the kids on the other team would back up so it wouldn't go over their head. That felt pretty good.

The only sport I got involved in was my senior year in high school when I was on the golf team. That qualified me for a letter jacket, but I didn't see much need to get one.