Mammaries Are Made of This

Daily Pundit: August 27, 2025

This blather from Noem is about as precise in its platitudes as a transcript of the Koran written on lime Jello with the head of a dead flounder dipped in squid ink. “People want things to be the way they used to be, permanently.”

You don’t say. Actually, you don’t say quite a lot that might be useful. Something like, “Really? Which people? Where? And when did that elusive “used to be” actually occur for them?

What is “used to be” for Generation Alpha, just now moving into their teens? Or Gen Zoomer, which seems to believe that anything prior to about 1990 is history as ancient as the Dead Sea Scrolls - not they they would have any clue what those are, either. Or Gen Millennial, beginning to finally boot out their GenX and Boomer forebears, and assume All the Power? Was their childhood “the way it used to be?”

Well, I’m a Boomer, and an early stage one at that. Not one of those fake “statistical Boomers,” whose status is designated by a formulaic dating system, but have no working memory of, or claim to have participated in, (in any meaningful sense, at least) the decade of the 1960s which was the crucible of true Boomer culture. If you were too young to have had any real experience of Sex! Drugs! Rock and Roll!, you are maybe technically a Boomer, but not really the genuine article. Even more telling, if you were born in 1955, not only do you have little investment in the Sixties, you have no real deep lived experience in the 1950s, the halcyon decade that shaped Boomer culture as surely as did the 1960s.

As I say, I’m an early stage Boomer, which the less blessed generations that followed might liken to early stage cancer, but whatever. I don’t care what they think, because they don’t actually know enough to get all judgy on the matter.

I was born in Muncie, Indiana in 1946, which means my very earliest memories involved victory gardens, my mom canning produce on a two-burner open gas stove in the basement, (which I would later use to melt lead - don’t ask) and wringing out “the warsh” with a motorized “mangle” on her state of the art Maytag washing machine. I was terrified of that mangle (an alternate term for wringer), because I was certain it would first crush my fingers, then my hand, and eventually my entire arm! Yeah, I was a pretty dour kid even then.

Washing day, generally Monday, as I recall, took up most of the morning. First you put in a load of clothes - always separating whites from coloreds, as God intended, and saving the really dirty stuff (grease and ground in grime) for a final load. You used the same water for all.

As each load finished - anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, depending on the dirt level, you turned off the washer agitator, and carefully fed the wet but now clean clothes (by which I mean really clean - I’ve never seen a modern fully auto washing machine that got clothes anywhere near as spotless, and in a lot less washing time, as that early Maytag) one by one through the wringer, from whence they dropped into a separate basket or rinsing sink. Our washer abutted a pair of such sinks, so you swished the mangled but still somewhat soapy clothing in the first tub, then ran it through the mangle into the second tub. A third mangling ended the actual laundering process, and a basket of great smelling clean clothes was ready to haul upstairs and out to the back yard to hang on the clothes line (with wooden clothes pins actually strong enough to secure them) to dry in the wind and the sun (in theory, at least, but we’re talking Indiana here, so windy, sunny days were by no means guaranteed).

It might seem odd that my earliest memories focused on the Monday laundry ritual, but I was four or five, and cherished the illusion that my little contributions to the process - swish-rinsing with something that looked a lot like a dwarf canoe paddle - and hauling the baskets up to the back yard gave me the idea that I was a crucial cog in a Very Important Family Task. If mom didn’t do the wash on Monday (with my necessary assistance), where would I find clean underpants? And that, I’d been told quite stringently, was of the highest importance, because if I got run over by a car, I didn’t want to die in stale underwear. All little kids worried about that, at least the ones I knew did. There might have been some who didn’t care about the condition of their boxers, (for the guys), or their frilly, girly underbloomers, (for the girls) but we didn’t mix with those types.

In fact, clean undies were almost as important as the paramount warning we began to receive as soon as we were old enough to comprehend it: Never take candy from strangers, especially strangers in automobiles who might try to tempt you into their conveyances and then haul you away to do…well, we had no idea what that might be, but we were told it would probably be horrible.

I remember one time when I was six or seven - early in my grade school years, at any rate - and some old guy ( to me - actually, looking back, he might still have been in his teens, but no matter, ancient enough) in a car while I was standing on a street corner conscientiously looking both ways before crossing, (another maxima dicta) stopped at the sign, then looked over at me - I was probably regarding him with a death stare - waved, and said, “Hi, kid! What’s your name?”

I screamed and ran the entire six blocks back home where, in sudden tears of relief at not suffering a fate worse than, well, I didn’t know what it would be worse than. I was closely questioned about this by my mom, and a couple of hours later by my dad, who then got on the phone, (four family party line, natch) and within a half hour or so, two cops showed up at our front door, and they heard my third retelling of my horrifying experience.

One cop told me I was a very brave boy, that I had done exactly the right thing, and the other one said they’d keep an eye out for the miscreant and not to worry about it. Of course I worried about it, and was somewhat jumpy for the next month. And so began young Master Quick’s life of derring-do. It was years before I fully understood what my parents were so worried about when it came to candy, strangers, and their vehicles.

Still, it was the Fifties in a small, utterly average American midwestern city, and there really wasn’t much to be afraid of, and so we were mostly fearless, as only children can be. “Go outside and play!” remained a byword of harried mothers, along with, “But be home in time for dinner. Well, supper. During the week the mid-day meal was lunch, but on Sunday after church it was dinner. Evening meals were supper all the way through.

Somewhere around third or fourth grade I began to develop a rudimentary fashion sense. Prior to that, I put on whatever my mom provided without a second thought. But then a couple of kids showed up to school wearing “pegged” jeans, which were pretty much Wranglers, (Levis, like Coors, had yet top cross the Mississippi) with the legs re-seamed to make them close to skin-tight. I begged my mom to alter my own jeans like that, but she refused. So I came up with an alternative that involved wrapping the legs of the jeans tightly around by calves, then folding the bottoms into a tight cuff at my ankles to hold everything in place - although sometimes some concealed safety pins were required. Was that the first instance of skinny jeans for men? Probably not, but it was the first that I remember.

Here’s what life was like for me and my pals back then. We walked to school, in my case only a handful of blocks away, walked home for lunch, then repeated the process ending up with supper. I don’t remember ever being given any homework through my entire grade school career, and very little thereafter until I went off to boarding school at the age of fifteen.

“Go out and play,” would follow shortly after getting home from school, followed by the “But be home for dinner.” Dad would also arrive in time for dinner, carefully hang his meticulously maintained fedora on the hall tree by the front door, remove his tie and suit coat, unbutton the top button on his shirt, and be ready, and properly attired, for his evening. He and mom would talk about stuff in which I was totally uninterested, and my only contribution was to respond to the inevitable question, “What did you do in school today?” My answer was always the same. “Boring stuff.” And for several years, that seemed sufficient.

I was, by the way, truly bored blind by school. My mom taught me to read at home, and by the time I entered kindergarten I was devouring the thrilling adventures of the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, and Tarzan, from books I found at my grandma’s house, tomes which my dad and uncle had also read decades before me. My classmates, on the other hand, were still grappling with Jack, Jill, and hills. And Spot the dog. Life was slower then, at least on the micro, everyday level, no matter what sort of upheavals might be going on at the macro level of the greater world. Although certain aspects of that did impinge.

We had no real idea what “the commies” were, except they were very, very bad, and for some reason they wanted to murder us all with the atomic bombs. Later on, I began to have occasional nightmare, always the same, when I would be awakened in the night by a growing light blazing through my bedroom window, and then a great noise would sweep me away and I would bolt up, yelling wordlessly, in my bed. If I was loud enough, mom would appear in her flannel nightgown and hair curlers, sit on the side of my bed, and say soothing things. In our family, mom was in charge of soothing away nuclear nightmares. Dad thought I was something of a sissy for having the nightmares in the first place. Real boys shouldn’t be scared of atomic incineration, I guess. Although to be fair, if you were a part of the generation that lived through the most devastating war in the history of mankind, (Mongol me no Mongols, thanks all the same) the threat of imminent death at the radioactive hands of the commies perhaps did not seem as alarming as it might otherwise have been.

Speaking of Dubya Dubya Too, it sparked my first major controversy with my dad. For some reason I became obsessed with the conflict, but not the American side of it. No, I had to be fascinated by the German point of view, in particular the German Generals and the battles they waged across the length and breadth of Europe and North Africa.

I knew all the battles, even though I had to learn about them by sneaking into the upstairs part of the public library, (I was too young to be allowed up there, but I found ways). I knew about the great doomed battle of Kursk, and the gallant but eventually suicidal thrusts of von Manstein’s, von Kluge’s and Model’s thousands of panzers against the dug-in defense in depth mounted by the Reds stirred something deep inside me. So did Erwin Rommel, in a different way. Not so much my dad, though, who didn’t hesitate to make his feelings plain about the perversity of my military interests.

Luckily, my obsession with German’s military heroes faded after a few months, and I switched to an American pastime, baseball. In short order I had memorized the stats of every single player in both the American and National leagues.

In those days, Indiana had no team, so people ended up rooting for one of the Chicago teams, the Cincinnati Reds, or the Detroit Tigers. I became a rabid Tiger fan, although I never saw them play. But I followed every game on the huge console radio in our living room (we hadn’t gotten a TV yet) where I also followed the exploits of the Lone Ranger, the Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Red Skelton. My dad would leave the room when Red came on, citing certain vaguely explained “moral problems” with him. I just thought he was funny as hell, almost as much as “To the Moon, Alice” Jackie Gleason, who often showed up on the regular Jack Benny show. “Weelllll…” If you know, you know.

When we finally got a television - it had a round screen about a foot across, but it was a porthole into a new world, and I wasted no time in opening up a new front in the generational culture wars between me and my dad. He hated American Bandstand. On the other hand, he loved Your Hit Parade, which made me want to vomit. You can only hear so many weeks of some perky blond bimbo warbling “How Much Is That Doggy In the Window” without developing an overwhelming urge to pitch that damned doggy right out the window.

Okay, this is starting to show signs of turning into an epic, so we’ll return tomorrow, same time, same station, for more of my scattershot mammaries of ancient dead times in America at the twilight of one era and the dawn of a new, and much less comfortable one.

See you then!