The other day I realized summer is just about over and it’s time to put my shorts away and get out my jeans. When I reached in the drawer to get them I was suddenly overcome with memories of the days when I was a Stanford “rough.”
You don’t hear much about Stanford roughs these days. I suspect that’s because there aren’t many left. Those who remain are, like me, in their 80s. Roughs go back to the days of the Depression when tuition was—well, you don’t really want to know how little it was—when nearly all students were poor and the only costume many males could afford was jeans.
Jeans seemed fitting for the Farm, then surrounded by open, grassy fields on three sides. Jeans didn’t cost much, they didn’t require much washing, and no one really cared if they looked dirty.
Every so often, we’d put them in a box and mail them home to Mom to have them washed and returned. (There were no washing machines in dorms in those days.) Jeans helped many an undergraduate male think he had come of age: he was tough enough to get through Stanford no matter what his finances, and he looked, well, male.
Some may even have thought jeans made female hearts flutter.
Stanford women of the time, if I remember correctly, wore more formal attire. They wore saddle shoes, long skirts, blouses and sweaters. Males may have worn white shirts, but work shirts were more appropriate to the image of the rough, as were work shoes, heavy boots or shoes that would last a long time.
And no one, absolutely no one, wore shorts.
The image of the rough was already firmly imbedded in campus life when I arrived at Stanford in 1940, and it lasted until the roughs went off to war. It never really returned. Veterans had a surplus of khakis and beige cotton uniform trousers, and those became the standard male costume after the war. Khakis lasted about as long as did the veterans. With their graduation in the late 1940s, costumes changed again. I suppose they’ve changed with each succeeding generation.
I’m not sure what the current fashion is on campus, but my impression is that outside influences continue to make themselves felt on what becomes everyday gear on the Farm. In the 1960s, the time of troubles at Stanford and on a lot of other campuses around the country, long hair and odd clothes combinations could be seen. But the males of the ’60s were not eager to be known as roughs. Nor, I suspect, are the Stanford men of today. They may even wear shorts.
