“I just wonder if old Levi ever imagined their longevity and popularity”
A COLUMN By Kathryn Ross
I get amused when I see a white-haired woman wearing blue jeans at the grocery store or on the street. Then I realized that that elderly woman was two years behind me in high school.
I read recently on my news feed that it was Levi Strauss’s 196th birthday. Wouldn’t he be surprised to learn that more likely than not, most of the over 333 million Americans have worn blue jeans and probably have one or two pair in their closets right now.
Strauss was the first to manufacture blue jeans. In 2022 a pair of Levi jeans from the 1880s sold at auction for more than $87,000. The jeans had been found in a mine shaft and were dirty and torn.
I started wearing jeans at a very young age. There’s a photo of me as a toddler with my grandmother sitting on her stoop of one of those cabins that were behind the old gas station at the corner of South Main Street and Dyke Street. The area is now the ARVOS parking lot. In the photo Gram is wearing jeans and I’m wearing toddler overalls.
From overalls I grew into regular jeans and by the time I was a teenager, I was wearing Wranglers. Wranglers were less expensive than Levi’s and within my parent’s price range. Besides, I was a fast-growing girl and the jeans they bought me in summer were high water by Christmas.
While jeans were very popular, we girls weren’t allowed to wear pants in school. When I graduated high school we still weren’t allowed to wear pants. I think that quickly changed when our skirts got too short. I was in that generation who had to kneel next to our lockers so the principal could see that our skirts weren’t too short. Of course, we just rolled them back up when the principal went back to his office.
When I got to Corning Community College, I discovered the Army/Navy store and bell-bottom jeans. Today I’m just so amazed at the popularity of jeans and that people of all ages wear them, live in them and dress up in them. I just wonder if old Levi ever imagined their longevity and popularity.
Another thing that I find interesting is when I go to car shows like the ones in Bolivar and Belmont or the huge AOH Park ‘N the Park show in September and see all my old vehicles: my ‘68 hardtop Mustang and my Jeep Wrangler and once in a while my ‘70 Mercury Cougar. I wish I still had those cars. The Cougar was my favorite with hideaway headlights, sequential taillights and its longer wheelbase. The Mustang was a cool car right up until I totaled it outside the Shangri-La. The Jeep was the best with its manual 5-speed, removable top and Jaguar clutch. It was just a little cold in the winter, but it was the first of many Jeeps to come. From there I went on to drive four different Cherokees.
Reminiscing about jeans and cars leads me to think about pizza, the other staple of my life. Of course I could be hungry. For as long as I can remember pizza has been my main comfort food. Mom taught me to make pizza using hot roll mix, but I can still taste the sauce and the stringy mozzarella cheese from when mom, dad and my sister and I went to the original Ponce de Leon Pizzeria in downtown Hornell. It was before that section of the village was torn down to make way for the highway.
When I wasn’t making pizza from Chef Boyardee, I was buying it already made from Pickups on Main Street. They had the best pepperoni. It was a few years before Peter Giovanniello established the first Pizza King on the south side of Main Street and long before they moved across the street to the present location.
The old pizza parlors are gone now, except for PK, and my Mustang and Cougar are classic cars seen only in car shows, but I’m still wearing my blue jeans. I guess, like the song says I and a lot of others are, “Forever in blue jeans.”
