It’s easy to dunk on social conservative J.D. Vance—a bad pick for Trump, as opposed to Glenn Youngkin—but mocking the no-longer-hillbilly for wearing a shirt while swimming, as loads did after pictures surfaced last week, is stupid. As someone’s who’s very fair-skinned, an old(er) white man, the shirt made sense to me. Two of my older brothers also don bathing “costumes” while in the pool, and for good reason: both have had, collectively, thousands of pre-cancerous splotches removed from their forehead, nose, ears, stomach and arms in the past 10 years (as did my mom in the late-1970s), a result, undoubtedly of growing up in the 1950s and 60s, where our family had the choice of half a dozen public beaches near our house in Huntington. No one wore sunscreen, me included, even though all seven of us got nasty sunburns on the first warm day in April. My dad had some common sense, limiting his time in the water to 20 minutes after work, remembering when he conked out on a beach in Massachusetts at 17 and wound up in the hospital with severe burns. My wife and kids are fair, though the latter were completely lathered in the 1990s before engaging in aquatic activities.
My worst sunburn came in the summer of ’74, in Huntington to visit friends, and after a raucous night of mixing beer, apple wine, joint after joint, culminating in 15 of us skinny-dipping in a luxurious pool of a family on vacation, I was really, really worse for wear the next day. Stupidly, I agreed to go on a boating spin the following morning in Huntington Harbor, and with no hair-of-the-dog (I’m still pissed Rich Hoblock didn’t have a cooler on his small vessel) I fell asleep and woke up as red as a caricature of a 1930s commie. After two days, back in Baltimore, I was shedding so much skin I felt like a—benevolent—snake.
I got a dose of that last week when my wife Melissa and I spent three hours traipsing around downtown Baltimore—which is increasingly decrepit, a noisy zone that’s nearly bereft of any retail establishments, with construction workers, some exceedingly ornery, pounding on jackhammers and motorists zooming around at will. Never mind pedestrians! Earlier this summer, in the same nexus, we’d seen an object at a dusty junk shop that we agreed would be an apt present for our son Nicky’s birthday in October. Naturally, we didn’t jot down the address, and so on this unseasonably hot September afternoon we hoofed it from street to street, down every alley, getting lost in the maze of clogged one-way arteries, tripping over chopped-up sidewalks and becoming rather puckish ourselves.
A man around 30, who was halfway presentably-dressed, asked Melissa to buy him a pack of cigarettes—that’s no “Buddy, can you spare a dime” request—and she whispered to him, “Don’t fuck with me, I’m not in the mood.” We’d about given up on the cool antiquity, wanted a coffee, but couldn’t find a Starbucks, Dunkin’ or smart artisanal café. We saw a 1970s-style restaurant, figured we’d settle, but it was boarded up. Anyway, I wound up with a burn (Melissa had the sense to wear a floppy hat; raised in Los Angeles, she’s just intuitively smarter about sun protection), and blisters galore from a relatively new pair of sneakers.
The picture above, of my mom (in the pram—my grandparents came to New York from Ireland, so that use, instead of stroller, is kosher, to mix colloquialisms) and grandmother over 100 years ago in a shabby part of the Bronx, at least shows that she was covered up, although in the years to come she was a bathing beauty—pardon the objectification!—and, as noted above, paid the price with quarterly trips to the dermatologist, whose scalpel and potions weren’t covered by insurance. (Several years ago, my oldest brother, asked a doctor when it was safe for him to play tennis. The reply: “At six in the morning, if it’s raining.”
Look at the clues to figure out the year: Edward Douglass White is SCOTUS Chief Justice; Oregon is the first state to levy a gasoline tax; George Wallace is born and Andrew Carnegie dies; the Algonquin Round Table holds its first meeting; the Green Bay Packers are founded by Curly Lambeau; Felix the Cat makes his first appearance; Pauline Kael is born and L. Frank Baum dies; The Greatest Question is released; W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio are published; “The Alcoholic Blues,” by the Louisiana Five is a hit record; Jack Dempsey defeats Jess Willard to win World Heavyweight Championship; and Firmin Lambot wins the Tour de France.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023