FITTIN’ IN, BUT NOT FITTIN’ NOW

When I was growing up in my very small high school, most girls were in the Pep Club, which was the group that sat together at basketball games to yell out the cheers along with the cheerleaders.  We practiced after school, and even took a couple of prizes at basketball tournaments.

“S-U-C-C-E-S-S! That’s the way we spell SUCCESS!”

Because the school colors were black and gold, we had these…things…to wear sometimes, to make our group look like one solid color.  They just covered the top half of us, our shoulders-with our heads sticking out.  Some wore black, some wore gold, in patterns.

The seniors sat in the lowest row, the juniors in the next higher row, and so on up.

But when we weren’t wearing these shoulder covers, some senior girls wore something else to the basketball games:  their senior jumper.  Made out of corduroy, we employed someone (or did it ourselves) to personalize it for us with the names of the clubs we belonged to, etc.

I am so old I can’t remember if I wore mine with a black turtleneck sweater or a gold one.  Imagine!

Here is the front of it, where you can see that I worked in the library, helped with the concession stand for basketball, and was in a singing group called “Singing 16.”  The names of all our seniors are throughout the jumper, and names of best friends are in the hearts.


The back shows musicals, plays, and more clubs, along with another singing group called “Sweet 16” (16 girls).  My life verse is Galatians 2:20, I took pigs to the 4-H fair for six years, and the pink toilet paper…well, I’ll have to tell that story another time!


I don’t know if this was a tradition throughout our nation or not; I’ve never heard anyone else mention having something like this-except my mom.  When I was a child, I loved getting into her drawer and looking at her senior skirt from 1952.  I could look at all the clubs she was in, and feel its softness. Because THEY wore theirs almost every day during their senior year of high school!