When I was a teenager, I was acutely aware of the intense peer pressures that teenagers suffer. I realized that those peer pressures were dangerous to my independence of thought, and therefore resolved to resist them. But I didn’t want to do it in a pointless, merely symbolic fashion, such as some weird haircut; it had to be something practical. I finally hit upon the right approach in my sophomore year in high school: I was often cold at school so I tucked my pants into my socks. This kept my lower legs a big warmer.
It looked absolutely ridiculous, and of course I was made the object of much derision for it. I didn’t mind; the deriders were the stupider types anyway. It was hard, of course, being belittled in front of a lot of other teens, but I knew that the ability to stand up to social pressure would be important. Of late I have resumed the practice when I venture out into the weeds during tick season — it stops the ticks.
Later on, when I had a paper route, I had to deliver papers on Sunday mornings, and sometimes it was very cold. I didn’t have a warm hat, so I improvised: I wore two pairs of underwear over my head, with my eyes peering out through the leg holes. That was a lot warmer. I wouldn’t have done that during the day, but I was willing to take the chance of being seen by somebody at 4:00 AM on a Sunday morning.
In my junior year, I started wearing a slide rule on my belt. Now, that wasn’t so weird; although I don’t recall any other people wearing slide rules in high school, the fact that slide rules came with a belt holster certainly implied that it was an acceptable practice. No, I never wore a pocket protector. I did, however, like to write homework papers using a shocking pink felt tip pen.
I abandoned cursive writing in high school and took to hand printing. I could write in very tiny letters. I still have a reference book I got from my dad, entitled “Handbook of Mathematical Tables and Formulas”. This was an important reference book back then; it provided all sorts of useful tables: logarithms, trig functions, logs of trig functions, values of various probability distributions, and so on. Back then, we didn’t have calculators to do this kind of thing, so we had to look up everything and write out the calculations longhand — unless you were calculating to only two significant figures, in which case you could use your slide rule. Here’s a little card I prepared with all the critical numbers that a physics-astronomy student would want to have handy:
You’ll notice that I crossed my sevens in the European style, which I deemed superior to the American seven. I also replaced the loop-the-loop eight I had been taught with the stacked-loop eight, which again I thought was easier to read.
When I started riding a motorcycle, I of course wore a helmet, but I found that the helmet did not keep my head warm, so I created a special hat that I wore under my helmet. Again, it looked rather odd, but I didn’t care.
I’ll have dig out my old sliderule and post a photo of it here.