A well-meaning friend gifted me a coffee mug on my 40th birthday … a few years ago.
Black in color, it reflected the American mindset of 40 as the midnight hour of aging when birthday celebrations turn into pumpkins. I still have the mug. Every so often, I glance at it once more, and the message that foreshadowed coming years.
“After 40, it’s patch, patch, patch.”
How funny, we all laughed at the party. These “Golden Years” were still a distant vision when we celebrated as I announced my intentions to remain “thirty-nine and holding.” A motto, which I also used to think was funny when my optimistic Uncle Freddie joked about it years ago.
While sitting in the waiting room of the hospital imaging area last week, leisurely looking at dog-eared magazines dating back to just after Y2K, the mug’s message returned to me in a vision. One with memories of household items routinely patched when I was a kid. Things that no one patches anymore. At least, not that I know of.
Things like blue jeans. With cuffs turned up a couple of rolls. Extra leg length allowing for growing boys because buying new jeans didn’t happen frequently. Usually once a year. At back to school time. And when they were finally tossed, the dark color was long gone, the cuffs completely unrolled, and the knees patched. Sometimes more than once.
Iron-on blue jean patches were a staple of every mother’s mending basket back then. New patches stood out like a bandaged sore thumb on worn out jeans. Something that no doubt promoted the popularity of decorative patches.
I remember going to school sporting a likeness of Davy Crockett on my knees. “King of the Wild Frontier.” Other times, with Roy Rogers riding on Trigger, hat waving high above his head.
Patching clothes was not limited to blue jeans, though. Mom darned my socks. Who today even remembers the word “darning?” Or knows what it means. The domestic art of stitching up small holes in clothing by weaving thread to cleverly hide the repair was also used on my sisters’ sweaters. Extracting extra miles from everything we wore.
Even down to our shoes. Making them good for more miles. When every small town had a “shoe shop” where the rich smell of leather greeted customers at the door. Glynn’s Shoe Shop on the south side of the square in Mount Pleasant extended the life of footwear with new soles and heels and a complimentary shine, all at a fraction of the cost of new shoes.
New heels and soles were still available at Center’s shoe shop when I located here during Gerald Ford’s presidency. It was just off the square on Logansport Street .
Another shoe shop service was cutting a couple of inches off the ends of leather belts and punching extra holes to extend their life of keeping pants up on young boys as they sprouted into lanky teenagers.
Washing machines, refrigerators, and other appliances were once repaired when they stopped working. Now, we go shopping for a new one when the old one hiccups. A popular advertising slogan touting quality back in the day proclaimed the Maytag repairman to be “the loneliest man in town.” Today, simply finding a service technician to repair any brand in some communities is a lonely search.
Patching practices included the family car. Repaired tire tubes for flat tires on Dad’s Studebaker Starlight Coupe. A box of Camel brand inner tube patches was ever-present in his toolbox. Like most men then, he did minor repairs on the family’s only car. When automobile maintenance required little more than common sense and logic.
Today’s riding lawnmower is a more complex machine than a 1950 Studebaker. And cost as much as three or four new Studebaker cars did then.
Household repairs were creative by today’s standards. My grandfather patched Granny’s pots and pans utilizing a nut and bolt with flat washers on both sides of the hole. And I own a rocking chair on which he repaired a broken leg. I remember him repairing and patching his favorite rocker when the US flag had 48 stars.
Previous generations were adept at patching and repairing to make household items and money last longer. One repair shop I remember displayed a sign claiming, “We can repair anything but a broken heart.”
“Mr. Aldridge,” a voice interrupted my daydreaming. It was an invitation to join the technician for an MRI party in my honor down the hall. A party where there will be less laughing than was heard at my 40th birthday.
By the time you’re reading this, I likely know the test results. I should also know the options for dealing with that aching, aging shoulder. The one that’s endured everything from a 1970s motorcycle wreck to a hillside hiking spill just a couple of years ago. But it’s amazing what modern medicine can patch now.
If I’m lucky, maybe one of those Camel tube patches might even work.
—Leon Aldridge
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Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Center Light and Champion, The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche, the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.
© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2025. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.
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