When we lived in Gary, Indiana, over 30 years ago, we had a neighbor-man who was never married. He had at that time been a teacher in the Chicago School System for over 25 years. A nice enough man, it seemed. Perhaps a tad peculiar, but overall he appeared a harmless fellow. One spring Saturday we heard the lawn-mower running and casually looked out the window to see our neighbor doing lawn work. He was cutting the grass in his “whitey tighties.” Picture a bald, significantly overweight person in a white t-shirt, fat, hairy belly poking out of the bottom with a severe case of “Dunlap’s disease,” in his drooping white underwear pushing around the lawn-mower on a Saturday morning. Not only that, he had mid-calf black socks on with black dress shoes. Wish I had a picture. I got my wife and we stared in disbelief for quite sometime. What do you make of something like that?

Not to be outdone by this episode, the next week it was a bit colder. This time he had a tan trench coat on, unbuttoned in the front to reveal the exact same outfit on underneath the coat. We lived there for several more years and every time after that when he cut the grass he had on his same “whitey tighties” grass cutting outfit. Several other neighbors commented to us about that as though it was our job to do something about it. We never said a word to him about it.