Vigo County Historical Society
Historical Treasure Article
June 19, 1988
By Deborah Curtis Drummy
Vigo County Historical Society
Senior cords a fad of innocence
The year is 1962, the place the hallowed halls of Garfield High School. The girls are wearing raccoon-collared coats, Liz Taylor and Ben Casey blouses; the boys wear pegged pants, white socks and letter jackets.
The fads will last a few seasons, as fashions generally do. But take a look through that year’s “Benedictus,” Garfield’s yearbook, and you’ll see a more extreme fashion which reigned as tradition in area schools for at least 20 years; “Senior cords continue to be the accepted fad for the ‘big wheels,’ the seniors, as they proudly don brightly-painted senior cords, symbols of their arrival at senior status.
The year 1963 “Scarabaeus,” Gerstmeyer High School’s yearbook, offers a similar observation: “No one knows exactly when or where the idea of senior cords began, but . . the fad soon took hold at Gerstmeyer.”
A search through the 1950s and 1960s yearbooks at the Vigo County Public Library show evidence of the tradition at most other area schools, including Wiley High School, West Terre Haute High School. West Vigo High School, State Laboratory High School, Blackhawk High School, and for one year at least, Terre Haute South Vigo High School.
The 1972 South Vigo cords in the collection at the museum were donated by Gregg Reynolds. The cords appear to be the carryover of a long-held (1951-1971) tradition of Garfield senior class presidents passing on cords painted with each president’s name and year. Reynolds, who was sophomore and junior class president at Garfield during that school’s last two years, became president of South Vigo’s first senior class. His senior cords seem to be a last hurrah to Garfield tradition.
Several accounts also have been made of seniors at Purdue University wearing painted cords, and there is reason to speculate, given the tendency of high schoolers to imitate their college elders, that the tradition may have trickled down to this area via Purdue.
Talks with baby boomers from various parts of the country--Nebraska, Colorado, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island--suggest that the tradition may have been very Midwestern, perhaps even centered mostly in Indiana.
What exactly were painted cords, and what were the traditions surrounding them?
Painted cords were brightly painted corduroy skirts and trousers worn by senior high school students. Senior cords were yellow as a rule and were worn only by seniors.
Underclassmen wore cords of their own colors: freshmen wore green, sophomores pink or red, and juniors light blue. Underclassmen were not allowed to paint their cords, and anyone bold enough to show up at school breading that rule faced the real possibility of having their garment forcibly removed and raised on the school flagpole.
Seniors could wear their cords plain or decorated. The decorations can best be described as personalized graffiti. Popular comic book heroes of the day--Denise the Menace Daffy Duck, Alfred E. Neuman, Snoopy--showed their bright faces from the seats of skirts and trousers.
Other graffiti represented personal data--nicknames, boyfriends, girlfriends--and school activities, both academic and extra-curricular; chemistry flasks, thespian masks, sports symbols, National Honor Society emblems or music symbols. School identification and status appeared on every example seen: graduation year, school name, mascot, school colors.
Humor inevitably crept into the artwork, some it bordering on the objectionable. The girls tended toward the tame, with skunks painted across the seat of their skirts or “one-hour parking only.”
The boys tended to test the limits of good taste a little more rigorously. At my school one boy wore a pair of 1966 trousers with the words “Spanish Fly” painted across the crotch, and another wore a pair of 1967 trousers with the words “Slippery When Wet” painted down the front of one leg. Rumor said both those seniors had to get dean approval before wearing the cords in school, which they apparently received.
The quality of artwork on the painted cords varied tremendously, ranging from crudely hand-lettered names done all in black, to professional quality designs in a rainbow of colors.
Evelyn Roberts, a teacher in Indiana schools during the cord years, remembers students coming to her house and paying a token $3 to $5 for her artistic renderings. She recalls painting class rings, mascots, club emblems and symbols representing class trips, such as cherry blossoms to indicate a trip to Washington, D.C.
The most frequently repeated sentiments are the wistful regrets of those who failed to save their painted cords. Imagine the quantity of folk art torn into rags and used to wash the family car!
Another frequently expressed wish made by women was that they could still fit into those size 8 skirt waistbands. One 1959 Wiley grad very proudly wore her cords to her 25th class reunion in 1984, observing that only a few others managed to do the same.
So what led to the demise of such a colorful and long-held custom? It’s a question posed to many of the people who shared their memories of painted cords.
The answers have been similar: “It got old.” “They just got tired of it.” “Something new must have come along.”
Something new certainly came along, and the “something” was a whole new way of looking at the world. The year 1968 seems to have been the turning point--the year of assassinations, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Democratic convention in Chicago, women’s liberation, flower power, our brothers’ backyard war games being played for real in distant jungles for reasons they didn’t even understand.
At any rate, the tradition of senior cords came and went in the Wabash Valley, and just as no one knows exactly when or where the idea of senior cords began, “no one knows exactly when or where” the idea made the inevitable transition from tradition to history.
The Historical Museum of the Wabash Valley, 1411 S. Sixth St., is open from 1 to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.