[BillyMac]

This thread reminds me of something from back in 1965. That was my first year in junior high school and, as seventh grade gym class students, we were first exposed to locking lockers (and forgetting our lock combinations), gang showers, reversible color gym class school uniforms, athletic supporters, bringing (smelly stinking) gym clothes home to be laundered, etc.

In our very first gym class, Mr. Damico, our junior high school boys gym teacher for all three years, and someone we eventually came to really admire (he coached both basketball and baseball), gave us a lecture on how to properly dress for gym class. He told us that socks must be white. Why? Because, according to Mr. Damico, in 1924 President Calvin Coolidge’s son developed a blister while playing tennis on the White House tennis court and later died from blood poisoning and an infection caused by the dye from his black socks entering his bloodstream.

That lecture really made an impression on me because when I started officiating fifteen years later, having to wear mandatory black socks, I made the decision (Mr. Damico would be so proud of me) to double up on my socks, wearing white socks under my black socks to prevent my death from blood poisoning.

Old habits die hard, even after I discovered as an adult that Mr. Damico’s story was untrue. While the claim may have seemed plausible at the time because some of the coloring agents commonly used by the clothing industry, such as zinc chloride and aniline dye, did indeed often cause serious inflammation when the chemicals came into contact with a wearer's skin, in reality Calvin Jr. wasn’t wearing black socks, he was in a hurry to get out on the court, and he put on his tennis shoes but no socks. Being sockless caused the fatal blister. In 1924 Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was still four years away. It wasn’t until the 1940s that the use of penicillin started to become practical.

As I already stated, old habits die hard. Only in the past few years have I stopped my long time ritual of wearing white socks under black socks and I've now switched to wearing only a single pair of black socks.