Dad vs. the Dress Code
When I was in the sixth grade in San Marcos, my rabble- rousing father fought the rules that dictated what I could wear to school. My hip-huggers survived, but I almost didn't.
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Students began circulating petitions protesting the "Harmonization." The dress code called for "businesslike" attire, so they appeared in T-shirts with fake ties painted on them. A handful of professors from Southwest Texas State University refused to make their sons cut their hair when they were threatened with suspension. Bob Barton, an activist in town, published editorials against the dress code in his liberal newspaper.
Eventually my father's voice was heard above all these others—or so it seemed to me. He started by writing a letter to the editor of the San Marcos Daily Record, citing a court judgment about a dress code in another Texas town and expounding on the Bill of Rights. Before it was all over, the town was polarized.
One Sunday morning my father rustled my brother and me and our younger sister, Noel, out of bed and told us to come out on the front porch. He had the same excitement about him that he did on Christmas mornings, and I hurriedly pulled on some clothes. My mother was already out there. Stuck into our front lawn, under an enormous elm tree, was a crude cross made from a couple of flimsy boards; it was charred at the base.
"Someone tried to burn a cross in our yard last night," Dad announced proudly, puffing out his chest, the cold air misting his breath.
My mother was quiet, looking at the spectacle. She wasn't as elated as my father was.
"Dinky, isn't it?" he said. He was disappointed that the perpetrators had not been able to light it, but I could tell he loved the thing. "I've always wanted to have a cross burned in my yard. I'm tempted to set it on fire."
Instead, he called the police, who came and hauled it away. Afterward he called his friend Bill Moyers to tell him about the incident. He and Moyers were in the habit of talking on Sunday mornings, and I can still see my father seated in his reading chair that morning with the phone pressed to his ear, his grin practically splitting his face in two, an unlit, chewed-on cigar in his hand, his right ankle crossed over his left knee, a Gucci slipper dangling from his foot. "Bill? You'll never guess what was in my yard this morning . . ."
My brother survived the first month of the dress code by combing his hair back to make it appear shorter; it exceeded the length permitted because it covered the tops of his ears. The strategy temporarily satisfied the junior high principal even if it didn't actually fool him. Bill wore a black armband to school, and when one of the coaches asked him what it was for, he answered ruefully, "To mourn the death of democracy." "Oh," the coach replied. Everything seemed to be going all right until my father suggested to Bill that he ought to own up to his hair length. Predictably, when Bill showed up at school with his hair combed over his ears, the principal called him in and told him he could not come back to school until he cut it. Bill went home and told my father, who gave him the option of cutting his hair or staying home with tutors for the balance of the year and applying to a private school—St. Stephen's Episcopal School, in Austin—for the following year. Bill chose the tutors and St. Stephen's. "Did you feel any pressure from Dad about it?" I asked him recently. He is now a Republican. He was thoughtful about his answer. "I remember he sat me down and said, 'Son, men have died for less than this.' I don't know," he said, laughing. "Would you call that pressure?"
I recall a meeting in our living room of about a dozen parents whose children—mostly boys with long hair—had been suspended for violating the dress code. My father fielded questions from the group with his Dallas attorney over the telephone. I remember that some of the men seemed edgy and nervous about how their jobs might be affected if they took a public stand against the dress code. My father, however, seemed to be having fun. In spite of his unusual insight into many things, he did not have insight into people's worries. He was impatient with equivocation. It was a paradox of his personality that he could champion the underdog without really understanding what the underdog was going through.
He flew his attorney down from Dallas to address a packed hearing on the dress code in the high school auditorium. The audience was pro-Harmon, the mood toward my family ugly and aggressive. The attorney's plane was late, and when he arrived, his speech was met with booing and hissing. Speakers in support of the dress code received standing ovations. My parents, my brother, and I were seated near the middle of the auditorium, Dad wearing his Oxxford suit, Bill wearing his hair down to his earlobes now. People turned to stare at us throughout the hearing. At the close, the school board voted to keep the dress code as it was written. Several of Bill's former elementary school teachers refused to speak to him when he said hello to them in the parking lot as we were leaving. I made a beeline for the car. On the drive home, Mother observed that this was the first time she had ever understood what it was like to be hated.
On behalf of a group of parents opposed to the dress code, my father and his attorney drew up a federal lawsuit against superintendent Harmon, several principals and vice principals, and the members of the school board, alleging violations of constitutional rights. But they never actually filed the suit, because at the time, courts almost always ruled in favor of dress codes, and there wasn't much chance of winning. They merely used it to threaten Harmon and the board.
On Cinco de Mayo, almost half of the students in the San Marcos public schools—mostly Hispanics disgruntled about the dress code and racial issues—boycotted the schools, gathering in the Girl Scout hut at the river for free hot dogs and music and speeches. My father approved of the boycott but gave me a choice about whether to go to school. Being compulsive about my grades, I decided not to join the boycott after one of my teachers singled me out and told me pointedly that she would give me an F on the scheduled test if I was not in school. I felt some shame about my decision, knowing that I was making it out of weakness rather than conviction, but I also understood, in some rudimentary, adolescent way, that staying home just to please my father would be equally weak. The truth was, I didn't care about the dress code. I remember plodding along down Belvin Street on the way to school that day, thinking at every step that I might find the strength and social conscience to forgo my compulsive need for A's and turn back toward home. I imagined how Dad would receive me. How proud he would be.
Bill was spared the decision of whether to join the boycott, as he was at home with private tutors on account of his hair. It was shortly after the boycott that he and my father began distributing bumper stickers with the slogans "Hair Harmon" (as in "Heil Hitler") and "Repeal the Dress Code." They drove around in one of the Lamborghinis late one night plastering the bumper stickers onto traffic signs, starting on Harmon's street and working concentrically from there.
A school board election was coming up, hotly contested because of the dress code. On the day before the election, the principal of Lamar called me into his office to discuss the length of my skirt. I had never been in trouble at school before and was as frightened as if I had been caught on the wrong side of the law. The principal and I had always liked each other.
"What do you think?" he asked as I stood before him, embarrassed, my arms at my side so that he could see if my fingertips hung below my skirt. "Is it too short?"
"I don't know," I said. It was a scooter skirt—basically shorts with a flap in front. My mother had bought it at Sears.
He seemed reluctant to pass judgment and called in the counselor. I was sent into the hallway so they could converse in private, then called back in. The length of the skirt was all right, he said, but it needed to have a flap in the back as well as in the front. I wouldn't be allowed to wear it to school again.
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