I was in the sixth grade when I realized that my mother was trying to wreck my life. We wore uniforms to school – white shirt, blue tie with the school logo in gold and dark-blue slacks. Shoes were the only thing you got to choose for yourself, or the only thing my mother would choose for me – as she had for my first five grades.

My mother was a well-dressed, sensible woman, except for the fact that she had eight children, so I was shocked to see the new pair of back-to-school shoes she presented to me that September. They had black-leather bottoms, with a large, white patch on the uppers. Years later, I found out that Elvis Presley wore a similar pair on the cover of his first album. When I was in the sixth grade, that album was seven years old.

I had heard of Elvis, of course. But he was from another generation. He certainly wasn’t my idea of a fashion role model. He was old hat; I liked the new stuff – The Kingston Trio, The Four Freshmen, The Brothers Four. The Kingston Trio’s big hit “Tom Dooley” was all over the radio, you couldn’t escape it. Folk singers performed on “Sing Along with Mitch” and “The Andy Williams Show” almost every week. It was hard to dial through all three channels without finding someone in a tuxedo or a ball gown singing “Cotton Fields” or “John Henry was a steel-drivin’ man.”