It had been quite a few years, decades actually, since Uncle Tyler Dyer and I had visited the State Museum of Pennsylvania, formerly the William Penn Museum, in Harrisburg. Several days ago we decided to stop by to see what’s new.
I was fussing around with the official “Life in the Lower Susquehanna Watershed” camera while walking slowly down an entrance corridor when I heard Uncle Ty exclaim from up ahead, “Hey man, that’s my T-shirt!”
There it was, neatly screen-printed on luxurious , but functional, blended cotton and polyester, just like the one Uncle Ty wore forty years ago. This priceless gem was no iron-on job. It was the real thing, just like Coke, but a little bit more expensive.
Uncle Ty said that, other than his own artistic creations, his T.M.I. T-shirt was the only one he wore during the summer of ’79. It even had spots of hardened wax in the fabric around the belly section where his candle had dripped during one of the anti-nuclear energy protest vigils he attended.
I wasn’t so certain, I thought he had a few others in his rotation back then. All those corporate beer brand and pop music group T-shirts were really popular. And “Grease”, Uncle Ty really liked Olivia Newton-John back then. He had a “Grease” T-shirt for sure. Then I remembered, and I reminded him, “You were wearing a Buck Tractor Pulls T-shirt back then, weren’t you?” I was sure of it, nice artwork of a hopped-up farm tractor on the front and “See You at the Buck” across the back.
“No way man,” he retorted, “There’s no way I went down there to waste a Saturday night with that gasoline and gunpowder gang. I would have sooner spent a Saturday night getting a tooth worked on by an angry intoxicated dentist!”
Oh well, everybody has there own idea of a good time.