“Bib Overalls“
by John Brewer Gibson (1907-1983)
Bib overalls have been a part of my very life for well over sixty years. I wear ’em seven days a week with brief intervals off to go to church, or infrequently, on trips to town when I substitute a pair of dress pants and a light shirt.
The first pair of bib overalls for me were made of a thinnish blue material striped with narrow lines of little white dots. After many washings, the dots turned into holes, and from mid-thigh to below the knee perforated the little pants.
You adjusted for size with a simple little device on each gallus or suspender. These things had two prongs each to stick through the suspenders and hold at any desired height. They also had a bad habit of sticking little fingers fumbling to button or unbutton the bib.
The bib itself, as I recall, was innocent of any pocket, “slick as a smoothin’ arn.” Indeed, only two pockets graced the garment — two little identical patch pockets with pointed bottoms, one pocket fore and one diagonally aft.
The present-day adult overall, however, (if you stop to think about it) is almost a work of art. A single pocket, thoughtfully subdivided, bolsters the bib. In the right compartment, you may carry your billfold (replete with its own subdivisions and loaded with driver’s license, car registration, social security and Medicare cards, credit cards, snapshots, coupons, duns, receipts, small change — and maybe even a dollar bill or two!).
In the left compartment of your bib pocket, you may carry a pocket watch — if you have a pocket watch. And the back or underneath part of this compartment affords a fine place to carry your specs and case. And between the right and left compartments of this huge bib pocket is a narrow, sewed-off gut of a pocket for your pencil.
Now. In the front right swing pocket, you can carry loose silver and a pocket knife, and at the mouth of this pocket another watch pocket offers its services.
The right hip pocket houses your handkerchief; the left one, your check book, a pair of gloves and perhaps a few folds of emergency toilet tisue!
In the double pocket on the right overall leg, you can carry a screwdriver or folding ruler and a pair of pliers or small crescent wrench. And a hammer strap, secured in the outside seam of the left trousers leg and the corner of the left hip pocket— in it, you carry, what else? — a hammer.
Thus attired, like a medieval knight, the old farm boy is ready — though perhaps neither willing nor able — to face the world! And now who dares to say that the lowly bib overall is not a work of art?
(from Remember Me, Volume Two, John Brewer Gibson 1907-1983, Book #825, Richland County Genealogy Society, Olney, Illinois)