Cheaper by the Dozen

see the handwriting on the wall. Over the Hill to the Poor House."

Chapter 17
Four Wheels, No Brakes

    By the time Anne was a senior in high school, Dad was convinced that the current generation of girls was riding, with rouged lips and rolled stockings, straight for a jazzy and probably illicit rendezvous with the greasy-haired devil.
    Flaming youth had just caught fire. It was the day of the flapper and the sheik, of petting and necking, of flat chests and dimpled knees. It was yellow slickers with writing on the back, college pennants, and plus fours. Girls were beginning to bob their hair and boys to lubricate theirs. The college boy was a national hero, and collegiate was the most complimentary adjective in the American vocabulary. The ukulele was a social asset second only to the traps and saxophone. It was "Me and the Boy Friend,"
    "Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie" and "Jadda, Jadda, Jing, Jing, Jing." The accepted mode of transportation was the stripped-down Model T Ford, preferably inscribed with such witticisms as "Chicken, Here's Your Roost,"
    "Four Wheels, No Brakes" and "The Mayflower— Many a Little Puritan Has Come Across In It."
    It was the era of unfastened galoshes and the shifters club. It was the start of the Jazz Age.
    If people the world over wanted to go crazy, that was their affair, however lamentable. But Dad had no intention of letting his daughters go with them. At least, not without a fight.
    "What's the matter with girls today?" Dad kept asking. "Don't they know what those greasy-haired boys are after? Don't they know what's going to happen to them if they go around showing their legs through silk stockings, and with bare knees, and with skirts so short that the slightest wind doesn't leave anything to the imagination?"
    "Well, that's the way everybody dresses today," Anne insisted. "Everybody but Ernestine and me; we're school freaks. Boys don't notice things like that when everybody dresses that way."
    "Don't try to tell me about boys," Dad said in disgust. "I know all about what boys notice and what they're after. I can see right through all this collegiate stuff. This petting and necking and jazzing are just other words for something that's been going on for a long, long time, only nice people didn't used to discuss it or indulge in it. I hate to tell you what would have happened in my day if girls had come to school dressed like some girls dress today."
    "What?" Anne asked eagerly.
    "Never you mind. All I know is that even self-respecting streetwalkers wouldn't have dressed..."
    "Frank!" Mother interrupted him. "I don't like that Eskimo word."
    The girls turned to Mother for support, but she agreed with Dad.
    "After all, men don't want to marry girls who wear makeup and high heels," Mother said. "That's the kind they run around with before they're married. But when it comes to picking out a wife, they want someone they can respect."
    "They certainly respect me," Anne moaned. "I'm the most respected girl in the whole high school. The boys respect me so much they hardly look at me. I wish they'd respect me a little less and go out with me a little more. How can you expect me to be popular?"
    "Popular!" Dad roared. "Popular. That's all I hear. That's the magic word, isn't it? That's what's the matter with this generation. Nobody thinks about being smart, or clever, or sweet or even attractive. No, sir. They want to be skinny and flat-chested and popular. They'd sell their soul and body to be popular, and if you ask me a lot of them do."
    "We're the only girls in the whole high school who aren't allowed to wear silk stockings," Ernestine complained. "It just isn't fair. If we could just wear silk stockings it wouldn't be so bad about the long skirts, the sensible shoes, and the cootie garages."
    "No, by jingo." Dad pounded the table. "I'll put you both in a convent first. I will, by jingo. Silk stockings indeed! I don't want to hear another word out of either of you, or into the convent you go. Do you understand?"
    The convent had become one of Dad's most frequently used threats. He had even gone so far as to write away for literature on convents, and he kept several catalogues on the tea table in the dining room, where he could thumb through them and wave them during his arguments with the older girls.
    "There seems to be a nice convent near Albany," he'd tell Mother after making sure that Anne and Ernestine were listening. 'The catalogue says the wall around it is twelve feet high, and