Handbook Updates

I've made several edits and additions to the CCC Uniforms Handbook recently.  Highlights include a new section on civilian denim chore coats in workwear, a revised discussion of procurement of civilian service-style shirts during the mobilization years in early dress uniforms, and a new entry for the late spruce-green dress Mackinaw coat (companion garment to the spruce green tunic) in Outerwear.

Personalized CCC Wear #2: Betty Boop and Popeye Moleskin Vest

Along with the Cooper's Rock MC-style cossack jacket, I have tripped across one other example of a truly personalized garment associated with the CCC -- a work or hunting vest hand-decorated with pen-and-ink cartoon sketches and a freehand CCC logo.

I found images of this garment in a blog post with no further information provided.

This jerkin appears to be made of moleskin, a heavy cotton fabric woven and then sheared to create a short, soft pile on one side. Moleskin was a common choice for durable workwear in midcentury, often used as an alternative to whipcord or canvas duck.  

The collar includes a tag identifying the manufacturer as Buck Szein or Buck Stein, with a buck image. The buck iconography is surely a play on the manufacturer's brand name, but may also suggest the core market might have been hunters and outdoorsmen. The vest includes two patch front pockets with slightly angled top entry and is closed with a Talon zipper. The waist includes fabric tabs and buckles on each side for adjusting the fit.

The vest is ornamented on both sides with a variety of quite well executed hand-drawn pen and ink markings. On the right front breast is a cartoon of Betty Boop, the animated cartoon character created by Max Fleischer. A caricature of a Jazz Age flapper, Betty made her film debut in August 1930. On the right front pocket is a set of monogram initials in a circle -- they seem to be S and B flanking a center C.

On the back center of the vest is a hand-drawn shield with the letters CCC and the legend Civilian Conservation Corps.  Below it is another fine cartoon featuring Betty with Popeye the Sailor. Popeye was another Fleischer creation; he debuted side by side with Betty in 1933's "Popeye the Sailor with Betty Boop," which combined Popeye's origin story with an animated short featuring the established and very popular Betty.

This was surely a private purchase item decorated by its owner, a CCC enrollee.  

The anonymous owner seems to have identified with Popeye, the tough guy with a heart of gold. In the famous theme song, written by Sammy Learner, Popeye proclaims that

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man. I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.
I'm strong to the finich, cause I eats me spinach.
I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.

I'm one tough Gazookus, which hates all Palookas.
Wot ain't on the up and square.
I biffs 'em and buffs 'em and always out roughs 'em
and none of 'em gets nowhere.

If anyone dares to risk my "Fisk", It's "Boff" an' it's "Wham" un'erstan'?
So keep "Good Be-hav-or", That's your one life saver
With Popeye the Sailor Man.

He's Popeye the Sailor Man, He's Popeye the Sailor Man.
He's strong to the finich, cause he eats his spinach.
He's Popeye the Sailor Man.

Popeye's combination of toughness and chivalry would have been a remarkably good match for the values promoted among enrollees by the 3C's, with its "We can take it!" motto and ethos.

 

Personalized CCC Wear #1: Coopers Rock State Park Company 3527 Cossack Jacket

Personal alteration or decoration of CCC-issued clothing was prohibited by regulation. Uniform clothing was "GFE"-- Government Furnished Equipment.  As a 1940 Enrollee Handbook sternly admonished,

"All clothing is purchased and issued by the Army. The company commander is responsible for enrollee's clothing, as he is for all government property. The enrollee's uniform is issued for wear during his stay in the CCC... . During his stay in camp he is required to use and protect his uniform as he is other government property... . Enrollees are required to take the utmost care of all clothing issued them. While replacements will be made for articles worn out in regular use, the cost of clothing lost or destroyed is charged against the enrollee's pay."

It followed that defacing uniform parts with personal markings was strictly forbidden. The existence of the famous bell-bottom pants modification to the wool dress trousers suggests that many camp commandants took a relaxed attitude toward the letter of this rule when it came to alterations. However, vintage photographs otherwise confirm the message of the handbook: enrollees were not to embroider, deface, or otherwise personalize their issued clothing.

That said, I have so far encountered two examples of very personalized CCC-related clothing. Each is almost certainly a private-purchase garment, to which the ban on altering government property did not apply.

First up is this fascinating whipcord cossack jacket. An enrollee named George Morgan evidently served with Company 3527, building the beloved Cooper's Rock State Park on the Cheat River Canyon 12 miles east of Morgantown, West Virginia. He was apparently so proud of his association with the CCC and this project that he had his private work jacket customized as a memento.

Morgan's jacket is itself quite interesting. In the 1930s, "cossack jacket" was the generic term for a trim waist-length jacket. The earliest such jackets were made of leather and were close cousins or derivatives of the military A1 flight jacket.  As the style spread, other variations were made in every conceivable fabric, including wool and cotton. Morgan's jacket seems to push the cossack style towards a fusion with the civilian chore coat. It retains the trim cossack cut, but employs a heavy blue corded fabric more like what would usually have been used in a loose-cut overall or work coat. It includes a falling collar, two slash hand warmer pockets, a single zipper-closed utility pocket with an ornamental pull chain on the left breast, and fabric straps with buckles to adjust the fit at the waist. Visually, it anticipates by a decade or more the combination of workaday fabric and a trim fit that would come together definitively in 1953 in the iconic Levi's 507 "Type 2" trucker jacket of Elvis Presley fame.

But what really fascinates is the stunning custom embroidery -- name stitched on breast, and on the back panel, park name, plains Indian-style chief's head, and Company number and town name. The overall effect is stunning -- artistically, this is a postwar motorcycle club jacket a full 10 to 15 years before such things came to be in wider American culture. So uncanny is the resemblance to an MC "cut" that it is tempting to think the jacket might have been embroidered in the late 1940s or 1950s as a retrospective memento.  But it otherwise is clearly of true 1930s manufacture, and other than the uncanny pre-figuration of the MC style, there is no reason to believe the needle art is not prewar as well.

Whatever its probably never-to-be-known origin story, it is one of a kind -- perhaps one of the very earliest examples of a style of embroidery that would, in the hands of disaffected vets after World War II, become the iconic MC cut of Easy Rider and Sons of Anarchy notoriety.