Today, citizens, the topic shall be stinky feet – the South’s gift to the cause of good hygiene.
Smelly feet, enclosed in dirty socks, were once as much a part of Dixie ambiance as patches of kudzu. You’d have to take a time machine back to the ’40s and ’50s to understand the prevalence.
Fortunately, we’ve found some positive uses for kudzu. I have smeared kudzu jelly on whole-wheat toast, have deposited knick-knacks into a basket made from interlaced kudzu vines, and even, as a kid, chewed kudzu leaves, because Dad would have tanned my hide had he caught me filching a plug from his Bull of the Woods.
But until recently, nobody could think of a constructive use for stinky feet or dirty socks. Now scientists have come up with such a use, and I’ll tell you about it farther down in this column. I will also try to solve the enigma: Which came first, the dirty feet or the stinky socks?
Boys naturally had stinky feet, despite their mothers’ insistence on nightly foot-washing and the good efforts of Mama at the wash tub and the clothesline.
In the dim past, now accessible only through memory or old Doc Brown’s time machine, there was a nightly ritual every country boy was expected to perform: He went to the back porch, carrying a used cake of Octagon soap and an enamel wash basin half-full of cold water. He sat on the porch steps, dunked his feet in the cold water, rubbed them with the Octagon soap and then tossed the dirty water into the backyard.
That should have deodorized his feet, except for the lingering smell of the Octagon soap, which was somewhere between limburger cheese and bad breath.
Next morning, if the barefoot season was already past, he would grab a clean pair of socks, pull on his brogans and plod down to the main road to catch the school bus.
So if everything went according to plan, the school boy left home with socially acceptable feet. Then, some time before the end of classes, the stinky-feet phenomenon kicked in.
I don’t know how to explain why a pair of feet sanitized with Octagon soap and enclosed in freshly washed socks take on the aroma of dirty socks in the classroom environment.
Maybe it’s because a boy in those days had one pair of shoes, and he wore them for every occasion, with no chance to air out between wearings. Maybe, on occasion, all the clean socks were hanging on the clothesline and he was reluctant to walk across the cold dew-covered grass to retrieve them. So he wore yesterday’s pair. Or maybe it was a Friday, and Mama’s wash day was Monday, so he was fresh out of socks until then.
Whatever the reason, normal boys developed stinky feet at some point during the day, usually after a game of touch football at recess. If you poked your feet under the desk of the blonde cutie in front of you, she would discreetly nudge them back. She wasn’t playing footsy; she was trying to repel the odor.
Interestingly, girls never developed stinky feet. I know this will be a shock to all those who believe that gender distinctions are all sexist inventions, and women are nothing more – or less – than men without adam’s apples. I won’t delve into the sociology of it, but trust me, girls’ feet didn’t stink.
Now to the point I’ve been getting to all along. Think back, all you who have survived the stinky-feet era: How many cases of malaria do you remember from your childhood? If you’re like me, you can’t think of any. Kids missed school because of sore eyes, measles, mumps, chicken pox and snake bites but never from malaria.
There was a good reason for that. Malaria is caused by a particularly mean kind of mosquito that loves the smell of stinky feet.
When you take off your socks at night and wash your feet in Octagon soap, the stink leaves your feet, but it remains in your socks.
So a mosquito that finds its way into your room through the cracks in your wall will be attracted to the odor of those socks, which presumably you left in the middle of the floor, where you took them off.
Given a choice between drawing blood from your feet and sucking the odor from your socks, the mosquito will opt for the socks. Ergo, it will not inject the malaria virus into your blood stream. So even as you sleep, your dirty socks are doing their job.
My authority for this is the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which became interested in malaria after the British Empire sent its Redcoats into Africa, Malaya, the Carolinas and Virginia, and they came back all feeble and feverish.
The Brits discovered that mosquitoes infected with malaria are strongly attracted to the dirty-sock odor. So now they’re developing a mosquito trap that will attract only the skeeters that carry the disease. Presumably, they’ll collect all of England’s dirty socks, lace them with DDT, and ship them to the West Indies.
I’m pretty sure that it’s that kind of reasoning that cost them an empire. Why just pick on the skeeters with malaria? Haven’t those Limeys ever spent a hot night slapping mosquitoes of all varieties without worrying about which ones carried the disease? When a mosquito lights on me, I slap it first and asked for health certificates later.
Regardless, I’m happy to learn that we’ve found a good use for dirty socks. No more trips to the back porch to wash my feet in chilly water. I’ll just scrub them with a Handi Wipe and leave the socks out for the mosquitoes.
Gene Owens is a retired newspaper editor and columnist who graduated from Graniteville High School and now lives in Anderson, S.C. Readers may email Gene Owens at WadesDixieco@AOL.com For more of Gene’s writings, visit wadesdixieco.com.
