Just what are BVD’s?

BY ROSE POST
SALISBURY POST

Whether you did or not, I bet you don’t know why those old-fashioned men’s underwear are called BVDs.

Not knowing didn’t make any difference in the story about Patti’s inheriting $20,000 (that let her open her shop)from a woman in Florida because 20 years ago she worked for an underwear company and kindly tried to help the woman find BVDs for her husband.

But I had to know, so I called Rowan Public Library.

Librarian Kenan Padgett answered the phone.

“I don’t know a definition,” she said, “but I’ll .... ” Then she laughed. And laughed and laughed — and explained why.

“I was just reading ‘The History of Underclothes.’ ”

Why?

“I’m writing a story about underwear,” she whispered.

Why?

“It comes from working in a library,” she whispered, “where everything seems interesting at one time or another. A friend of mine does ‘zines.’ That’s like a self-published magazine thing. They’re about anything imaginable.

“I was thinking about creating my own zine, just for me and my friends, because the funniest underwear things happen to me. My underwear fell down in the middle of Main Street.”

Why?

“They started sliding,” she whispered. “and they fell down. So I did this little hop shuffle and just scooped the suckers right up there in the street and kept on walking.”

Did anybody see her?

“Everybody. It was 8 in the morning, and everybody was going to work, so they all kind of had that blank, not-seeing stare.”

She recognized the stare again when she saw some of them later in the library.

“It was like they were thinking, ‘Oh, it’s that library lady with her underwear.’” she whispered.

What did they look like?

“Oh, just a little pair of panties. Bikinis. The flowery kind. But wait! If I tell you this, you’ll ruin the whole zine. Everybody in the whole world has an underwear mishap.”

“I know,” I said, and told her about my aunt, who was walking with a man on a New York street before World War I when skirts were long.

When her bloomers fell off, she didn’t scoop the suckers up. She stepped out of them like they’d never belonged to her at all and kept on walking. It became a memorable family story because a man behind her scooped them up, caught her and gave them back.

“When I was thinking about underwear,” Kenan said, “I was thinking how many children’s books there are about underwear.

“One of the librarians has the children play a game with really large underwear. Like musical chairs. They put them on and take them off and pass them on to the next person .... ”

And we’re back to research.

As for BVDs, in 1876 Messrs. Bradley, Voorhes and Day founded BVD, which became a famous and innovative underwear brand in America — with a new look for year 2000.

P.S. Whitey Harwood called this morning to say he found the same answer in a trivia book but with the letters uncapitalized, with periods, as b.v.d.