Beaver Coats

Beaver coats—more precisely, sheared beaver coats—were popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Beaver was more affordable than mink, and people thought of beaver coats as a "middle-class" article of fashionable clothing.

My Mom and Mr. Irene's Mom both owned sheared beaver coats. After Mom had worn hers for a few years, she passed it along to me. She thought it would be a practical item for a twelve-year-old to have during the Chicago winters, when I spent the early mornings on the corner waiting for the school bus. Preteens in Eastern Europe, after all, often wore fur during the cold, bleak season. I even saw young women wearing fur coats in Italy, even though the temperatures there rarely dipped below the freezing point.

The hand-me-down coat was, however, another example of cultural cluelessness: Mom had no idea the ridicule a seventh-grade girl would encounter by wearing a beaver coat to school. The taunting was relentless. One afternoon our teachers screened "West Side Story" as part of our music-enrichment program. I walked into the grade school's downstairs hall wearing the coat. Just as the movie's overture began to play, one of the boys erupted, "Hey! Irene! How's your BEAVER??"

Suburban Chicago, December 1965. Mom wears the coat. She later also passed down the leopard-print scarf to me, and I wore that for many years, until it was threadbare. Mom stands on the driveway, in front of the tree my Parents planted when I was born.

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Chicago, Illinois, 1959. Mr. Irene's Mom models her beaver coat at the Forest Preserve.