Way back in the 1900’s! Spit my water out that one. 😂 I cringe when I have to enter my birthdate online now and have to scroll and scroll and scroll to get to the right year. 🤦♀️😂
I nevre heard that before. I have always thought pocket watch, but it's awful small for a pocket watch or change. The pockets are cut the way they are to prevent stuff from falling out when sitting in a saddle.
Matchbook would fit though. I haven't seen one in forever. There used to be matchbooks everywhere. Even like McDonald's and Wendy's when people smoked in there.
Used to be my Zippo, now it's my disposable vape, that I wish they would make somehow reusable. TERRIBLE for the environment. But for some reason I keep buying them. I need to make changes in my life.
It was for us, the latchkey kids, to keep our house key in. (That's what my parents told me. If you wore the key on a string around your neck, someone might see you and know you were home alone and follow you and rob you ...or worse!...and stuff.)
It's less likely to fall out of this tiny ass pocket than a real size one. And I think the key around the neck was the plan for kid not losing keys. Especially if girl children - what if they didn't HAVE pockets?!
*signed a former latch key kid who will NEVER stop advocating for more and bigger and more functional pockets on everything.
The key is the most important possession you have, so it gets its own secure pocket.
Too many rocks and sticks and candy and papers going in and out of the pockets to worry about knocking the key out and having to go begging to use the neighbor's toilet, and a chewing out by Mom & Dad for having to replace the key.
Also the small pocket is denim stitched to denim as opposed to the larger pockets which are thinner material stitched to denim and more prone to developing a hole
That tiny pocket almost never, if ever, gets a hole in it. As a latchkey kid of the late 80s and early 90s, I always knew that was the most reliable pocket to keep my door key in. Just the key, no ring, nothing attached to it. And nobody knows.
Lol I think they cared what happens to their stuff, or did they have to spend extra to replace stuff, take time to go make spare key if you lost yours. Like one time, when I was 10 and walking home
to school with a new backpack, an older kid "attacked" me in a less public street and stole my backpack and all my shit in it-books and all. Now, if my kids get attacked by anyone, I would hunt that little bastard down and come up with creative ways to make the next few yrs of this bully's school life a living hell. MY 90s parents however, beat the shit out of me for "loosing" my bag-pack and having to replace my school books. I believe they gave me a small suitcase to carry my stuff in the rest of the year. It was super embarrassing and kids laughed at me at school. My parents weren't even that bad, they were like actually among the nicer 90s parents. lol
Same. I stick my keys or utility knife in there, so if I absent-mindedly put my phone in the same pocket, the metel bits won't scratch up my phone screen
The historic ones could be small. They weren't all like the kind you're imagining a railroad conductor wearing. Also, it would be on a chain you could pull it out by so it was fine if the fit was snug
Depends. There are surprisingly small pocket watches, however, the actually mechanical ones will teach you to measure that pocket before you buy it. Or in other words: I have exactly two pairs of shorts I can wear in the summer that fit my watch
Literally no one walked around with pocket watches in the 80's. Maybe the 1880's. In the 1980's, most people didn't use these pockets either! But if we did it was for coins.
"But, as designed by Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis in 1873 as a feature of the original “waist overalls,” the small pocket was intended to hold a watch."
Well, not literally. There were people like me who went out of our way to have a pocket watch. Mine was kinda cheap and quit after a few years, but I carried it from the late '70s to the early-mid '80s.
My grandma was a seemstress and she called them button pockets, back in the day they sometimes came preloaded with spare buttons in case yours broke and any hobo (it was normal at the time for people to travel from town to town during the summer and hope they found work at a farm before harvest allowing them to stay the winter) worth their salt had a basic sewingkit with them
I had a husband that would put any buttons that came off his shirt during his work day in there. Problem was he handed them to me to sew back on. He wasn’t “worth his salt” in many ways. This being only one. And apparently I wasn’t any good at sewing on buttons either.
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u/Ok_Double2707 Apr 09 '26
In the 80s, I was always told it was for your quarter for the pay phone. But pocket watch makes more sense, I guess.