Chartreuse laces and white bucks

Surfing the 'net this morning I came across the word chartreuse, which triggered a memory of my youth.

During the '50s and early '60s, Charles Eugene Boone, more popularly known as Pat Boone, was the second most widely known and adored American singer behind Elvis Presley. Boone still holds the record of being on the top-40 charts for 220 consecutive weeks (that's 4 years and 2.3 months), according to records kept by Billboard magazine.

Boone's signature footwear during his early career was white buck shoes, supporting the singer's preppy image.

Those shoes caught on with my friends and me in the late years of high school, but we augmented our shoes by stripping them of their white laces and replacing the strings with chartreuse laces. We also weren't particularly careful about keeping our bucks white; they eventually became scuffed to city-street gray, but the laces gleamed their apple-green chartreuse, and, as I recall, we replaced them on almost a weekly or monthly basis (some guys shifted to fuchsia laces, a deep, bright pink, but I was loyal to chartreuse).

Teen fads go in weird directions, and ours focused on shoelaces. Lives also take some surprising turns.

I liked Boone's music, but eventually his religion and politics turned me from admiration, despite my sharing his ardent Christianity. He moved toward charismatic Fundamentalism, and I slouched toward Canterbury; his politics became stridently conservative, matching what might now be called Tea Party radicalism. Boone, now in his late 70s, has criticized President Barack Obama for not celebrating enough Christian holidays in the White House, and has joined the conservative irrationals who hint that Obama is a closet Muslim and a foreign-born pretender to presidential qualifications.

Maybe that's why I loved white bucks but had to link them with chartreuse laces; chartreuse has its etymological roots in the 11th-century Roman Catholic monastery of the Chartreuse (i.e., Carthusian) Order that originated in the French Alps of Grenoble.

Even my shoelaces appear to have drawn me away from Christian Fundamentalism.