Guiness World Record for most T-Shirts worn at one time.

Matt McAllister of 99.9 KTYD in Santa Barbara, CA, setting the guiness world record for the most t-shirts worn at once. matt@ktyd.com

I probably should have saved this entry for somewhere closer to the holiday season, but Dad & I were talking about this tonight, and I wanted to put it down in writing while it was reasonably fresh in my little mind.

All families have holiday traditions, many of them unique. And I’m guessing that this one is fairly unique to the Hall clan. My father’s Aunt Ruth was a special lady. She was a bit eccentric, but that kind of goes with the territory. My brother John and I always thought that she was a bit batty, but then again, we were just kids.

Dad says that she was a very bright lady. She worked as a comptometer programmer at Campbell, Wyatt, & Cannon in Muskegon during the war years. The comptometer was a type of early computer that worked off of a hand crank. It was a highly skilled profession, perhaps even more so than today’s computer programmers or systems analysts jobs – if for no other reason than they were so rare.

The Comptometer, an early hand cranked computer.

She lived very frugally, so as far as family lore had it, she was “quite well off.” I don’t know about that, but I do know that she was always very kind to my brother and I. Dad says that she was also quite kind to he and his brother Ken as well. The only early photos of Dad and his brother that we have are studio portraits of them with their grandmother. According to Dad, Aunt Ruth paid to have those portraits done.

While her generosity was to be taken for granted within the family, it was her ability to never select a suitable gift that always brought howls of laughter to my brother and I – as well as all of our cousins. You could take it to the bank that her present each and every Christmas, as well as every birthday, would be the traditional “Aunt Ruth Shirt.” And while most kids, especially boys, find a shirt to be a particularly useless gift, the “Aunt Ruth Shirt” was in a class entirely by itself. For not only would the shirt be of the most unwearable color and design, the size selection process that she employed must have required all of her skill with the comptometer. Not only would the “Aunt Ruth Shirt” not fit, it would amazingly not fit any boy in the family. With six of us to chose from (cousins Bill, Charlie, Don, and Alan as well as John and I), covering a nearly 20 year range, it would seem that the basic laws of probability would require the shirt to fit one of us. But no, with unerring skill Aunt Ruth would be able each and every year to select six utterly hideous shirts that would not fit any of us.

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