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We all have our little obsessive hobbies. Sometimes they take you down strange paths. If you don’t believe me, why are there so many Pittsburgh Steelers fans who find themselves rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles right now?

Rioting in the streets is not a new thing. I was appalled the first time I saw this play out on State College’s Beaver Avenue back in the late ‘80s when the Nittany Lions beat somebody or other. As it turned out, removing the goal posts from Beaver Stadium and parading around with them as if they were colossal mammoth tusks had been a thing since the 1920s.

People are strange critters sometimes.

That’s why being mocked for playing with yarn and knitting needles doesn’t ruffle my feathers. Even snarky comments of “Gee, I wish I had time to do that” are met with an equally snarky rejoinder of, “Well, it’s a matter of choice because nobody is busy 24/7.”

At least most of us aren’t in 2023. It must have seemed that everybody was busy all the time to our rural great-grandparents a century ago.

I’ll tell you what sent me off on this bizarre tangent. I read a random article about Victorian sock-knitting machines last night and it reminded me of my Grandpa Kerr’s knowing how to knit.

He was a man of many parts. He began teaching school at the tender age of 19, could drive a team of horses and knew the difference between two major schools of knitting, left-handed or right-handed.

I always thought that he picked up this skill while recuperating from a leg amputation at age 13 in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Being confined to a hospital bed in the days before television and even radio would have been maddening. Manual activities prevented several cases of insanity.

Grandpa probably wasn’t making lace doilies. For anyone who knew him as an adult, “Darl” and “doily knitting” could never exist side by side in any universe. That’s where black holes come from.

Back in the days before nylon was invented, sock yarn was made from wool and that was that. After a few weeks of being sweated upon and rubbed against the inside of a shoe, a woolen sock would turn to unyielding felt and you’d need a new one.

As a result, nearly everybody spent his spare time knitting socks, at least according to many old written accounts. These were produced on sets of double-pointed needles, usually four but sometimes five. To the uninitiated, the process resembles an octopus wrestling with a porcupine.

I had recently learned to knit in 1964, courtesy of Della Adams, in a small group of nine-year-old girls who gathered at her house perhaps once a week. We would practice our skills during winter recess and compare notes. Like good Americans, we carried the yarn in our right hands while knitting.

It was during this time that some interesting memories embedded themselves in my brain. On a snowy winter day, knitting and the Animals’ “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” just seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. This was when my grandpa told me about some ladies he knew as a child who carried their yarn with their left hands.

“Heresy! Sacrilege!” I didn’t actually say those words because they weren’t in my vocabulary yet. Still, I was outraged.

The English and Americans tend to knit right-handed, not because their Anglo-Saxon blood is pure and superior but because only the dirty Huns of World War I infamy used their left hands. There was a wholesale switching to right-handed knitting after 1914, but only on the British side of the English Channel.

Which gave me pause for only a minute in late 2017. As so often mysteriously happens, a family member’s obsession with World War I meant that I, too, must share the obsession and be drafted into recreating several soldierly items knitted on the home front.

When faced with devoting many hours of my time to knitting acres and acres of olive-drab socks, gloves, balaclavas and scarves, a few inauthentic tactics were employed. One was substituting modern no-shrink yarn to get the right color. The other was using the faster left-handed technique.

I have no regrets. If I hadn’t, I’d still be working on a six-foot-long scarf in plain back-and-forth knitting. As it was, I tended to drool and giggle a lot for a few weeks afterward.

And so the invention of a mechanical sock-knitting machine for home use must have seemed like a godsend in the 1800s. It all makes sense now.

In a nutshell, these gizmos worked a lot like the plastic knitting looms you find in craft stores, or the knitting spools foisted upon little girls in the pre-liberated 1960s. I received one of those tricked out as a mock spinning wheel.

And then came those afterschool knitting lessons alongside Darla Adams Hinderliter, Patty Barnett (Toy?) and perhaps three or four other girls. The real thing was a lot more fascinating than the pretend version.

Grandpa and other kids of his generation might disagree. We knitted for fun, not as a constant evening chore.

This wasn’t a peculiar form of child labor. Even today, lads in northern European countries might pick up the sticks and string to make something for themselves.

Knitting has always been a manly art.

[Susan Kerr is a semi-retired freelance writer living in her hometown of New Bethlehem. Previously, she was the managing editor of a regional-interest magazine and a business journal in State College.]

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