On seersucker and riverboat gambling. 

The last time riverboat gambler Beauregard P. Delacroix faced the mechanical man in a game of cards, he had lost his money, his home, and his prized Appaloosas. Worse, he had lost his cool – falling for the gambling gadget’s bluff when he could least afford to. He blamed his pants.

And then he heard the laughter. Above him, the dastardly iron contraption and its flesh-and-blood masters from the University of Mississippi Engineering Department were taunting him from the poop deck. Delacroix spat in disgust. He vowed they would meet again.

With time, Delacroix rebuilt his fortune to even greater heights than before. By 1879 he had more horses and hogs than any man in the state. He owned turpentine warehouses, a gin distillery and even the Vicksburg Snuffatorium, which he had won in a game of whist. But all of it was meaningless without a rematch against his nemesis.

His chance came one sweltering August, when the heat was so fierce that livestock stood rendering in the fields, beards spontaneously caught on fire, and the streets ran thick with lava-hot molasses. In this hellbroth, Delacroix faced off again against the mechanical monstrosity at the Magnoliaville Annual Poker Tournament, putting on the line everything that he had worked hard to reacquire.

The contest lasted into the wee hours of the morning, until only Delacroix and his metallic opponent remained. They had bet nearly everything they had, then the metal man placed on the table the deed to Farthington Manor. The sweating crowd gasped, and the contraption let loose with a triumphant puff of steam from its exhaust portal.

“If the action is too hot for you,” the machine chirped and whined, “best you stay out of the kitchen!”

Had Delacroix been wearing ordinary pants, the action would have indeed been too hot, but not this time. Not when he was wearing a new pair of light and airy horizontal seersucker Summerounds, which kept him cool despite the furnace-like heat of the moment.

“I see your bet, you despicable mechanical cur!” he ejaculated, laying down the deed to the Snuffatorium. The machine was nervous now, and almost hesitantly it laid down its cards, revealing a full house. “Oh my stars, how I shall enjoy summering in fair Farthington Manor,” Delacroix said coyly, showing his royal flush.

 
From the dark hollows of Appalachia to the steamy bayous of Louisiana, Austindale Crocket has spent a lifetime hunting the largest and most ferocious beasts ever to roam the backwoods of his beloved South. Possumzilla (seen above), King Coon, even the dreaded Saber-Toothed Squirrel --they all met their fate at Crocket's mighty hands. Among his fellow outdoorsmen, he is known as a hunter of singular skill and courage, a man who once, bereft of his trusty Winchester rifle, laid low a one-ton, 200-point buck deer with little more than a machete and his own gleaming incisors.

Only last month, the intrepid hunter spent a week in the wilds of the Everglades tracking the Skunk Ape, finally bringing about the creature's demise with a shot from his crossbow, followed by a deathly submission hold that even his mighty, malodorous adversary could not overcome. Soon after that adventure, Crocket returned to Evenfall, his stately manor in the Shenandoah Valley, and it was there on the porch that his traditional Sunday afternoon of whiskey and selected passages from the Iliad was interrupted by a call on his satellite phone.

"Good lawd," he said softly, when he heard the news. The fair city of Pensacola, Florida, was under attack. And this creature would be his greatest challenge yet: More fearsome than Ol' Cerebus, the vicious, three-headed bloodhound, and more vile than the Chewbacabra, the mysterious and grotesque creature of the Okeefenokee Swamp, known for a glandular discharge redolent of rancid chewing tobacco. Crockett quickly packed his hunting implements and a fresh pair of Summerounds and headed south in his hot-air balloon to face off against none other than the Manateedon.

As he floated over Pensacola, Crocket soon caught sight of the horrible abomination as it waddled down the heart of the city, entire families impaled on its gigantic tusks, city buses crushed beneath its mass of blubber. Crocket strapped on his parachute and dove from his balloon, streaking through the humid summer morning until he landed squarely on the back of the megafaunal monster! The Manateedon bellowed terribly and tried to slash at Crocket with its razor-sharp whiskers, but Crocket, nimble in his airy, lightweight Summerounds, easily parried the vile cryptid's blows and then responded by climbing into its mouth and scorching its innards with his trusty flame-thrower.

Well, the beast cried mightily and with its last remaining strength, it made its way to the beach, where it collapsed in Pensacola's powder-white sands. A huge, bikini-clad crowd cheered Crocket as he emerged from the Manateedon's mouth, he and his Summerounds none the worse for wear.

"To all the beasts who walk the Earth, swim in the sea, or fly in the air," Crocket cried, "know that I am your master!" And then, as if to assert his dominion over the world's wildlife once and for all, he snatched a pelican from the air and gobbled the bird whole.

A letter from a satisfied customer.

Kind Sirs:

As you and undoubtedly most San Franciscans well know, Civil War reenacting is never a particularly comfortable endeavor. Especially during the long, Alabama summer, when we must take to the roasting battlefield in our heavy burlap jackets and scratchy woolen trousers, when the heat of combat is exceeded only by the steamy, tortuous environs between pant and leg. Why, after the Battle of Hooper’s Mill, my unmentionables were no less miserable than the Okeefenokee Swamp, and even with generous applications of salves and medicinal powders, my chafed thighs remain quite tender to the touch!

So you can imagine my surprise and envy when, during the annual reenactment of The Massacre at Blood Mountain last month, I spied through my field glasses several Union reenactors charging toward our redoubt … wearing luxurious, seersucker pants! Gorgeous, Union-blue pants, loose-fitting and ingeniously horizontal in nature. Feeling as cool and fresh as a spring morning in the Shenandoah, those Yankees broke through our lines and annihilated the regiment with even more speed and vigor than was historically called for. As I pretended that the thrust of a Union bayonet had pierced my spleen, I crumpled to the ground, moaning: “If only my men had such fine and stylish pants!”

Weeks later, while leafing through the latest issue of Confederate Quartermaster Monthly, I saw an advertisement for these wonderful pants, these so-called “Summerounds,” available for a limited time only in …GREY! I can not adequately convey to you in this modest missive the tears and Rebel Yells and other assorted enthusiasms with which my men received the news. Needless to say, each and every one of us has ordered copious amounts of your grey Summerounds; with the Reenactors’ Ball fast approaching, one cannot have too much fine toggery.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Before our grey Summerounds can delight the belles, they will delight in the thrill of battle! After victory at Culver’s Crossroads, we will once again be roundly defeated at the Skirmish of Crabapple Corners. On that day, the creek will run red with blood, after the dye is poured in. We will imagine that Union rifles are shooting real bullets, that swords have razor-sharp edges, that there are actual horses to trample our mangled, perforated corpses into the mud. As always, we will gallantly pretend-fight to the last man. But as that last man falls to the ground, he shall do so, this year, in comfort and style.

Huzzah, Summerounds, huzzah!

Most Sincerely Yours,

O. Rutherford Pickling III
Captain, 134th Alabama Volunteer Infantry
Adjunct Professor of American History,
Cyprus City Community College

A team of scientists from Suckerlabs traveled to the famed leisure proving grounds of Worthington P. Chesterfield’s wide and gracious front porch to put our horizontal seersucker pants to the test--the Southern Gentleman test.

Under rigorous analysis, our trousers scored high marks in all manner of Southern Gentlemanly arts (see findings on left.) And why shouldn't they? After all, these pants were sewn in San Francisco's South of Market district by ladies who hail from southern China. And you can acquire a pair for well south of $100. It doesn’t get much more Southern than that, does it? Until our pant scientists figure out how to fabricate them out of sweet tea, we don’t think so.

Our trousers have been engineered specifically for casual use in hazy, lazy days of summer--on porches, on beaches, on stoops, preferably with an iced beverage in hand. In test after clinical test, they are precisely 90 degrees cooler than tradition vertical seersucker. A fact not lost on Worthington himself, who declares, “ and I do declare…you’re far cooler in suckers whose puckers go‘round”