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Thermal Underwear

Cold weather warning - get out the Long Johns
20160214 snow walton

The recent Polar Vortex was enough. I got out my old set of thermal underwear. Long Johns, as we used to call them. I even have the red ones. I mentioned this in an email to one of my friends down in the Big Smoke and he said, “You mean the ones the old cowboys used to wear - year around, never washing them, only rinsing them off when they went down to the river for a swim in the summer?”

Well, mine are more modern that than those old wool ones, but he got the idea. I was then apprised that the modern under garments designed for cold weather were made of silk. I am not certain if I am manly enough to wear silk underwear but if the weather gets much colder, I may have to try some. When the weather forecaster mentions things like balls on brass monkeys you have to be prepared to stay indoors or dress for the weather. Aunt Martha always said there was no such thing as bad weather, just improper clothing.

This talk of underwear made me think of that new line of clothing called Under Armour - which I thought at first was something to replace my Fruit of Looms but it turns out that people wear this clothing on the outside. I even saw this brand name on some of the football players in the latest Super Bowl extravaganza where I also viewed a commercial about Super Bowl babies. (Stick with me, I’ll be back to the thermal underwear in a moment).

Super Bowl babies, it said, were the result of couples mating without the usual birth control precautions due to the excitement of the Super Bowl. Now some of those games may have been exciting but really? I could see that happening if we ever had a Stanley Cup playoff between two Canadian teams, but football? However, there was the time of the big black-out when the electricity was off all through the northeastern States and eastern Canada and there were nine-month delayed reactions. And there does seem to be some correlation between the cold winter months and fall babies here in the great white north.

However you may not be aware of project ‘Thermex’ in the 1950s - a project that involved thermal underwear. After WWII, a number of German Scientists came to North America. Among them were fellows like Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun who helped the Americans get off the ground and up to the moon with his rocket technology. Lesser known was Reinhardt Jesper Gerber, a trained gynecologist who spearheaded the Thermex Project. A distant cousin of his was in the process of becoming a millionaire with his Gerber baby food, but Reinhardt was not jealous of his cousin’s success. Right. So RJ decided to go into the field of birth control, not out of spite, but just because.

The German people have long been fascinated with the America Wild West, both the cowboys and the Red Indians. RJ had read many westerns and was quite familiar with the red Long-John cowboy underwear. Being a scientist, RJ wondered why there weren’t more little cowboys and cowgirls nine months after the cattle drives came to town or even perhaps after an exciting rodeo at the local corrals.

A few words of explanation follow for those of you who did not get the sex education curriculum in grade 4. The male scrotum is an amazing piece of anatomy. Not only does it hold the testes in place but it acts as a thermostat by stretching when it is hot and shrinking when it is cold. Males will be familiar with this phenomenon from jumping into cold lake water. Females likely are aware of this from an old Seinfeld show where George had to explain this in an embarrassing moment with his then girl friend. RJ Gerber of course was well aware of this when he had the brainwave about Thermex underwear.

RJ postulated that if a man wore really warm, fully insulated underwear the scrotum could not stretch and cool the testes. Hot testes do not produce active spermatozoa. In fact, the little swimmers are defunct, kaput and totally useless. This new form of birth control would not require taking pills, observing religious feats, prayer or other acts that seemed too clinical in the heat of the moment. All the man needed to do was wear his Thermex underwear for eight hours before sex.

The eight-hour time period was arrived at after much testing by volunteer men who had to have their swimmers tested after wearing Thermex for a specified number of hours. These men were paid a small stipend for being in the study and there seemed to be no scarcity of volunteers. The procedure was to feed the men well and then show them photographs of women in various stages of undress to stimulate the testes.

In six months of trial and error as RJ lined his Thermex with everything from lamb’s wool to silk to cotton batting, the lab checked the results. The final product was a little bulky but the men said that ought not to be a problem as some of them had stuffed their skivvies with various items, including socks, to appear more manly in their swimwear and tight-fitting jeans.

Thermex was a mixed success. As soon as the scrotum was freed from the insulated confines of the tight, hot underwear, things went quickly back to normal production. Other things happened during the time it took to remember to put the Thermex shorts on again. RJ Gerber gave up the project when his grant from the Stanfield Company ended.

RJ had another theory that if he could just get the nether regions cold enough, he could achieve the same results as Thermex underwear but after a cold bath in a tub filled with ice cubes he changed his mind. There were no volunteers for a clinical trial.

These are just some of the things I thought about as I pulled on my Long Johns before going out to shovel snow and I wanted to share them with you.  Just saying.

 





Bill Walton

About the Author: Bill Walton

Retired from City of North Bay in 2000. Writer, poet, columnist
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