Last Friday, I spent part of the evening not watching lacrosse, but at a gathering celebrating an Internet journalist named Paul Lukas.
Lukas has turned a weekly column on sports uniforms, first published in the Village Voice 25 years ago this week, into a wondrous body of work spanning not only uniforms, but other kinds of aesthetics, including vintage tin cans, old report cards, various business catalogs, and a kind of dwelling called a “Futuro.”
This week is the last for Lukas as a contributor/editor/Grand Poohbah of the Uni-verse, as he is turning over the publication of the site to others and starting on other projects.
I feel kind of a kinship with Lukas, in that we both started our journeys a quarter-century ago, with micro-focused content and having to be extremely mobile in terms of hosting and distribution as the markets for field hockey, lacrosse, and women’s sports have changed and grown over the years.
There have been times when these worlds have collided: Dartmouth’s field hockey throwback jerseys of a few years ago being a prime example. Another time, we saw some of the uniforms worn by some of the Seven Sisters colleges when playing basketball under the rules of the early 20th Century.
The theme of the day was the Purp Walk, which was fittingly held in Baltimore, where the city’s popular football team wears purple jerseys at home.
Part of the day was also devoted to the celebration of a particular municipal quirk in Baltimore: the salt box, a service of the Baltimore Department of Transportation. Salt boxes serve as a distribution network for the city to get rock salt to people in order to spread as needed to melt icy patches on city streets, sidewalks, and the ever-present marble stairs in front of many homes in town. Salt boxes have become a local outlet for artists to stretch their creativity, making kaleidoscopic varieties of outer decorations for these usually ephemeral wooden boxes.
That’s the kind of aesthetics that Lukas, and his readers, have been gobbling up over the last quarter-century.
And I’ve been lucky to be one of his daily readers.
