When Sock Monkeys Ruled the World

By Mike Marino

When Sock Monkeys Ruled the Earth

By Mike Marino

Theoretically, life began with a badda bing badda big bang boom! Science and religion, the oil and water of disciplines, have opinions that oppose one another regarding the exact point in time of a general consensus of genesis. One thing is certain...Mankind is the dominant species today..temporarily..we'll shoot ourselves out of a cannon far out into space...just give us time...nukes, pollution, wars over oil and religion..(remember more people in history have died as a result of religious differences than from cancer. The Lost World of dinosaurs ruled the roost Jurassic eons ago..Ice Ages brought forth the wooly bully mammoth and the sexy saber toothed tiger...giant birds filled the skies...Great empires reigned...the Greeks, the Romans, the Phoenicians, Huns, Vandals, Vikings and so on, up the ladder of civilization we go. Some ages were dark, foreboding, forgotten and forlorn, ages of fear that made the earth tremble. Inquisitions, plagues, war (there’s that war thing again!) but one Age..one age alone dominated every other species and left a swath of terror in its wake that can still be felt today. It was the ancient age when Sock Monkeys ruled the Earth! No one knows exactly where they came from, but they have left an indelible imprint on history and sociologists and archeologists are still scratching their collective heads. What the hell are the Sock Monkeys? They weren't explorers, sailors, inventors or philosophers. But...they were...

The origin of the Socksters is a tragic blur...muddy as the churning Colorado River on a steamy deep canyon sweltering blistering southwest summer day. Some say, with conviction no less, that they originated on some desolate far away rocky Skull Mountain island type of environment shrouded in all the majestic King Kong mythology you could muster up. Sacrificial blondes tied and bound for the pleasures of the Sock Beast.

A cloud of misconception points the anthropological middle finger towards other destinations of origin equally as bizarre. The Ice Age for example, impossible! Or they were the result of the large meteor that crashed into the ground like so much phallic space debris penetrating the vagina of Arizona leaving a rather large hole from this rape of the Sabine’s encounter...the seeds of a new race...a space race known as Sock Monkeys...the result of the penetration of asteroidal rape and formidable fornication of Mother Earth from between the knees of of the galaxy.

Then again, it may have something to do with the Victorian Age which was prone to producing copious amounts of deep purples, and not the Smoke on the Water Deep Purple either, but gaudy almost whorehouse purples...there was at the time a fascination with stuffed animals, exotica from the jungles of deepest, darkest Africa and within the bosom of the Amazon including natives and pagans and Indian princesses with loin cloths. It was the making of these stuffed animals however that provided the fascination that collided with the emergence of the modern Arts & Crafts movement and it's popularity only grew from then on tentacles gripping and climbing and clinging...vines in a rainforest.

Enter the industrial age...post-Purple Victorian age....the age where the automobile replaced the horse and buggy and drove blacksmiths buggier. This is the one strata in the stuffed animal archeological dig that can truly be called...the Stuffed Animal Reformation, and along with it the new leader of the pack would emerge, resplendent in muted grey and bright red, the endearing Sockster itself..The Sock Monkey. Earlier in the mid-19th century, Swedish immigrant, John Nelson patented a sock making machine in 1869, and by 1890 began manufacturing tough, durable work socks. Other companies followed and tried to duplicate the work socks, in effect making knock off socks, not socks to knock your socks off.

The socks, manufactured in Rockford, Illinois were so popular, people started calling them "Rockfords"..like Coke and Kleenex, it became a noun in itself, and, you guessed it, it fostered an army of counterfeit sock makers trying to duplicate the cash success of the Rockford Sock Company. The Rockfords became an icon among the working class..strong, durable, honest and Union Made in the U.S.A.

By the Dustbowl Thirties...the American worker and farmer were being replaced, displaced and tossed onto a garbage pile of poverty. Hunger, foreclosures, uprooting, and the River of Immigrants headed west on Route 66.Then there were the children..they needed toys after all to balance the onslaught of misery and feeling screwed by circumstances. So, in the best blue collar vein of ingenuity cleaver mothers decided to take worn out Rockford’s and instead of tossing them away, holes and all, began to sew them up, and somewhere around 1932...the first sock monkey, as we know it today emerged from the womb, (except for the characteristic red lips), they appeared when the red heels were added to the socks in 1937.

The sock shockwave continued, and by 1955 the sock manufacturer began including its own pattern and design for a sock monkey with every pair of socks sold. As a result of the fuel injected pop culture of the Fabulous Fifties...sock monkey manufacturing turned into sock monkey marketing savvy, and the Sinatra of all stuffed animals grew in popularity to space age sub orbital heights.

The sock monkey is a survivor...decades of depression, war, cold war and protest have not diminished nor thrown it off course. Today there are a variety of different types of sock monkeys including polka dots, and some with vibrant colors not mere neutral grey...what the hell...there may even be a tie-dyed one in someone’s purple hazed double dazed imagine waiting to be born. There may even be international monkeys...Canadian Sock Monkeys, known as Sasquatchian Monkeys, Australian Sock Monkeys called Sock-a-roo's or even Communist Sock Monkeys ala Mao-Tse-Sock or Sock Guevara.

Today there is a Sock Monkey Madness Festival in, you guessed it, Rockford Illinois. It began in 2005 with over 1,500 in attendance to show and see various Sock Monkeys, learn about its history, participate in sock monkey workshops, and to be regaled by the crowning of Miss Sockford as she is referred to royally..I would prefer Miss Sock Monkey but that is only a personal opinion.

Forget about Ken and Barbie. Manufactured for the masses but the Sock Monkey, a real proletarian treat...born of hard times and Depression Era Poverty it is the real working persons stuffed critter. It is the blue collar Teamster of the world of stuffed animals. Power to the Sock Monkey People!