UPS veteran Floyd Coley is perfectly comfortable wearing shorts year-round in Minnesota.
Recent subzero temps did give Coley pause. "I don't own a pair of UPS pants," he told me. "I was looking for some the day it was 27 below, and then I remembered I had returned them all." So Coley wore shorts.
He even shovels snow in shorts. A video of him doing that was recently recorded by his wife, Maria Olson, at the request of his disbelieving sister, Yolette.
Shorts are practically de rigueur in his native Jamaica, but Minnesota is not that warm a place sometimes.
The curious sight of people walking around in shorts when there is snow on the ground has perplexed me for years. WCCO-TV's recent clip of a college kid, who would not give his name because his attire would have angered his mom, reminded me that I've been collecting video of people wearing shorts in winter for two years.
My original subject for an interview about cold-weather shorts disappeared, so I asked a random FedEx guy, Gordy, if he had any colleagues who wore shorts in winter. Gordy said he knew a guy named Floyd, and within hours I was arranging an interview with Coley. Thank you, Gordy!
While I would never expose my legs to windchill, there was a time when I played tennis outside with a group of pals until the temperature dipped below 32 degrees or there was snow on the court — whichever came first. A couple of layers of long-sleeve T-shirts and we were perfectly warm. But Coley puts us to shame.
Q: I really want to understand shorts as attire in the dead of winter.