We Freak About Stuff

Upon reading through the archives over at Richmond Roadie, I came across this post about finding his high school yearbooks in the garage. He was class of '85 and tells about all the stuff teens did back then that we today would completely freak out about. Chewing tobacco, beer t-shirts, pictures of students drinking wine in hot tubs, smoking, crazy hairdo's, etc. I was class of '82 and remember stuff like that, too. Jocks and stoners, low riders, Cholos, rah-rahs, thespians. Jocks drove "high riders" which were jacked-up muscle cars (I had a Camaro) and burned rubber around every corner. We had a junior high school across the street, so when I turned the corner, I laid some rubber down to scare all the jr. highers. Every day. Stoners were often associated with low riders, although I've since heard that Concord, CA was the only place anybody knew about where the low riders were white kids. Chevy Impalas with fuzzy dice and custom upholstery. Kids too tame to lift a set of hydraulics from a delivery truck usually had their weight set in the trunk to lower the car.

Kids smoked, and we had a smoking section that was near the "portables" and the entire field behind the classrooms. Teachers openly smoked with students, and teachers often smoked in their offices between classes. Kids smoked pot, too, and many of them came to class stoned. Some teachers had beer parties for their students (invite only). We etched rock group graffiti in all our desks, and smoking wasn't allowed in the bathrooms, but it happened anyway. The bathrooms were ruled by the stoners, and they freely smoked pot there. We had an open campus and students were free to leave campus at lunch or recess.

In student government we had a couple of wild comedians run for activities commissioner as a pair. They promised things like tight underwear Bee Gee's sing-alike contests, new ideas for spirit week and such. They won. Their crowning achievement was the annual "Underwear Day." They planned a stage performance for a lunch period with students performing a dance to music in their underwear, chicks too, but with bags over their heads for anonymity. The school administration surprisingly approved, and all the TV news crews came out to film. What the school didn't know was that upon completion of the staged event, all those in underwear would run wildly around the school and out into the streets and shopping center nearby. This made big headlines. The following year, the vice-principal came on the intercom to say that underwear day was cancelled. But it happened anyway, all four years I was there as an underground event. Today we would freak about such things.