"Dazed And Confused"--What were "Air Raids"

Cafe Society
1

Recently I watched part of Dazed and Confused, which deals with high school life in Texas in the 1970s. Apparently part of the custom was rather vicious hazing, and no, you didn’t have to be in band or on the football team, or any team, you just got hazed for being a Frosh. At one point a Senior girl tells a Frosh girl to get on the ground for an “Air Raid”. When the younger girl refuses, the Senior promises that she will make her life a living hell.

So what was an Air Raid? I did see the whole move years ago, but don’t remember.

2

In the movie, it was basically how you describe it - a senior girl yells “Air Raid!” and the freshman girl has to get down on the ground. There’s nothing more to it than just being one of a number of degrading things the freshwomen have to do. I took it as evidence that these rituals had been going on at the high school for many years - i.e., for at least the couple of decades since air raid drills were actually common practice in schools.

3

They just hit the deck. Here’s a clip.

4

A few grade schools continued them until the early 70s. I’ll bet there were plenty doing it in the mid-60s.

5

.

So then, the freshman wasn’t ordinarily submitted to further abuse, such as tickling or pouring water on? Not that I think it’s OK as you describe it, but there seems to be no point to it.

We had drop drills (aka “duck and cover”) in my earlier school years.

6

[Evil Captor]

I agree. It would have been a much better movie if the freshman girls had been tied up and spanked by their older classmates.

[/Evil Captor]

7

When I was in high school (the early eighties), the Girl’s Club had basically the same routine. An upperclass girl would yell, “Air Raid”, and the freshman initiates had to fall on the ground and pretend to shoot a machine gun in the air.

8

Ha! I don’t know if it would be a **better ** movie, as I think *Dazed & Confused * is damn near perfect as is, but it certainly would be different. And I would watch it.

9

Moderator expresses considerable annoyance:
Lou: considering that there is a 600-page Pit thread on Evil Captor, and considering the foo-faraw that’s been going on, your comment is in excruciatingly bad taste. It is, in point of fact, flaming and belongs in the Pit-forum, not here.

I grant you, had you said this a couple of months ago, it might have been just “funny,” but timing is everything. At the moment, it is not funny, it is insulting and gratuitously so.

10

So if someone yells “'Gator!” in college, you get down on the floor and like it, but if someone yells “Air Raid” in high school, you get down on the floor and feel miserable? What’s the difference?

Oh, right: Booze.

11

Sorry to you and sorry to him. I generally stay out of the Pit and don’t like engaging on pile-ons of Dopers. I meant to be funny because that’s his usual schtick, and didn’t even realize there was some kind of witch-hunt going on. Doesn’t seem like my business anyway.

12

The entire movie “Dazed and Confused” was filmed here in Austin, Richard Linklater’s hometown. However, no one I’ve met here in Austin has any recollection of the kind of hazing incidents portrayed in the movie taking place during the Seventies.

Friends from smaller towns in East Texas, however, assure me that similar and far MORE painful and embarrassing hazing rituals were commonplace in their day.

13

Linklater actually went to high school in Huntsville, which is in East Texas. My husband went to the same high school and my mother-in-law still teaches there, but there really isn’t that kind of hazing anymore.