My high school burned down the middle of my senior year and I mean to the ground. The most likely cause was that someone broke into the auditorium, lit the very old drapes on fire and then let 70 years worth of oil swept wood floors do the rest of the work. I lived a few miles away and the fireball was so bright within just a few minutes that that it woke me and my mother up from a sound sleep. I honestly thought that our small town had been firebombed. We drove towards the fireballs in the sky until it was apparent where it was coming from. Hundreds of other people were already there to watch the 1920’s building go up in a blaze of glory but we couldn’t get within a quarter mile of it because of the heat.
We went back to school in temporary buildings and a partitioned gymnasium with the remains still smoldering to make “classrooms” a couple of weeks later but we didn’t have any books or supplies except for miscellaneous and non-matching spares that other school districts donated. The teachers and administrators did the best that they could but it resulted in complete social breakdown in many ways.
I have told a lot of things that resulted from that period here before and a lot of people don’t believe them but they are a fact due to exceptional circumstances. Let’s just say that hundreds of teenagers crowded together with few functioning educational resources tend to get really creative with the types activities they come up with to pass the time. We had every contest imaginable (and some almost unimaginable) including betting lines on almost anything we could pull off or pull out.
I was in high school in the early 50s, different world then.
School librarian committed suicide.
One kid shot another one horsing around after school with a .22 rifle. Shootee recovered, nobody ever even talked about criminal charges or gun control. Boys will be boys. I knew them both very well.
Every boy went to school with a jackknife from 3rd grade onward. Some brought fishing tackle, for when the art teacher sent us outside to sketch.
A girl was expelled and not allowed to graduate because she secretly got married in her senior year. Not pregnant, but not a virgin either, and that was enough.
A guy on the track team got beaned with a discus, rushed to emergency, got a steel plate in his head.
Two girls were caught kissing each other and were thenceforward thought to be lesbians, but we didn’t know the word.
Four of my sister’s classmates were killed instantly when they crashed into a concrete bridge abutment in their dad’s '49 Ford.
Every boy at 18 immediately registered for the draft, because the draft card was proof of drinking age. Most kids knew what marijuana was, because we heard about it on a radio episode of Dragnet, and then asked our parents what it was.
It was rumored the high school graduating class the year before mine were preparing for their five-year reunion, when it was discovered that the treasurer had smoked and snorted the entire budget for the gathering and then blew town. I heard this from enough people; I doubt its rumorousness.
In Jr. high school the art teacher would leave the classroom for second and come back in wiping her mouth off with the back of her hand. Everyone knew she was drinking on the job but nothing was done.
The biggest one by far was that one of the girls in my graduating class was murdered by a security guard right before graduation who first tried to rape her and then shot her when she wouldn’t comply. And this was in a very upscale neighborhood in LA. The guy also tried to have the prosecutors rubbed out by a hitman unsuccessfully: http://articles.latimes.com/1990-12-18/local/me-6662_1_security-guard
I took a drafting class my Freshman year, a class which was covered almost entirely by a teacher’s aide not much older than us students. Her tits rubbed against my elbow whenever she stopped by my desk. Wish I could remember her name.
Couple days into the school year, I got permission to spend my study hall in the drafting room rather than with my originally scheduled old biddy of an English teacher.
In the early 70’s four women kept a male love slave in the basement room of a half empty dorm. This was in an era of enforced dorm living.
It was all girls school and surprisingly none of the girls got charged with anything, although the guy got charged with trespassing.
If this was made into a movie these girls would have been free spirited beauties rebelling against the patriarchy. I knew two of them and they were dirty layabouts who deserved to get booted.