I’m not sure if we were technically allowed to leave for lunch, but nobody did because there was nowhere to go. Lunch was only a half-hour; by the time you could even get to the nearest fast food or convenience store, it’d be time to turn around and go back.
High school mid- to late-60s but it was in Orange county, right next to where Nixon was from; closed campus.
Bananas: Never, ever eat 'em. Dropped off at day care one day while my mom and aunt went off to do something. The afternoon snack was luke-cold mild with a banana mashed up in it. Since then the smell and thought of eating a banana gives me the willies. Evel looking at one is off putting.
Oh yeah, there’s that. We were most definitely not allowed to leave at lunch, and even if we had been allowed, lunch periods were only 22 minutes and we were 3 miles from the nearest places to get food, so probably no one would have bothered.
Those of you who had a “closed campus” in high school, how did that work? People at the front door saying you can’t leave, or people in the cafeteria making sure you were there? I suppose it could simply be like my junior high, and the students were just “expected” to be within the building. Our high school had people coming and going all the time.
We were just expected to stay. I don’t remember monitors of any kind.
Back then I would have said we had an open campus because there was no way they could possibly fence in the entire campus - it was just too big. (My graduating class was 1000+ students.) That was then. Now, in the age of daily school shootings, they found a way and the entire campus is behind tall, sturdy steel fencing, with monitored egress.
I hadn’t considered that. But my kids went to a big public high school in Seattle in the modern era and it was completely open.
The other reason I would have thought fencing to be impossible is the fact that there is a major street that cuts right through the middle of campus, with semi-heavy traffic. Seems that wasn’t an issue. (The school was the only high school in town and a State football powerhouse. Nobody wanted to dilute the team by building another high school. When the enrollment got too big, the district just made the middle school across the street “North Campus” and sophomores spent most of their day over there.)
We couldn’t plausibly have gotten anywhere to eat from the first high school I was at without a motor vehicle, which none of us had access to. I don’t remember it ever coming up.
At the second one I remember sometimes walking to a sandwich place after school; so it must have been possible. But I don’t remember going anywhere at lunchtime; and again, I don’t remember it ever coming up. I think it would have been noticed if I wasn’t at lunch; I seem to remember that we had usual tables, and teachers at them, though that might have been only the first school.
I do wonder how much of the difference has to do with time, and how much with location. Some schools were undoubtedly quite close to reasonable places for students to eat at, and/or quite close to some of the students’ homes. Other schools probably had mostly students bussed in over distances and either no place to eat within a few minutes’ walk, or no place considered safe for students to hang out at.
Nitpick: in terms of bicycle stability, the gyroscope effect of the spinning wheels is not a contributing factor. Bicycles stay upright in motion almost entirely because of steering geometry. A 150lb person riding on a 25lb bicycle that has a pair of 2lb wheels spinning at maybe a few couple hundred rpm is not subject to noticable gyroscopic effects.
Micheal Phelps, on the other hand, doing the butterfy, yeah, a lot of spinning going on there.
At my school, there was a security guard in a shack by the entrance to the parking lot. He checked everyone who was coming and going during the school day. If you needed to leave, like for a doctor’s appointment or to take the AP exam, you were supposed to show him a note from the office saying you had permission to leave.
And like others said, leaving for lunch wouldn’t have worked anyway. You couldn’t get anywhere without a car. And while many kids who were old enough did have cars, driving down to Hardee’s in the traffic that would have resulted from everyone leaving at the same time, ordering something, and getting back in the 30 minutes we got for lunch, probably wouldn’t have been possible.
Southern California so there were no doors as such, but rather rows of classrooms with separate buildings for admin, the library, gym and locker rooms, etc.
We didn’t have anyone counting noses in the cafeteria. Not everyone ate there but brought lunch from home, or out of the machines (raises hand) and eat at an outside table or in a classroom if the weather was hot or inclement.
I never tried to escape so I don’t know the details but there were two burger places across the street, Jack in the Box and Burger Chef, so it would be easy enough to have someone swing by there to check the patrons, and also check no one drove out of the parking lot. Southern California meant no one would walk more than 50 yards if they could help it.
Teachers took attendance at each class and a student who had study hall that period would be sent around to each classroom to ask each teacher who was absent. The student then turned in the list of who was missing that period into the school office to check for anyone who wasn’t excused. Additionally, it was a small school so if someone left, their absence was very noticeable.
God it was so long ago I’m not sure I’m remembering correctly but I think only seniors were allowed to leave campus. There was definitely nobody monitoring this.
I am starting to feel like I went to school in the golden age. We never had corporal punishment (though my cousin of the same age in a nearby state said that they did), never had duck-and-cover drills or strict dress codes. In my HS, it was not uncommon for a student to just skip a class or two now and then, and there was really no way to prevent us from leaving campus (the public park on the edge of school would have been too big to patrol). Of course, the city still had truancy laws, so a student could not too blatant at gadding about in the middle of a school day.
I went to a five-day boarding prep school out in the 'burbs in the early Eighties. I never had a car on campus and leaving without permission was, IIRC, forbidden. I never tried. Not too many dining options nearby, anyway, and the food in the cafeteria was decent.
Don’t eat bananas all that often, but I don’t pull off the banana “strings” unless they’re really thick, or unless they’ve already started coming off on their own. I usually do eat the tip, though.
Huh?
It had sat out of the refrigerator long enough to be only a few degrees cooler than ambient.
But what was the banana mashed up in?
Milk. Weird typo, but just a typo.
My car color is Urban Titanium, so I chose the grey option.
When I was in high school, only seniors could leave campus. But juniors and younger were too young to drive, and to go anywhere you’d need to drive. Some kids were close enough to go home (the high school was in the middle of a neighborhood of single homes). @DesertDog , my high school had a similar layout to yours, since it was also in SoCal (but about 38 miles west of yours).