Boy1 is a freshman in high school, and they only have gym lockers. Books are maintained in classrooms, and distributed as needed, and copies of certain textbooks are kept at home for homework purposes. Boy1 hauls notebooks, paper, homework, (un)washed gym clothes, lunch, snack, pens/pencils, and uniform stuff (JROTC and cross country) back and forth as needed.
Yep. IIRC we could keep some of the bigger and heavier text books in drawers in the classroom, but I had a pretty heavy bag to carry to school. Officially we were told to only carry our books in rucksacks worn properly over both shoulders, but of course that was hopelessly geeky so everyone had sports holdalls slung over one shoulder, and constantly walked with a lean. 
Late 90’s highschooler, we had full size lockers 10" wide with shelves, for long coats & boots. During sophomore year bookbags and coats were banned after homeroom so you had to use your locker or carry around all of your school books.
At my high school, most of the lockers were half-height, but some were even smaller, about a cubic foot. They were known as ‘freshman lockers’ since locker choice went by seniority. It wasn’t too uncommon to grab two of those lockers if you could. The locker room lockers[sup]*[/sup] were mostly half-height, with some full height ones. The larger ones were invariably allocated to the members of the sports teams first. The girls’ locker room at the time had either no or very few full-height lockers.[sup]**[/sup]
*Odd that the term ‘locker room’ for me doesn’t necessarily signify a room with lockers in it, but a room in which a sports team prepares. In this case it was our changing room for P.E.
**How do I know this? During my time there the old gym containing the boys’ locker room was condemned and torn down. The girls’ locker room was split to accomodate the boys, with a hastily erected partition that routinely needed patching.
My high school (built in the late 1940s) had full-size lockers. By full-size, I mean roughly 5’ tall and 12" wide – just a little too narrow to put typical notebook binder in sideways. You were assigned a locker outside your home room. You could go to your locker between classes, but there was usually only enough time to visit it at lunch. We were allowed to have locks, but they had to be purchased from the school, which had a master key.
Since I was in high school during the peak of the baby boom overcrowding, most of us had to share lockers. I don’t remember them having any maintenance at all and broken handles or missing shelves weren’t uncommon.
And contrary to what others have said, our lockers were definitely large enough to stuff someone into. A relatively short and lean classmate of mine won a case of beer for staying in a locker all day.
My grade school got them about 1970 and every school I attended thereafter had them. They were the tall full sized ones. The locker rooms (gym class) had small ones.
I grew up in the south part of Chicago and we had the tall lockers. We had lockers from 7th grade on.
Did you notice on TV shows where the kids have the 1/2 lockers no one ever has a locker on the bottom.
At my school (this was about 5 years ago, in Shropshire) they brought in lockers, but students who wanted them had to pay for them.
There is one group that get’s the summer off who are always allocated lockers though; MPs. I visited the HoP a few weeks ago (my grandmother’s local representative showed us around), apprently, before a new MP is given an office they are allocated a locker.
My middle school, built sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, but later remodeled, had lockers down almost every hallway, but the only people allowed to use hall lockers were the special education students. We did have locker rooms for the gym that everyone in gym class used.
My high school was built so that the only lockers were in the changing rooms for the gym and the pool, plus the band’s storage room. It stayed that way for at least 12 years (when it opened to when I graduated), but I’ve now heard (3 years post-graduation) that lockers have been added to the “house” buildings, and are available on a first-come-first-served basis. (The “house” buildings are the four main buildings with classrooms, and generally have math, science, English, and history classes in them. Foreign languages, arts, occupational classes, and gym are in other buildings most of the time.)
As fsr back as I can remember, we had lockers with combination locks in every grade (except when we were little kiddies, of course). My daughter attended a high school, two stories high, the size of a shopping mall, and her little locker was most inconveniently located. (as was everyone’s locker). She had to run run run run run all day between floors, from opposite ends of the building, etc. Finally she just found it easier to carry all her books for the day around with her in a backpack.
Oh, and there was scarcely room in that teeny locker for a winter coat, much less boots or shoes to change into. But as it turns out that was OK, because the school got a phoned in bomb threat every day for 53 DAYS IN A ROW, and all students had to be evacuated every time. So they all carried their winter coats around, too. Fun times. (The day they caught that psychopath phoning in bomb threats should have been made a federal holiday, and some kids suggested maybe he ought to be strung up by the privates on the flagpole as an example. But no, they wimped out and gave psycho the usual slap on the wrist and a few hours of community service.)
At my high school (20+ years ago) the lockers consisted of two lockers about 3 feet tall and very narrow, with two small square lockers on top of them, so that the whole thing stood maybe 5 feet tall. When you opened the left locker, you had access to a lever which would open the top square locker. If you opened the right locker, you could open bottom square locker (still above the two bottom thin lockers). The top square lockers were for books, and the bottom lockers were for coats, boots, etc. The top square lockers were barely wide enough for books, and you couldn’t stack many books in there. The bottom lockers were half that width, and you could barely stuff a heavy winter jacket in there.
It was basically a way of squeezing two lockers into the space of one, since the lockers needed to be tall enough to shove your coat into, and wide enough to hold books.
They may have gleamed once upon a time, but they were pretty scratched and beat up by the time I got there. As the lockers aged, the levers wouldn’t work properly and sometimes you had to smack the locker to get the top part to open. The top locker (where the books were supposed to go) was also too small, and if you had a lot of books they wouldn’t all fit. I ended up stacking books vertically at the bottom of the bottom part (coat portion) of the locker on occasion. Books don’t like to be stacked vertically.
As for maintenance, if the door fell off, they’d come and fix it. For anything else, you were probably on your own. Nobody fixed dents or poorly working levers. One kid even had one of the hinges broken so that his door nearly fell off every time he opened it. As long as the door actually stayed on, the school didn’t care. Another kid couldn’t get the top part of his locker to open, at all. They never fixed it. He just shoved everything into the bottom.
We had teeny tiny gym lockers, maybe a foot and a half square. Those were wire mesh so that they wouldn’t stink if someone left gym clothes in them. If you played sports, you had access to larger lockers which were full size, but you couldn’t use those for gym class. If someone was really, really small, you might be able to stuff them into one of these full sized lockers.
We generally didn’t have enough time between classes to stop back at our lockers, unless one of your classes happened to be really close to your locker. Generally, you’d grab your morning books and leave your afternoon books in the locker. Then at lunch you’d shove all of your books into the locker, and after lunch you’d grab just your afternoon books.
We were required to buy our own locks.
My high school had them (private, Catholic, a couple thousand students). I think a few were the half-height kind, but mostly they were the full-height ones. Too narrow to shove anyone into, though. And we still had to lug books to and from home, and the scheduling was tight enough that you usually had to carry with you everything you’d need all day. (It was a six-story building, with probably 30-some rooms per floor, and only four minutes between classes, so you’d be lucky to find one time a day that you could stop by your locker to swap out the contents of your backpack, let alone after each and every single class.)
I did love that locker, though. Something about having your own personal space to stake out was very appealing.
IIRC, all of my friends’ high schools, both public and private, had lockers of some kind or another, too.
Lockers at my old high school (downtown Buffalo, NY; building built in 1913). These are the same lockers as when I attended in the early 1980s; the school has been extensively remodeled since then, but the old lockers remained.
Every student got a locker. Generally, your locker was located as close to your homeroom as possible.
Obviously, your bullies didn’t try too hard, or take any origami courses.
“Man, if you fold his legs up this way, you can close the locker and it won’t pop open.”
Same with me… lockers from grade 7 on. Here’s the web page for my high school. When I was last there, there was a student video showing the halls… lined with the same lockers I remember. Can’t seem to find it now.
It’s not just the U.S. In Montreal, the high school I went to had full length lockers for every student. It had to, to hold our winter coats.
When I moved to L.A. the high school had half-length lockers for everyone.
Ever notice how, in movies and TV shows that have the half-height rather than the full-height lockers, none of the characters ever have a bottom locker? What an odd coincidence…
I was assigned my first locker in 6th grade, which was also the first year I had different classes in different rooms. We were the first class ever at the newly-built middle school building, and the lockers were indeed gleaming, though half-height. On the downside, the locks were built-in rather than free-hanging provide-your-own jobbies; you were issued the combination along with the locker number. Each combination lock also had a keyhole in the middle so that the administration could snoop around using a passkey if they wanted to.
High school, also half-height lockers. The locks weren’t built in, but you were required to buy one from the school store; non-conforming locks were cut off. The school locks were combination locks with serial numbers and a keyhole on the back for a passkey, once again to permit administrational snooping. They kept a book listing serial numbers and combinations, but not names. My lock met with an (ahem) unfortunate accident involving epoxy, toothpicks, and aluminum foil that rendered the serial number unreadable and the keyhole permanently plugged, but luckily for me the combination that only I knew still worked.
I can still recall how quick I got with that lock: zip through the combination with my left thumb only, then in one move unlock it, slip the shackle out and up into the locker handle and pull up to open the locker, then drop the shackle back into the locking hole. Muscle memory is a wonderful thing.
Full-length lockers and locks that went 18 right, 26 left, 16 right. That’s living.
We had lots of lockers in our high school and j r. high in the '70s. Underclassmen had to share with a “locker partner”. Seniors got thier own. They were full height, and I saw at least one smallish kid get stuffed into one in Jr. high. (Now you’ve got me trying to remember that kid’s name<edit Vernon Pearson!! >)
The latching mechanism, BTW, was made to pretty easy to open from the inside, the designers having anticipated such nonsense.
There were also seperate band/orchestra lockers that had a wire cage front, These were in several sizes to accomidate piccalos to tubas. I think the string basses pianos, and large percussion were the only instruments that wern’t kept in lockers.
Art and science classes had lockers or locking drawers where glassware, art supplies, and unfinished projects would be kept.
And then of course there were the gym lockers, A small drawer that was “yours” and shared half-height lockers for your street clothes when you actually in gym class.
Our high school had full sized lockers. Mind you, most of them would open if you just pulled hard on them, but in theory they locked.