From what I’ve seen, in the early days of public high schools, there seem to have been a couple of things you don’t see today, principally because they were so few and far between. First, you had the high school varsity teams playing against local colleges as well as any other organization that happened to have organized sports teams. Second, they seem to have used cheers that included the words “High School”, but didn’t name the school. For instance, from Los Angeles High School, in 1898:
Well, there are plenty of cheers that dont mention school at all.
My favorite football one: “Move the ball! Down the field! We want six! WE WANT SIX!” As in six points, for a touchdown, that is… but it never came out sounding like “six”…
But I can’t imagine a cheer that just said “High School!” The cheers I can recall, if they’ve got a school or team mention, it’s specific. It’s the team more often, actually, things like from my high school – “Let’s go Indians, Beat those <otherteam>s!” My college does both, things like “Mounties over here, stand up and cheer! Mounties over here, (other side) stand up and cheer! Let’s! Go! Mounties!” (my team is Mounties as in a shortened form of Mountaineers, not the CRMP, thank you very much.) Or the one the marching band does, with a groovy drum beat – “M! (thump thump thump) A! (thump thump thump) N! (thump) S! (thump) F-I-E-L-D, GO!” Yeah, we’s so creative.
But the cheer listed in the OP is really freaking weird. I understand not saying a school at all, or identifying your specific school, but just “High School!”? That’s dumb. Weird old people cheerleaders.
Oh and the version of racer72 and Dooku’s that I heard was a combination of the two: Rah rah ree, Rah rah rass.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Beadalin *
**(For when your team is losing:)
That’s all right, that’s OK
You will work for us someday!
The version that I know is,
That’s alright, that’s okay ,
your gonna pump our gas someday.
The classic cheer heard at least one time at ALL Indiana high school basketball games: “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar/ All for our team stand up and holler.”
My favorite cheer: the Linton Miners played the Fountain Central Mustangs in 1997 in Class A football. Several times, the Linton cheerleaders screamed out: “How do we like our horsemeat? Rah, rah, rah, rah!”
When they felt the refs were against their team, students at North Central (Farmersburg) and other schools have yelled out: “Nuts & bolts, nuts & bolts, we got screwed!”
It’s not ‘High School’, and it’s not even a cheer for the team, but at times when a UC (University of California) team was playing a CSU (California State University) school, the UC fans would chant ‘state school … state school’ as an insult.
Was the Los Angeles High mascot the frog, or did they just like the cheer?
I think in 1898 they might not have had any mascot, but by the 1930’s the teams were called the Romans. As for the frog noises and the “wallaga-wallaga” bit I think yells made mostly of nonsense syllables or phrases were quite popular for a long time. The LAHS website includes a 1935 student handbook that lists some of the yells then in use, and one of these was:
Ali bevo ali bivo ali bevo bivo bum
Bum get a rat trap bigger than a cat trap
bum get a rat trap bigger than a cat trap
Cannibal cannibal sis boom bah
L.A. High School rah rah rah
It seems like the Ali Bevo call, or variations of it, were widely popular. There’s a Three Stooges short from the same period where they are photojournalists being sent to the country of Vulgaria, and at one point the three of them yell:
A - bevo.
A - bivo
A - bevo bivo bum!
Bum get a rat trap bigger than a cat trap
rah rah rah
Vulgaria!
It was after reading the LAHS website that I finally understood what the Stooges were yelling.
As for the “High School!” cheers, I think they came out that way because there might then be only one high school in a radius of hundreds of miles, usually referred to as simply “The High School”.
I 'm not sure, but I believe that LAHS always has used the Romans as its mascot. I just read a rather comprehensive history in the 1935 Handbook of Student Information. Here’s what I found from an alumni Web site, advertised as the school’s oldest yell, with the name War Cry (which I do not remember):
War Cry
(L. A.'s oldest yell)
Ali-Bevo, Ali-Bivo
Ali-Bevo, bivo, bum,
Bum get a rat trap,
Bigger than a cat trap,
Bum get a rat trap,
Bigger than a cat trap,
Cannibal, Cannibal,
Sis, boom, bah,
L. A. High School,
Rah, rah, rah.
My grandfather (Class of '04) was the first member of my family to attend and graduate from L.A. High. He was the oldest in a family of six siblings and, as far as I know, the only one to attend college (UC Berkeley, 1904-1905). He never spoke about another mascot. My mother and two uncles, my brother and I are the only other LAHS alumni.
Watermelon watermelon watermelon rind. Look at the scoreboard see who’s behind. YOU YOU YOU!
Then there is the dependable “silent scream” where you just pretend to make a bunch of noise but in complete silence. It is intended to confuse the opposing stands.
Our small town school used "fill in the blank"cheers. Like they were created by a committee, for general distribution to all schools. If you could get your school name in three syllables they would work.
The main cheer was sung to The Stars and Stripes Forever and could apply anywhere:
[part I forgot]
…We’re happy and always of cheer
Helping friends and our classmates so dear
We’ll stand by and live by our school
We give three cheers of gratitude to our grade school
And then the “tailored” part:
Yoo-rah-rah my-school-name! x3
Yea Yea YEA!
Even in second grade it seemed hokey. Why would we have loyalty to our school? We hated it! Loyal to a school? That’s something from the deep past, like the Beach Boys!
And the previously mentioned:
2 bits 4 bits 6 bits a dollar
All for my-school-name stand up and holler.
There was a Peanuts bit where Lucy or Peppermint Patty or one of the girls was tasked with writing a cheer. The specifics are lost on me, but she wound up writing something with florid words well beyond her age,* and absolutely no meter. It was something like:
Victory shall be thine!
Ascend to new heights!
*Charles Schulz always failed to understand the verbal limitations of his characters vis a vis their ages (likely deliberately). For example, there’s Linus’ recitation of much of an entire chapter of the Book of Luke, in King James, in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Or when Charlie Brown told Lucy that the only way they’d beat Peppermint Patty’s team is if an earthquake opened up a hole in the ground that swallowed up PP’s team, and Charlie’s team “won by default.” Ba-dum-tssh!
At the end of every swim meet back in the '80s, my high school swim team used to sing a cheer that ended not with our school’s name, but instead with a salute to whatever school we were competing against. It was made up of a bunch of nonsense words that went something like this:
P.S. The words above are recollected from 35-year old memories, and I’ve never seen the words actually written down, so take this with a grain of salt.