What, you mean the thing my school copied from a popular character on a popular prime time TV show watched by tens of millions in the 70s was not confined to my school alone??!?
Yeah, I realized after I posted that, I really boinked the part about “specific to your school/area”. Dumb of me. In my very weak defense, I didn’t have any specific knowledge that any other schools were doing it…
Weird just in the repeating nature of the motif in question. Every ~18 months, like clockwork, the entire school would have a yo-yo craze, and every boy had to have one, so natcherally I had to bug my parents to get me one. By the time the third iteration came along and I had noticed the pattern I was utterly bored with the entire notion.
Madrid, end 60s to end 70s, there were waves of fads in a recurring fashion: spinning tops, yo-yos, playing races with bottle tops (link to Spanish Wiki, no link to English found), marbles, trading cards, and back to the beginning.
For a while in Middle School some kid would come to school with a big jar of individually-wrapped Warheads sour candy, and sell them all. I don’t know if they ever switched up candies…I never bought any because I don’t like sour candy.
I remember it being a Big Thing and I think some other kids tried their hand at selling candies too. And I think it was hush-hush but I’m sure the teachers knew about it.
I don’t know, maybe this was a thing everywhere. I do remember being kind of in awe that a retail-sales-channel-sized jar of individually wrapped candy was available to this kid, like he was a gas station or something. It was in the infancy of Sam’s Club.
This occurred at our school too. I think it was the junior high levels (our jr and sr high was in one building - small school). They would pick you up very early, in a school bus, and drive you to the fields. They paid us super low wages (ag can pay below federal minimum wage I believe - maybe if you are under 18?). I think the first summer I made $1.15/hr and the next summer I got a 10 cent raise. You know I was Scrooge McDuck rolling in all that money! Thanks Pioneer Seed Co.
We did this for the corn fields as well. Nothing like roguing the corn field. Blech.
The worst ag job I ever had was working at the egg ranch to move the “old” hens into the rolling cages and onto the semi so they could be turned into soup. The scene in Napoleon Dynamite undersells how disgusting that job was. Those of us on the lower level (two-level barn) were constantly rained upon by the shit of thousands of excited hens above us. Horrible job and I cannot stress how horrible.
In my middle school, pencil fighting became all the rage. It was like someone sent out a memo, one day everybody was pencil fighting. Those cats were fast as lightning.
My sister got a job for the summer working in tobacco fields(?). They took kids to South Carolina(?) on a bus. Kids lived in dorms, worked with tobacco, had their pay minus an allowance deposited in a bank account.
My elementary school (60s/70s) too had a run on marbles and yoyos for a while. The big thing for the girls was Chinese jump ropes - does anyone remember those? We used them for a special kind of jumping rope and also did cats in the cradle stuff with them. Also, the famous, banned Click Clacks were a big hit along with the Footsie (ring around the ankle and you’d skip over a ball attached with a string). We’d make our own out of a plastic coffee can cover, string and an empty thread spool. Not really weird or stupid, just fads.
Our bus driver’s name was Mr. Hagen. For one year, the kids would chant over and over, the entire way to school, every morning - Old man Hagen, sitting in a rocking chair, chewing on his underwear. I don’t know how the poor guy could stand it. He never said a thing.
For some reason, in 2nd grade, we started calling each other by our last names only. Like we were a bunch of construction workers!
During junior high, when some boys turned into animals, they would spit loogies in the girls’ hair when we were on the bus. Many a tear was shed. We hated those boys.
In eighth grade, we had a squirt-gun craze. Bonus points for the smallest gun. Everybody had one. You know that scene in A Christmas Story where the teacher confiscates all the hillbilly teeth and dumps them in her desk drawer? Imagine every teacher’s desk drawer filled to overflowing with water guns. Good times.
I must confess: I was a goody-goody and would NEVER bring a S-G to school. Until the last day of class before summer vacation. The first time I used it, the homeroom teacher (one of my favorites; had him for German class) was standing right there, confiscated it and shot me in the face. I loved it.
I doubt it was just local but Click Clack (?) balls were a big thing. I think they were pulled from the market when some chipped and injured several eye balls. Then yo-yos. Then water pistols concealed and used whenever the teacher left the room or turned her back. I actually took a hard back book and hollowed it out in order to hide my space-laser water gun. I never got caught.
Yes! Big fad when I was in elementary school. And cat’s cradle. And that Philipino dance with the big bamboo poles.
In elementary school we would get small 8 ounce cartons of milk delivered to our classroom. (All Norwegian kids brought sandwiches from home, and mostly still do.) For a while there was a fad for stabbing one of the bottom corners several times with the pointy end of a pair of compasses and drink the milk through those holes instead of opening the carton the regular way.
Saved me a worse experience the time I stupidly decided to drink the carton I’d accidentally left in my desk over the weekend …
Penny basketball and paper triangle football. I’m certain mine wasn’t the only junior high to play those at lunch.
We also played a pencil-and-paper naval combat game; we’d draw a map of a seascape, with islands and capes and such, then draw in our warships. Combat began when one player placed a sharp pencil point down on the paper on their ship, and flicked it by pushing down on the eraser with a finger, resulting in a short line. The next shot was taken from the end of that mark. The idea was to reach your opponent’s ship in the fewest shots.
I wouldn’t call that a “fad”, as “fad” implies “something done for fun”, and no one in my middle school liked that gawdawful dance. Nevertheless, it was a staple of P.E. As a big, unathletic, clumsy kid, those damn bamboo poles inflicted any number of bruises to my ankles and feet.
Does anyone know what that dance was actually called? For some reason, I had it in my head as “Kon-tiki”; probably because I was doing it around the time Thor Heyderal and his raft were in the news.
That reminds me, in my school we would play war by drawing rows and rows of little stick figure soldiers on opposite ends of a piece of paper. Then hold a pencil by the eraser end and whip a line across the page from one side to the other. Any soldiers that were hit were dead. The last side with remaining soldiers won.
Must have been played other places, but it really hasn’t come up in daily life since fourth or fifth grade, so I wouldn’t know.
I had a couple of sets of “clackers,” and one of them did shatter as I was clacking them. Fortunately, none of the fragments ended up in my eyes.
I also recall yo-yo and water pistol fads, and playing “football” with a tightly-folded triangle of paper. One thing I’ve wondered is if these fads were happening at roughly the same time everywhere, or if they popped up in different areas at different times. I grew up in the pre-Internet era, and we had no idea what was popular in other schools, much less in other cities.
In the early 1960s a local radio station had a thing going where people would call in and announce how many alligators they had “seen” at a particular spot at some odd time. For awhile I held the record at something like 267 alligators in Beaver Creek. You know how high school year books often have some slogan or saying under each name? Mine reads, “Counting alligators at 3:00 AM”. Future generations will have NO idea what the heck that means.
I worked with a junior programmer from a working class background who was stressed and distressed that a starting wage intern a middle-class job got paid less than for grabbing chickens in a chicken shed.
He hadn’t grokked that the reason middle-class kids went to school wasn’t to get rich: it was so that they didn’t have to grab chickens in a chicken shed.
It would take a LLLOTTTTT more than I make in my current, well-paying job to ever do the constant-chicken-shit-raining-from-above job again. It is seriously disturbing to me right now, and I did it nearly 35 years ago. I think it gave me PTSD. After the first day of that “job”, we went back for day two and all got completely wasted in order to deal with it.
I don’t know the name, but we danced it for fun at recess when I was in elementary school (didn’t have P.E. then). We thought it was different and fun…like Chinese jump rope!
My high school has a decades old tradition of going “Bohr”. We would go Bohr for a variety of reasons. Authority displeasing us, Authority letting us get away with it, the end of a class/day/week/semester, often happened during school assemblies especially if there were guest alumni, on field trips, some times it was a protest but mainly it was a way to annoy others and call attention to our selves as a group.
A Bohr usually started with a single inquisitive 'Bohr?" Or sometimes a conspiring “Bohr?!” Which is then responded to with affirmative "Bohr"s. Now, this is the point of no return. If Authority does not stop it now, it is going to happen. The whole room is now going Bohr. Bohr. Bohr. Bohr! Borh! Borh! BorhBorhBohrBorh! No specific rhythm and usually didn’t last too long except at the end of school year