They still play dodge ball in my girls' PE classes. That, and a game they call 'sting', which sounds an awful lot like smear the queer.

Friend of mine used to build homemade rockets and set them off on school baseball diamond using chemicals from the lab as a fuse (glycerin and potassium permangnate, I think). More often than not, he'd pack the DIY 'engines' too tightly and the thing would explode -- always thought that may have been his intention all along.

Remember drawing swastikas on book covers. lots of boys did it and I don't think any of them grew up to be Nazi's. I am sure my parents set me straight on this one. probably about 3rd or 4th grade. //

Not sure how old you are but when I was in grade school we did this all the time, and there were a lot of swastikas in our comics and surf mags. Before there were even Nazis, surfers in the 30's I believe began to use the Swastika as a logo and it was one of the first and biggest mass produced boards at one point. So it was ingrained in the surfer mindset very early without any negative association. Of course at some point it was squashed as a business logo and name, but the rebellious surf culture kept it going for quite sometime, at least through the 60's when I grew up on the beach. Probably one of the reasons surfers were looked at as rebels, most did not know that sign predated Hitler.


Guessing that since so much of CA surf culture was exported back then, that it showed up all over the country too. Remember Rat Fink and Murph the Surf, swastikas all over the place in those old cartoons and comics. Also remember some very racist cartoons in surfer magazine, real sambo type shit...Would definitely get kicked out of school with that on my desk.


Hey Duffy, you are a lot younger than me, do you remember in your youth any swastikas still hanging around in the surfing culture???

When I was in HS, you could still bring your deer rifle in the gun rack in the cab of your pickup.

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I'll be what I am
A solitary man

Other than the occasional fight and the odd knife here and there, I had a couple that would be looked on pretty poorly today. I went to a small school, <100 per grade, in farm country. My dad was on the school board. I never thought much of it but in retrospect I think some of the teachers did.

Not sure how this would play out today since it was not actually intentional. I was talking to one of my friends during class. Someone smacked me on the back. Thinking it was another of my friends I backhanded them. It turned out to be perfectly aimed backhand across the face. To my teacher. Glasses knocked off. We both kind of stood there stunned and I mumbled avery sincere apology. End of story.

Senior year. My best friend was QB and was feuding with one of the football coaches. When the coach went out to practice, he put icy hot in the coaches pants. The coach wanted him kicked off the team, he got held out of the first series of the next game. Brad gave me a case of beer to do donuts in the guy's yard during the next game. I figured since I was getting a case of beer out of it, I'd do a good job. Unbeknownst to me, the coach had quit since he wasn't kicked off the team and was home to see my very recognizable 1976 AMC Hornet wagon trashing his yard. I didn't roll over on my friend. He was smart enough to say he didn't know anything about it. End of story.

Senior year. Burned the study hall monitor's bush in her front yard with a coffee can of gas. Way too big of fireball from what I intended. I never told a soul until 15 years later. She was out for blood. My ass would have been in a sling then. Today it would have been jailed.

To go with someone else's above. My neighbor brought some chickens to school. He had someone pass them in through the window and he put them in the suspended ceiling in the study hall. That was actually a solid prank. Very hard to catch, no real damage, funny as hell when you could hear them running around up there before people figured out what was going on.

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.

Funny you mention this. Neighbours of ours pulled one of their daughters from 5th grade at our local elementary school and put her back into Catholic school just a few weeks into her first semester there. When they were telling us, the wife used the words "sexual harassment". I was going to blow it off as more like "just boys being boys", but my wife seemed to sense what I was thinking and shot me a warning look.

Used to tease a brother & sister who both wore wigs to school. They both had Leukemia. I don't think any of us realized what cancer really was at the time.

Egged my soccer coaches car junior year on Halloween. He found out it was me. Not surprisingly, my senior year, I didn't make the soccer team. Even though the previous year I was a starter and the seniors always made the sports team. Even if they didn't play all season, they made the team.

I'm sure all the teasing I did would be considered bullying nowadays. Always seemed inevitable everyone would turn against one of the girls we hung out with. Everyone would rail against and exclude them for a couple weeks, then whatever they did would be forgiven and they'd be welcomed back in the group. Couple of weeks later it would happen to someone else. Everything always worked out and nobody's parents were ever called, the police weren't called. It was just part of being a hormonal teen.

Used to love playing dodgeball in gym. Although getting hit in the face with those rubber balls hurt like hell.

While not really anything approaching suspension-worthy, back in the mid-80s a national bank in the UK had a junior saver campaign where you opened a savings account and got a bunch of stuff:



See that nifty sports bag? Seemed like EVERYONE had one. So one lunchtime my merry little band decided to fan out through the school and gather up as many of them as we could from where people had left them outside classrooms ready for the first class of the afternoon, and deposit them in a big pile in the middle of the yard.

That afternoon's first class consisted mainly of kids interrupting other classes trying to track down the kids whose bags they had, then looking for their own bags. We somehow never faced any consequences for that either, from the school or fellow pupils.

What, no titty twisters?

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I'll be what I am
A solitary man

Carried a spring loaded knife
Punched out a bully
Made a slingshot and hit a dude in the head
Had a fake gun that could shot really loud plastic blank bullets
Disassembled a bullet, burnt the gunpowder and in the process burned friend's face too.

WTF who pisses on someone else? Apparently swimmers because this was rampant on our team also. Not as organized as you. Oh and don't ever drink a soda in the shower unless it's yours and you are a 100% certain it never left your hand.

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"I think I've cracked the code. double letters are cheaters except for perfect squares (a, d, i, p and y). So Leddy isn't a cheater... "

All you guys who were trouble makers as kids (and have since wised up) should be volunteering at your local junior high & high school. Coach a team, be a mentor, make a cash contribution to a classroom for supplies, cleanup graffiti. It's desperately needed and it matters.

Not pissing on just anyone. But 14 year old boys. Who does that? I wonder if OneGoodLeg is a Republican Senator. :)

Sports team hazing gets pretty bad. The worst our wrestling team did was to make people do animal noises. Kind of like when you ask a little kid what sound a dog makes. Except you are making high school kids bark and moo.

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.

I think I can make credible arguments that all three teachers/study hall monitors deserved it. :)

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.

I teach kids (12-16) jiu jitsu. Does that count?

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

I'd hardly call what you do teaching.

Oh Snap.

To an outside observer it might look like child abuse.


Btw, my son wears a pink gi and the other day a new kid's mom asked a guy who the kid on the pink gi was (I was eves dropping). The guy she asked told her and then she asked if he was gay.

Kinda weird. Pink hasn't been gay since about 1988.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

We used to bring loaded shotguns to school and leave them in our vehicle so we could to pheasant hunting later. I had a couple of friends who road dirt bikes to school from their family farms, both would bring (load) shotguns into school and put them in their locker. The late 70's, early 80's were a very different, and much more innocent time.

Phys Ed and having a shower afterwards was mandatory when I was in H.S.. We had this kid whose nickname was "Piggy" who refused to take a shower after Phys Ed. One day we all grabbed him and black balled him with boot polish. He always took a shower after that. I imagine today there would be lawsuits, claims of permanent psychological damage to the guy and all the other P.C. bull shit.