Going To School In 1977

[58Bassman]

What I described was a 1972 Grand Prix. I had to dip into my savings and that still stands out as well as how it started a cycling bug that is still with me. I would mow lawns and do chores excited to see my savings balance and then that monumental event of withdrawing to get the bike. That bike was in a way an important part of a teen building self-esteem. I would ride to neighboring towns and teen jobs.

I really liked that bike- had the leather Brooks saddle, really comfortable. Unfortunately, when I rode to work, it was uphill and into the wind. Riding home, it was downhill and into the wind, but the hills didn't matter as much.

 

[Lonn]

I went to high school in London in the 70s. We rode double decker busses, the tube or British Rail to school, and everywhere for that matter. Boy do I miss those annual passes that got me on everything all the time.

 

[Mike Eskimo]

Hmmmm…I don’t see anyone smoking.

At my school, you could smoke in the parking lot and there was a courtyard where smoking was allowed between classes. I remember being 14yo and having a smoke with an English teacher between classes.

OMG yes, the smoking. I forgot about that. I did not smoke but a lot of people did. During lunch the smokers would go on the patio outside the cafeteria. It would be 15 degrees in the winter and they'd be out there in their jean jackets freezing to death so they could get a smoke. You could see them out the window. I never quite got the attraction.

Indeed. As many of my fellow fossils remember, record stores also often doubled as head shops.

One of the items that we found at the record store were rolling papers that had a tan or browned end printed on them, so if you used a little cheapy Rizzla rolling machine, it looked exactly like a tobacco cigarette.

At the big smoking courtyard at our high school ? Teachers never went out there. They would look down from the windows and keep an eye on the kids that way, but they never dared set foot out there so there was a half a dozen people at any one time smoking joints that looked just like cigarettes from a window 20 feet away ...

 

[HaWE]

I left school in 1977,we were driving to school by bus. Nobody ( including the teachers ) had such cool looking cars .

 

[kctelegas]

I definitely got a whiff of weed at 0:40.

 

[Engine Swap]

I definitely got a whiff of weed at 0:40.

Same - my buddy’s brother looked exactly like the jean jacket guy.

 

[Knows3Chords]

I definitely got a whiff of weed at 0:40.

I smell it more than I ever did in high school. I smell it when I'm stopped at a traffic light. I smell it when I'm in the grocery store. I smell it everywhere.

 

[telestratosonic]

I'm a year younger than you and that describes it perfectly.
Every 3rd or 4th household had one car, teenagers had none, all the schools in our town had uniforms in either navy blue, bottle green or grey.
Ours was grey with the prescribed green sports kit. Though we'd tart up our blazers with bin lid sized punk badges that we'd take off at the school gate.

More Grange Hill or Gregory's Girl (filmed in Mrs K's high school), than Carrie or Grease.

At least with the uniform system you knew who to fight/run away from, after the 4pm bell.

 

[Refugee]

I was a junior at Madison HS in Michigan in '77. Just like I remembered it. Pintos, Mavericks, Gremlins, Monarchs, Pacers, Vegas etc. How many of those cars are still on the road 'ya think?

The sleeper was the Monza. Stock, the Vega would beat it. But the Monza had a lot of room under the hood. Here's a '75 with a 402 big block.

 

[getbent]

I graduated in 77. I think I saw school as just my job and something that was required. I liked school. I liked most of my classes, some of my teachers I really liked. It was kind of an awful place at times and I was more on the top of the social heap, so I know for sure it sucked if you weren't.

Lots of kids quietly dealing with lots of disappointment. I think that disappointment (the 70's) was the great expectations and what felt like promises were empty and not to be fulfilled. I didn't have a bunch of expectations and was climbing out of a lot of bad things from my childhood, so I wasn't disappointed and I was looking for opportunities where I could take charge of them.

I think 'meandering' was more accepted back then.

 

[Brent Hutto]

My senior year (1977-78) I finally got to drive to school instead of walking. I was allowed to use my father's green 1972 Ford pickup, vinyl seats, no A/C and all. It wasn't cool but man it sure beat walking.

Of course now for all I know a 17-year-old kid might be retro-cool with an 1972 pickup.

 

[telestratosonic]

I'm a year younger than you and that describes it perfectly.
Every 3rd or 4th household had one car, teenagers had none, all the schools in our town had uniforms in either navy blue, bottle green or grey.
Ours was grey with the prescribed green sports kit. Though we'd tart up our blazers with bin lid sized punk badges that we'd take off at the school gate.

More Grange Hill or Gregory's Girl (filmed in Mrs K's high school), than Carrie or Grease.

At least with the uniform system you knew who to fight/run away from, after the 4pm bell.

I'm 73 and graduated from high school in 1967. No grade 12 until 1983 in Newfoundland & Labrador so high school was grades 9, 10, and 11.

No Shop (woodworking, welding, auto-mechanics) or Home Economics (cooking et cetera) classes; just straight-up academic work. It was Algebra in the morning and Geometry in the afternoon. In the spring of the last year, Trigonometry of the right-angled triangle was added to the Geometry class.

I had the same Math teacher all through high school. And pretty much the same teachers for History, Geograhy, Physics, Chemistry, English Literature and English Language (grammar, et cetera), French and Phys. Ed.

We had 50-minute classes. Days were from 9-3:30, 5 days a week. One 15-minute recess period in the morning and 90 minutes for lunch from 12:1:30 PM.

No school bussing except for the kids who were bussed in from 10-15 miles away. They got to eat their lunch in school. We lived
a kilometre (0.625 mile) from the school and had to walk home for lunch. Dad had a car but he didn't pick us up even if he was on days-off. He was shift worker who worked for the federal government.

Very few students had cars and very few parents picked up their kids. Some kids lived 2km (1.25 miles) from school. Nope, in those days, we walked - no matter the weather. We had lots of snow (sometimes rain but rarely in winter) in winter and maybe similatr weather to Scotland in the fall and spring. Been following your weather all winter.

School uniforms, eh? We wore them as well: grey pants and a blazer or blue sweater, white or light-blue shirt and a tie (a red or blue clip-on - can't remember which - but nothing fancy allowed). Girls (I a sister older by two years and she was ahead of me in school) wore a grey skirt (just above the knees was okay) and blazer/sweater with a buttoned blouse (and not unbottoned past the first button). Our 35 year-old English teacher also doubled as the fashion police and kept the girls in check when it came to skirt lengths and make-up use. Having said that, her overly-tight skirt did not not go unnoticed by us boys.

Walking to and from school and another round trip at lunch time was brutal for the girls in winter. Some girls, but not all, wore slacks/jeans under their skirts going to and from school. For the most part, my sister didn't. Go figure.

I'm a big fan of bringing back school uniforms. Puts everyone on a level playing field, imo. It's tough being a girl when you have to worry about the 'mean' girls eating you alive because you don't have a new/different wardrobe for every day.

The town I grew up in (under 10,000) had two schools; Protestant and RC. The other guys/gals wore school uniforms as well but we pretty much knew who everyone was by sight. Plus, by the mid-sixties, we all hung out at the same pool hall after school and on weekends. No drugs around in the 1960s and 21 was the drinking age. We got along fine with no serious fights and were able to put our parents' 'stuff' behind us.

Once we hit 13, we could go to teenage dances held in our school's gym, the 'other' school's gym, the basement of the Masonic Lodge, the Fishermen's Lodge, or at the Anglican parish hall. There was live music and we danced with girls from the 'other' school as well as those from my school.

Put music and the opposite sex together and fireworks happens. i miss those days.

 

[Tele-beeb]

I graduated in ‘79 and that is how it looked. One of my best friends had a blue Monza and I had a (formerly gold) but later blue car as represented in that video.
I didn’t read all the replies, but a big difference is the weight difference between walking the halls today. None of those kids would be considered average of todays weight… no way. They would all fall in the slim to skinny category.
Also, no vulgar language noticed in the sports areas or hall.
I know, I’m the bad negative guy again… it’s something other than activity levels and food quality?

 

[Kandinskyesque]

No school bussing except for the kids who were bussed in from 10-15 miles away. They got to eat their lunch in school. We lived
a kilometre (0.625 mile) from the school and had to walk home for lunch.

Same here, I lived a few hundred yards from both primary/elementary and secondary/high school, so I went home for lunch. Our housing scheme was at the top of a steep hill so the exercise kept me skinny.
5 schools (2 Catholic, 3 Non-denominational) for a 1960s new town, of 50,000 people (Glasgow overspill) and kids further than 2-3 miles got free bus travel, so we did rather well.

Where I live now, in a rural part the nearest high school is 8 miles away. It also has one of the largest catchment areas in Europe, 600 square miles.
Like most schools when I was young, the uniform is compulsory of which I'm in agreement with. The last thing kids need to concern themself with is their parent's financial status.

 

[Nogoodnamesleft]

I was in grade 1 and new to North America at that point. The school I went to had up to grade 9. Some of the folks in that video remind me of the big kids then.

The parking lot shots - at home a large car was a Ford Cortina and in North America cars were the size of yachts. My dad's Mercury Meteor here was average.

 

[Lou Tencodpees]

My senior year in Michigan, yeah, looks familiar lol.

 

[telestratosonic]

Same here, I lived a few hundred yards from both primary/elementary and secondary/high school, so I went home for lunch. Our housing scheme was at the top of a steep hill so the exercise kept me skinny.
5 schools (2 Catholic, 3 Non-denominational) for a 1960s new town, of 50,000 people (Glasgow overspill) and kids further than 2-3 miles got free bus travel, so we did rather well.

Where I live now, in a rural part the nearest high school is 8 miles away. It also has one of the largest catchment areas in Europe, 600 square miles.
Like most schools when I was young, the uniform is compulsory of which I'm in agreement with. The last thing kids need to concern themself with is their parent's financial status.

Yes, a lot of similarities. Newfoundland (now known as Newfoundland & Labrador) was Britain's oldest colony. Newfoundland got its independence in 1917 or thereabouts, went bankrupt in the 1930s, became a British colony again and joined Canada in 1949.

Unlike many former British colonies though, we drive on the right side of the road. My wife and I had planned a winter in the UK before you-know-what hit. My biggest problem was going to be driving in the left lane and not screwing up at intersections.

 

[Nogoodnamesleft]

Yes, a lot of similarities. Newfoundland (now known as Newfoundland & Labrador) was Britain's oldest colony. Newfoundland got its independence in 1917 or thereabouts, went bankrupt in the 1930s, became a British colony again and joined Canada in 1949.

Unlike many former British colonies though, we drive on the right side of the road. My wife and I had planned a winter in the UK before you-know-what hit. My biggest problem was going to be driving in the left lane and not screwing up at intersections.

Left, centre, right scans become right, centre, left. And shifting with the left hand is a hoot. However, suddenly the position of the clutch next to the transmission makes a lot more sense.

 

[kctelegas]

Same - my buddy’s brother looked exactly like the jean jacket guy.

Everybody knew that guy (or was that guy).

 

[lammie200]

I lived that life in southwest MI. Drove a Datsun 510 to school. Wish I still had it.