I went to elementary school at a school that had all 12 grades.
One building held the elementary school and another building held the high school. There was a big auditorium where the entire school met for big meetings.
Of course, back then there was no smoking in school.
No smoking in school can mean many things.
You might as well answer, “Is there smoking in school?” with “It depends.”
You could smoke as a student if you had parental permission to smoke cigarettes at school. We had one student that had parental permission. He would go to lunch and then he would walk over by the shop building and sit in a chair out by the wood lathe. He had to be careful not to set the wood shaving on fire.
Every now and then we would go out by then shop and watch him smoke. He seemed very content to sit by himself after lunch and smoke a cigarette. He was a quiet person anyway. Sitting by himself suited him just fine. He usually finished his cigarette right at the end of recess and walked to his next class. He carried a cigarette pack and a Zippo lighter in his shirt pocket.
He seemed to be proud that he was the only person in school that could go smoke at recess without any trouble.
By the time I was in the seventh grade, I moved over to the other side of the school. All the high school had recess in the gym or the football field. All the high school boys would try to smoke in the boys’ bathroom. This seemed to create a challenge. Two of the coaches would try weekly to catch the smokers in the act. Usually, there was someone standing around close to the bathroom door to warn of the coming coaches.
One day, the coaches came running around the back of the building and ran into the gym.
I was outside near the back steps of the gym as the coaches sprinted by.
Cigarettes started flying out of the window from the bathroom. The coaches made the bust, and five boys walked out of the bathroom and went to equipment room. By this time every student in high school was packed in the gym and it was dead silent. We heard all the licks given with the paddle.
The football players that were caught smoking had to run additional wind sprints over the next week to make up for being caught smoking. Thinking back on the incident, it was rather strange because both of those coaches smoked.
One coach never mentioned anything about smoking. He would stand on the back steps to the gym and bum a cigarette from some of the students.The girls never got caught smoking. The teachers that should have been checking the girls’ bathroom were in the teachers lounge smoking.
Life sure is strange. The three men coaches are all still living but none of them smoke anymore. The student that had parental permission to smoke died of lung cancer about ten years ago. Hardly anyone smokes tobacco either.
After all that, now we are trying hard to make it legal to smoke marijuana. I’m sure it won’t be long before we have to have students standing guard at the bathroom door again. There are still zealous coaches out there ready to catch student athletes smoking.
“You know boys, that smoking will take your wind.”
Maybe that smoking was bad for you. The coaches used to say that drinking Pepsi during the week was bad for you, too. If marijuana gets legalized, we can do a study to see if it causes you to lose your wind. Maybe everybody can just go in the girls’ bathroom and smoke.
They never checked in there.
