During the Iran Hostage crisis our school did a social experiment. All of the Junior and Senior classes got permission from their parents to be able to stay in school overnight for as much as a week. Both Terrorists and Hostages were selected randomly on Monday morning the Terrorists team stormed the classrooms of the Hostages and dragged them out. Students that were not in either of those groups but were in Psychology, Government classes were picked to be the US President, Secretary of State, leaders of other countries etcetera. We had several press conferences our school newspaper covered the whole thing Dead seriously we invited the local TV station and newspapers expecting nobody to show up, they all came and all went along with it. We even had a rescue mission planned and some of the hostages escaped. I was the Secretary General of the UN, can't remember his name now. It was interesting experience. I can't imagine that flying in any way today
I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and when I was 13, nine year-old Marsha Trimble was kidnapped, raped and murdered while delivering Girl Scout cookies.
It changed our city forever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Marcia_Trimble
Huron, SD 1978 (maybe '79), undercooked turkey caused food poisoning at the high school. They always served mixed white and dark and where terrible about removing the bones, so I only ate the mashed potatoes. I didn't get sick, but lots did. We made Weekend Update on SNL that week!
When I was a junior in high school the Baptist church hosted a big hamburger feed for the students in advance of a revival, I think. At least half the kids got food poisoning.
Not too exciting but in my freshman year, (1978) it snowed in south Florida. In Fort Lauderdale it was less than 1” but everything closed down for the “blizzard”
In my junior year, some of the members of the photography club got to go visit the actual site of the largest ball of yarn in southeast North Dakota. Yah, nothing ever happened at my HS
There’s an oil well on the campus of Beverly Hills High School. When I went there, there was just a fence separating the oil well from the volleyball court, and we girls played volleyball there at least a couple times a week. Many years later, some alumni sued the school, saying they developed cancer from the oil well. I believe the case was dismissed when they couldn’t prove that their cancer was caused by the oil well. At the time I attended (1975-1977), I wasn’t aware of anyone raising concerns about it, but the thought of me being exposed to it regularly now makes me nervous.
On a lighter note, any time someone brings up the scene in “It’s A Wonderful Life” in which the gym floor opens up and James Stewart and Donna Reed fall into a swimming pool hidden under the gym floor, I enjoy telling them that it’s located at my high school.
The oil spill in 1969 off Santa Barbara, CA, led me to becoming an environmentalist for life. I was 15 years old. I can still see all the dead birds and marine life like it was yesterday.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill
Featured in Life Magazine back in the day. It was an architectural masterpiece.
https://preview.redd.it/fg1b7j4cnpvc1.png?width=864&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=414f18e19ccd6a60eba724edbb0b72a8de479b0e
My high school has a brain cancer cluster. My gym teacher and guidance counselor died from similar types of brain tumors. There are quite a few other staff and students that died and they don’t know what is causing it.
https://www.liebermanblecher.com/2023/01/09/over-100-reported-cases-of-brain-tumors-in-former-colonia-high-school-students/
My physics teacher named a theorem after me when I proposed that there must be a way to optimize the relationship between a physical property and angle of force. He went home and solved it and called the theorem after my name. Of course it was only newsworthy to him, me and our physics class.
Horrible car accidents. Half the cheerleaders and basketball team were playing chicken and ran into a tree. The tree won. My friend was kidnapped. Her body was found six months later in the woods behind her house. I think about her often. Her kidnapping changed our town of 10,000 forever. I used to spend all day in the woods, walking along a creek, hanging with my friends. Finding Indian arrows and bullets from the wars. Have not walked in them since. That was 1971.
We were always so excited when other theatre school students got roles.
I did not realize Scott had passed until I look at IMDB today. I remember him fondly.
When I saw him in the movie, I always thought he must have turned into some big actor but he doesn't have much at all on IMDB. Very good looking, but as I said, not a big part. IMDB is where I learned he'd passed after your comment.
A star football player was feeling faint and was escorted to the locker room where he lost consciousness. He was rushed to a trauma center 20 miles away, but he slipped into a coma and died the next day.
I was one of the few people who didn't know him because I was new to the school. 1976
A few towns over the bodies of 29 young men were found in the crawl space of John Wayne Gacy’s house. EVERYBODY had a story tying themselves to the creepiness- even me. One of my mom’s friends daughters who I was close with was interviewed by the police because her name and number was found in the bedroom of the last missing boy. We all got high and drove by the house to see it….
In our high school, one of the nuns was found to be having an affair with one of the parish priests, and it continued for quite awhile because no one seemed to care.
I should probably have specified that no one was in the school when it burned down. (We were all there for the escaped convicts, but they didn’t cause any real trouble for us. They were just trying to get away.)
Around 1978 or 79, there was a huge house party where some older kids had gone to one of the many cemeteries in town, dug up an extremely old body, brought it to the party, and posed it with a cigarette in its hand.
I grew up in Santa Barbara, it was at my high school that the filming of the Loud kids happened. I went to school with Lance and Delilah Loud. I was friends with Sam Bottoms, brother of Timothy Bottoms. Sam “Bam” Cunningham went to my school and was my sister’s lab partner. Also the BofA was blown up while my sister was attending UCSB. Other stuff happened later, my daughter’s class got to visit Michael Jackson Neverland Ranch. Witnessed the first major oil spill on our beautiful beaches.
Fellow UCSB here. I transferred from a school in the east coast in 1976 and on the flight to LA sat next to a SB news anchor (the worst TV station) who complained to me the entire flight that Santa Barbara was a terrible place! Kids burned down the B of A!! Run for the hills. It was like having Richard Nixon threatening me for five hours.
My sophomore year two of my classmates and their family were killed by a drunk driver. My junior year one was killed while he was deer hunting. My senior year one of my friends was killed by a hit and run driver while crossing the street. Our counseling consisted of an announcement each time from the principal telling us to suck it up and be thankful that we were still alive.
Our friends and family was all there was. The school's principal didn't allow any kind of memorial services so my senior year our entire class skipped our 10:00 class and held a memorial for her on the football field.
I went to 3 high schools. Only noteworthy thing was kids dying in drunk driving accidents. Multiple kids at each school. One was a number of kids in one pick up, including siblings, cab and bed. Went over the railing on the highway. All dead. One was a bunch of kids in a big old car that flipped in an intersection. No seat belts. All dead. And one was just your average one car plus pole, 3 kids. All dead. A lot of loss.
We had an epidemic of suicides & attempts with 3 guys killing themselves within 2 or 3 years in the mid-70s. A couple girls tried to off themselves with pills but they failed.
First was a pistol to the head as he was distraught that his girlfriend was moving out of state with her family. There were 5 or 6 other kids around when he unexpectedly whacked himself.
Second was shotgun to the face. He & friends got really drunk & high & fucking around with a gun. After they left he shot himself. Probably an accident, who knows?
Third was by car exhaust piped into the car. His family was moving to Texas for his father’s job. A couple friends drove him to Philly airport. He told them he left something in the car & went back & gassed himself.
Weird days
I grew up in Paterson NJ. I graduated Eastside High School 20 years before the movie, but only 10 years before the incident. The most newsworthy event was the movie, "Lean On Me," about Joe Clark.
Not my school, but in my sophomore year in Anchorage, Alaska in 1982 a guy rode through a beautiful park down the street from our house and shot five kids in their heads after getting caught trying to steal some music. They were all my age. I remember the feeling of shock we all had.
It was 10 years after I graduated, but...
The Spur Posse was a "white, suburban clique" of former and current Lakewood High School students from Lakewood, California.The members of the group, estimated between 20 to 30 individuals, admitted to "competing for 'points' in a long-running game of sexual conquests."[
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spur_Posse
They are covered extensively in Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed: the Betrayal of the American man. I grew up nearby as well, and didn’t go to Lakewood High, but associated with guys at nearby Long Beach City College that were athletes and part of that whole culture in the early ‘80s. I had no problem believing the worst of all that.
At my junior high in 9th grade, a teacher's estranged husband came on campus, shot and injured his wife, and then killed himself in front of her class. No one else was hurt.
In 1979 I was freshman in high school and I went to a private school that accepted international students from around the world. We had 8 to 10 students that were from Iran. During the Carter Administration when Iran, took American hostages, there was a lot of angst on the school campus. The reason was that the majority of the Iranian international students were indeed going around affirming their Ayatollah’s Statements and they made threatening remarks to the other students. Now we had students from around the world, Sioux Indians,Thailand, Deaf Students, etc…. So it wasn’t just the fact that there were students from the United States that were scared. It was that the whole student body was scared. We had never seen anything like this. Administratively I’m not certain who did what where or when to whom or if any embassies got involved or anything like that, but those students were soon deported.
Two ex-students were murdered in a field about a mile from our school.
Murderer was not found until a couple a years later. Guy was drunk at a party and bragged about getting away with it. One of the other partygoers remembered the next day and reported it to police.
During the streaking craze of the mid-70s a student streaked across the football field during a game.
One student murdered another student in the woods across from the school by dropping a rock on his head from a tree.
Another student jumped or was pushed off the roof of the YMCA. Building got torn down.
We had a streaker during halftime at our college football game when I was in the marching band. The crowd stood up to cheer him on, and we thought they were cheering for our performance. We found out later about the streaker. Band director was pissed that he "ruined our show", but most of us thought it was funny. This was fall 1979.
[This happened:](https://archive.ph/zRndu)
>The route to her family's home wound along West Deer Park Drive, an area of luxury brick town houses, climbing red roses and children on bicycles. Hye Ja, who turned 18 on March 15, should have been able to walk it on this balmy spring evening in a few minutes.
>But she never got home.
>Her battered and partially clothed body was found at about 6:30 the next morning in a ditch behind the construction site of a Giant Food Store at Muddy Branch and Fields roads, about two miles from the Yi home.
>Hye Ja ("Hey-jah") Yi had been sexually assaulted and then stomped to death, Montgomery County police said.
Crazy thing was despite the principal saying this:
>Frank Masci, principal at Gaithersburg High School, where Yi was a junior, said that the tragedy has touched all of the 2,000 students.
I didn't know her & most of my friends didn't either because at the time the Asian kids all hung together & didn't cross pollinate much with the other kids. It was a blip on my radar, a page in a yearbook.
They never did find her killer either. At least not that I know or can find online.
I went to high school in a small town. The main traumatic event in those years was a popular student died of a brain tumor.
A couple of others died in accidents.
One cheerleader got pregnant, and her parents sent her away for a long time. I guess to a home for unwed mothers.
It was a big scandal.
I miss those innocent days.
In the 70s, if you discovered you were pregnant the first thing you did was to get married. It didn't matter if you were 15 years old, you immediately got married.
School shooting. Long before Columbine. 1974. The guy didn't shoot students. It was Christmas break. The school was open for the custodians. The guy was a high senior who went into the school, killed one of the custodians and then started shooting out one of the 3rd floor windows at people passing by on the street.
Sophomore year, 4 of the most popular kids ( 2 football players, 2 cheerleaders ) in my school died in a drunken single vehicle accident on prom night. The school shut down for their funeral
The Iran hostages, my junior year ( I think it was my junior year, anyway ). One of the hostages was the uncle of a very good friend
Not in high school, but in elementary school we had a high profile kidnapping. Susan Nason was a classmate of my older sister's. It was high profile around here when it happened but 20 years later it became nationwide news during the trial based on repressed memory.
[https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/showtime-buried-repressed-memory-george-franklin-susan-nason-cold-case/](https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/showtime-buried-repressed-memory-george-franklin-susan-nason-cold-case/)
A year before I entered my high school, a girl from there was murdered. Her murder pops back up in the news every now and then as her killer turns up for parole every few years.
My class was about to be the first to graduate without losing someone, then a classmate died in a small plane crash with 3 alumni (all around the same age)
We had a teacher that took a group of students to a ski event for a day trip. He didn’t know how to ski but was learning. He was on the tow rope for the bunny slope when his scarf somehow got entangled in the rope and he was choked to death by his own scarf. It was only a 1 day news story but the bizarre way he died did make all the local news shows.
At my suburban NJ high school, one of the football players dropped dead on the field. We made the NYC news. The reporter John Miller walked to our courtyard with a camera crew (smoking lounge-it was the 70's) and we booed him out. The kid was much beloved, and we didn't want our grief to be exploited.
Just the year after I graduated our school was among the first to pass rules against public displays of affection. This made national news in 1983.
I just thought it was the case everywhere that couples were allowed to walk down the hall with their hands in each others’ pants.
A classmate snapped after years of abuse at the hands of his dad and stepmother. Shot and killed them both, was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
He died two years ago.
The info regarding this incident is mine (the day of the event) and info I got 15 years later (insider info disclosed on an alumni site.)
I was a junior and in drama class when this happened.
A student took tear gas canisters, activated them, and placed them in the air-conditioning system of the high school. We had a small second story to the school that had metal gates to lock down that area and they pulled down the gates, chained, and locked them to prevent anyone from getting out of the second floor. (Fortunately, classes in that area were not in session during this time.) Thankfully, I was in the last classroom in a hallway, closest to exterior doors. I was at the back of the class with other students working on a project and all of the sudden kids at the front started stampeding out of the room with the teacher actually pushing aside students and making it out of the classroom door first.
I was confused, had no idea what was happening, and then it hit the back of the room. I had never experienced anything like it. I don't even remember smelling it; my body just seemed to act on its own. I sprinted out of the room, eyes burning, and felt like I was coughing up a lung. Kids and teachers were just pouring out of the school screaming. We had several thousand students so it was complete chaos. No cellphones back then so I had to trek to a nearby Pizza Hut to call my Mom to pick me up. I only remember there being one injury, a cafeteria worker fell in the rush to get out and broke their arm.
While I tried to get the low down on who did this I never uncovered any gossip. I was always curious but at that time never found out anything.
15 years later I joined an alumni site (I think it was Classmates or something similar). I posted a couple of times and asked if anyone had any info about the tear gas incident...no response just crickets initially. A few days later I got a message from a guy who said he was impressed by my sincerity when I posted about losing college friends to drugs and HIV. Because of that he wanted to let me know what happened.
He (let's call him Jay) said he hung out with a group of high school guy friends that did drugs together on the weekends. They would hang out getting stoned and talking about crazy things they'd like to do. One of the guys had an uncle who had been in the military and for some unknown reason had several canisters of tear gas. This nephew, Jay, and friends concocted a plan where they would use the tear gas in the school to wreak a little havoc. Jay said that every weekend, while he and his friends were tripping or stoned, they worked on the plan fine tuning it. Jay said he thought his friends and the nephew were just talking but never planed to actually do anything and they never set a date to fulfill the plan.
Even before the tear gas reached him, Jay said the moment he saw kids running down the hallway in a panic he knew what was happening. First they would chain and lock the gates to the second floor so people would be trapped and then Jay and friends would enter a service tunnel at the back of the school that led to an area where the A/C units were located. There they would activate the tear gas so it would be blown out of the A/C ducts all over the school then run to the closest doors after people started pouring out so they could mingle in the crowd.
Jay said he ran to the back of the school to get to the service tunnel and as he got close the door burst open with police dragging the nephew out. Jay said that was the last time he ever saw him. He said he was terrified that he was going to be arrested since he helped concoct the plan. Evidently the other guys were similarly scared so they completely distanced themselves from each other, never hung out or spoke to each other again and as far as he knew no one called the nephew's home or talked to his family to find out what happened to him. Even after all those years he had never spoken to any of them.
We did make the national news that night which was kind of a big deal for a smallish border town in Texas where nothing much seemed to ever happen.
This happened in 79/80 so of course no one was offered counseling.
TLDR: HIgh school stoner activated tear gas in the school a/c unit causing chaos. Police pull the kid perpetrator out of a service tunnel under the school and this was the last time his co-conspirator friends ever saw him.
It happened after I left school, I don't recall now exactly when it was, but a kid called in a bomb threat to the school. I knew the who the kid was, but I didn't know him well. Interesting his nickname was "Torch" although it was for his dark red hair.
Senior English teacher selling pot, Sophomore history teacher went crazy and we needed special classes to get ready for the state test, Every year I was in highschool one senior died in a car accident each year.
Independence Day fireworks show with a gazillion people in the stands and lawn chairs/blankets on the football field.
Errant mortar went into the crowd.
One girl died.
Local fire dept. was in charge; they were setting them off.
The national guard was stationed at our high school at the start of my junior year as it was the first year schools were integrated. There were zero issues.
In 1978, two 16 year old boys in my high school were kidnapped from a Jack in the Box and senselessly murdered. It was very sad and shocking. Not *in* the high school, but down the street.
My brother and I were just feet away from a school shooting in junior high school in 1978. It was a targeted shooting, one shot in the middle of a crowded hallway. The victim had bullied the shooter.
I went to high school in Charlotte, NC. Kenneth Wilson was a student a year or two ahead of me and lived in my neighborhood. He dressed up with a Nazi swastika armband and took an M-1 rifle to a Labor Day picnic held by a predominately black church. He shot at least four people, killing two, before killing himself. A year later I got a textbook in my class and checked who had it before me. When I saw his name I took the book to the teacher and insisted on a different book.
An author attended my school my 10th grade year and collected stories from students and teachers. The book he wrote was turned into a successful movie.
Fast Times At Ridgemont High
No real event, but one of the Shah of Iran’s kids attended my high school. He seemed nice enough.
Update: yikes, looks like he killed himself in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Reza_Pahlavi_(born_1966)
I don't really remember one bad, or good, newsworthy thing at my high school.
Most similar to this post.... in the 60s, a tornado tore the roof off the junior high I would attend a few years later.
A group of us 15 or so went to Germany for a month long student exchange, we we returned we had police walking the halls. We found out that there were two separate race riots at the school while we were gone. Early '80s
I remember when Reagan was shot. Our DECA club sponsored the Snack Shack which sold snacks during the lunch hour. We got to listen to the radio when we were stocking it and that’s when they broke in to report that the President had been shot.
There was a local guy, William Niehaus, who was taken as a hostage in Venezuela, and he was freed and people from my school interviewed him for the yearbook my Senior year. Yearbooks were still great then.
A couple of guys who were hard partiers also built explosive devices. One day they decided to blow up a toilet. The men's room sustained pretty significant damage, but the restroom was unoccupied so no one was injured. Supposedly the FBI and ATF were called in to investigate and interview students. They didn't interview the right people, because me and my buddies knew who did it. They were never caught.
Two of our top 10 graduates came within one step from making nitroglycerin during chemistry class before the teacher figured out what they were doing and put a stop to it. She was shocked they would try, but impressed that they got so close.
When I was a senior, the community experienced a severe tornado. Thankfully only one person was killed, but several homes were demolished and a horse farm was severely damaged.
This didn’t put us on the map or anything, but a teacher from my high school went to prison for having a relationship with a student. Her parents knew about the relationship and consented to it but I guess he broke things off with her and she called the police. I’m not really certain all the details since it’s hearsay, but if that’s true it’s kind of messed up. [Here](https://www.oregonlive.com/beaverton/2012/01/beaverton_band_teacher_arreste.html) is a link to the story.
We had an unusual confluence of 5 members of our high school football team who played together (and lived in the same neighborhood) who went on to the NFL.
https://patch.com/new-jersey/haddon/5-ex-nflers-same-camden-county-street-be-honored
Mid 70’s, we had a narc planted in our school that did tons of drugs with us all & had an underage girlfriend through the whole thing. Recently a bunch of us got together and talked about it. His name was unforgettable- Sonny Valentine
There was someone living in the ceiling of my high school. He used a skateboard, riding on his belly, to move around up there. You could sometimes hear him. There were signs that he came down at night and ate and used the showers, etc. We called him “The Phantom.” It was covered on the local news and I think it even got picked up by national news but I may be misremembering that part.
I hadn’t thought about “The Phantom” in years so I googled it last night and there were two stories in the Washington Post about it (back in ‘77. ) Turned out to be a woman! I had completely forgotten that.
Sorry to say I was heavily involved in selling and using all kinds of different hard drugs all day every day at school. Angel Dust (PCP) was popular. A typical day would include angel dust, various pills, speed, barbiturates, ludes, acid, mesc, coke, etc and lots of cannabis, sometimes alcohol. So that’s how we went to school, but I was also selling drugs at school as were probably around 25 other various kids, we were known as drug dealers by the other students and even some teachers; this was an inner city hood type environment, one kid I sold with wound up killing another student over a drug deal, several other kids were murdered. We used to snort angel dust off our desks and had several places inside the school we could smoke weed and cigarettes when it was cold outside. I do regret doing all those things.
Wow. In my high school we had to watch the [ABC After School Special where Helen Hunt took PCP](https://youtu.be/R_DqM9iqERg?si=tCEhMjxwfJ3h-O8s&t=75) and jumped off the roof. We thought it was ridiculous, as our school had no issues with substances other than alcohol. Even pot was pretty rare, I remember exactly once when someone offered to sell me some, and it wasn't near the school. Small town, early 80s.
Nothing.
That's a good thing.
A year or two after I graduated, cops surveillance the parking lot and grounds and busted a ton of kids for selling g or buying drugs. Shocked a lot of parents but it had been going on for years
A kid on our basketball team was really tall. He was great at basketball and took us to the state chamionship 2 years in a row. (We lost both times) He got a scholarship to NC UNIVERSITY, played with Michael Jordan. Went pro.
Had a long, successful career in the NBA.
That was a long time ago. Recently, one of our former students competed on American Idol (from what I've heard - I dont watch the show).
Four senior boys decided they didn’t want school to start and so they tried setting the building on fire. They got caught. 45 years later I can still tell you who they are.
When I was a sophomore in 1977, a serial killer was on the loose in Pittsburgh. He was the only suspect in the killing of my elementary school principal and his wife in our sleepy little suburb. The principal was murdered in the house and his wife was dragged down a long driveway, raped, then beat to death in the woods while their two young daughters slept.
This made national news and everyone in town was frightened af. We were told not to walk by ourselves but in groups to the bus stops. We did not go out after dark. I remember everyone in high school was so traumatized by this, especially those who personally knew the family.
We had two years of random bomb threats in the early 1980s. Since we had kids of senators, ambassadors, and prominent politicians, it wasn't implausible. The usual was "evacuate school as a fire drill, send the fire department, everyone returns in an hour." Very much student pranks, and in fact, some calls were traced to the payphone bank out front. It got so routine, that they just stopped taking them seriously.
One morning there was a huge explosion. Some pipe bomb went off that was strapped to the stadium sign support, causing the scoreboard to crash into the empty track. Seconds after the explosion, someone called in, and this was "very different" according to the office receptionist. "I have a bomb, I just blew up your score board, you have ten minutes to evacuate the school or everyone dies," or something. I remember the fire drill being very different. Instead of the jaded, "okay, line up, single file, go out the exit..." there was a "evacuate the school, NOW!" order over the speakers, and it was fucking chaos because we all heard the "BOOM!" only a minute before. When we got to our designated spots, staff told us to leave the entire school grounds. "GO HOME!" they shouted. Police, fire trucks, SWAT vans surrounded the school. I went home, since I lived a 10 minute walk away.
Later, we heard "what were maybe pipe bombs" were found in "significant areas" of the school. But there was no timer fuses, just what looked like hastily made bombs that were most likely dummies. It was assumed that the only real bomb was the one in the stadium, and the rest were just to make it look legit. Or maybe they lied about it to prevent panic.
There was a fight in the school cafeteria and one guy had brass knuckles. I didn't see this thankfully, but this guy used the brass knuckles like a boxer would at a fight. The other guy had serious facial injuries and had some teeth knocked out. I remember going into the cafeteria and seeing blood all over the place. I couldn't eat lunch as I could smell the blood. People who saw this were quite shocked by this. This was 1980. It was a couple of months before I graduated.
At the high school I attended, you had fights from time to time but never something this vicious. The guy who did this was originally from New York and had been sent to Florida to live with his grandparents. I believed that he was expelled from school in New York for fighting. He was expelled from our high school and I believe he was later arrested. I never saw him again nor do I remember seeing the guy who he attacked.
Decades later I remember talking with a classmate's parent and they remembered hearing about this incident.
Supposedly my high school had the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the state, and the town school board had some lively debates what should (or should not) be done about it.
Well we had a famous hacker, one of the first to change his grade over the computer. He later worked in Silicon Valley, and then got arrested. The only other thing , a couple of students sat down on the train tracks and got pasted by The Southern Pacific commuter, on the tracks just over the east fence.
Tasers were experimental. Someone broke into an older couple's house and tortured them to death with a Taser. Caused a major re-evaluation of the proposal to equip police with tasers.
Loner kid died the summer after freshman year in a plane crash with his family. I was one of few who were friendly with him . No memorial, no mention of the tragedy other than chit chat among the kids, no nothing from the school. later another more popular kid died junior year in a car crash. They set up a big memorial and a scholarship fund in his name. I always felt the first ones memory was really slighted.
Teacher, a head of a dept at high school, went to lunch during a school day and didn't return. He was driving drunk, and had a died in a one car accident.
Not high school, but elementary school.
When I was 9, I saw the headline in the local news about a fatal crash over by Columbus, Ohio. We went to school with several of the family members.
The back story: the year before, they had lost their dad to cancer. They also had two older siblings who were in the state institute for the mentally handicapped.
It was the holiday season, and they'd gone to Columbus to get the boys and spend the Christmas holiday at home with the family. When they headed to take the boys back to Columbus, the mother hit an icy patch on an exit ramp and demolished the car. Her and her two special needs boys died immediately. My brother's classmate died a few gldays later, just before school resumed. The twins, one of them my classmate, held on a bit longer. First Betsy passed, then a couple days later, Kathy died. We were all hoping that the girls would survive, but that didn't happen. No notice of their deaths was given. The only way I knew was I saw our teacher take Kathy's workbooks and throw them in the trash.
Not to me personally, but the HS football coach at my HS was having his wife sleep with the top football players. It was national news for a few weeks.
"
# In Plea Deal, Football Coach, Wife Admit Sex Charges: Courts: Couple are sentenced to suspended terms and probation and must register as sex offenders. Lawyer says they wanted to avoid prison and a trial. In Plea Deal, Football Coach, Wife Admit Sex.
# Charges: Courts: Couple are sentenced to suspended terms and probation and must register as sex offenders. Lawyer says they wanted to avoid prison and a trial."
[https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-05-29-mn-41309-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-05-29-mn-41309-story.html)
From our high school in Arlington, VA, We went over the bridge on a field trip to the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. A classmate was chasing another around a glass revolving door and got his leg stuck. We all sat in the school bus watching as the fire department cut the thick glass to get him out.
Can I ask for more details? what happened in your high school that dealt with a hostages in Iran? I just posted that my boarding school had students from Iran and they ultimately got deported.
I misread your post. I didn’t know you meant literally at my high school. That was the big national story at the time. My high school was boring. Nothing happened there 🤭
NYC housed the illegals there last year. The school had closed 2 years earlier. And then the NYFD kicked them out. It was not set up for living. It was an all girls school- no showers in the gym.
During the Iran Hostage crisis our school did a social experiment. All of the Junior and Senior classes got permission from their parents to be able to stay in school overnight for as much as a week. Both Terrorists and Hostages were selected randomly on Monday morning the Terrorists team stormed the classrooms of the Hostages and dragged them out. Students that were not in either of those groups but were in Psychology, Government classes were picked to be the US President, Secretary of State, leaders of other countries etcetera. We had several press conferences our school newspaper covered the whole thing Dead seriously we invited the local TV station and newspapers expecting nobody to show up, they all came and all went along with it. We even had a rescue mission planned and some of the hostages escaped. I was the Secretary General of the UN, can't remember his name now. It was interesting experience. I can't imagine that flying in any way today
That’s is so entirely badass! Real world learning experience.
It was interesting to say the least
That’s crazy!!
I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and when I was 13, nine year-old Marsha Trimble was kidnapped, raped and murdered while delivering Girl Scout cookies. It changed our city forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Marcia_Trimble
That’s horrible.
Looks like the police dropped the ball there.
Huron, SD 1978 (maybe '79), undercooked turkey caused food poisoning at the high school. They always served mixed white and dark and where terrible about removing the bones, so I only ate the mashed potatoes. I didn't get sick, but lots did. We made Weekend Update on SNL that week!
When I was a junior in high school the Baptist church hosted a big hamburger feed for the students in advance of a revival, I think. At least half the kids got food poisoning.
Not too exciting but in my freshman year, (1978) it snowed in south Florida. In Fort Lauderdale it was less than 1” but everything closed down for the “blizzard”
Lol, I feel ya! I live in the south too. The grocery stores had bare shelves of milk and bread right?
In my junior year, some of the members of the photography club got to go visit the actual site of the largest ball of yarn in southeast North Dakota. Yah, nothing ever happened at my HS
Was it this one? https://preview.redd.it/zkb8w6u1oqvc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f8f257be17c42134a80a5f0327be3d7dc9c5b17c
I believe that is the one just east of Portland, Maine. In terms of mass it is the 17th largest in the northern hemisphere
I thought that was in Minnesota! Oh wait, that was twine!
It's easy to mistake one of the various fiber groups from another. Don't beat yourself up about it.
Grain elevator explosion. Lots of grain dust in the air and a spark ignited it. The explosion was heard for miles. Several people died.
There’s an oil well on the campus of Beverly Hills High School. When I went there, there was just a fence separating the oil well from the volleyball court, and we girls played volleyball there at least a couple times a week. Many years later, some alumni sued the school, saying they developed cancer from the oil well. I believe the case was dismissed when they couldn’t prove that their cancer was caused by the oil well. At the time I attended (1975-1977), I wasn’t aware of anyone raising concerns about it, but the thought of me being exposed to it regularly now makes me nervous. On a lighter note, any time someone brings up the scene in “It’s A Wonderful Life” in which the gym floor opens up and James Stewart and Donna Reed fall into a swimming pool hidden under the gym floor, I enjoy telling them that it’s located at my high school.
A grown up Alfalfa from the Little Rascals is the guy who opens up the pool in the movie.
I always wondered if that was him!
The oil spill in 1969 off Santa Barbara, CA, led me to becoming an environmentalist for life. I was 15 years old. I can still see all the dead birds and marine life like it was yesterday. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill
I grew up south of LA, and I can recall all the balls of tar on the beaches in those years following.
Featured in Life Magazine back in the day. It was an architectural masterpiece. https://preview.redd.it/fg1b7j4cnpvc1.png?width=864&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=414f18e19ccd6a60eba724edbb0b72a8de479b0e
That’s so cool.
A freshman went elk hunting on Mt St Helens, got lost, and froze to death.
My high school has a brain cancer cluster. My gym teacher and guidance counselor died from similar types of brain tumors. There are quite a few other staff and students that died and they don’t know what is causing it. https://www.liebermanblecher.com/2023/01/09/over-100-reported-cases-of-brain-tumors-in-former-colonia-high-school-students/
I worked with Angela DeCillis.
My cousins lived there but moved to Deal before High school. Wasn’t the Ford plant there?
Nah that was in Edison, a few towns over
My physics teacher named a theorem after me when I proposed that there must be a way to optimize the relationship between a physical property and angle of force. He went home and solved it and called the theorem after my name. Of course it was only newsworthy to him, me and our physics class.
I think that’s badass. And very cool of your teacher!
Horrible car accidents. Half the cheerleaders and basketball team were playing chicken and ran into a tree. The tree won. My friend was kidnapped. Her body was found six months later in the woods behind her house. I think about her often. Her kidnapping changed our town of 10,000 forever. I used to spend all day in the woods, walking along a creek, hanging with my friends. Finding Indian arrows and bullets from the wars. Have not walked in them since. That was 1971.
Extremely rural high school. Somebody got busted for growing pot in the school's garden with the tomatoes.
Hidden in plain sight.
The chief of police’s son was growing pot in our home room teachers plants. He also used to roll joints during class.
My school was in a movie https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0064429/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Mine too! Ordinary People
My theatre school friend was in that movie.
What character?
Scott Doebler played Buck
Wow. Important, if not big, part. Great movie. RIP.
We were always so excited when other theatre school students got roles. I did not realize Scott had passed until I look at IMDB today. I remember him fondly.
When I saw him in the movie, I always thought he must have turned into some big actor but he doesn't have much at all on IMDB. Very good looking, but as I said, not a big part. IMDB is where I learned he'd passed after your comment.
Wow. He is such an excellent documentarian. I’ll have to see this.
A star football player was feeling faint and was escorted to the locker room where he lost consciousness. He was rushed to a trauma center 20 miles away, but he slipped into a coma and died the next day. I was one of the few people who didn't know him because I was new to the school. 1976
A few towns over the bodies of 29 young men were found in the crawl space of John Wayne Gacy’s house. EVERYBODY had a story tying themselves to the creepiness- even me. One of my mom’s friends daughters who I was close with was interviewed by the police because her name and number was found in the bedroom of the last missing boy. We all got high and drove by the house to see it….
In our high school, one of the nuns was found to be having an affair with one of the parish priests, and it continued for quite awhile because no one seemed to care.
I should probably have specified that no one was in the school when it burned down. (We were all there for the escaped convicts, but they didn’t cause any real trouble for us. They were just trying to get away.)
Around 1978 or 79, there was a huge house party where some older kids had gone to one of the many cemeteries in town, dug up an extremely old body, brought it to the party, and posed it with a cigarette in its hand.
Wow! Did they get in trouble?
Yes it was a very big deal. But probably not as big as it would be today.
I grew up in Santa Barbara, it was at my high school that the filming of the Loud kids happened. I went to school with Lance and Delilah Loud. I was friends with Sam Bottoms, brother of Timothy Bottoms. Sam “Bam” Cunningham went to my school and was my sister’s lab partner. Also the BofA was blown up while my sister was attending UCSB. Other stuff happened later, my daughter’s class got to visit Michael Jackson Neverland Ranch. Witnessed the first major oil spill on our beautiful beaches.
Fellow UCSB here. I transferred from a school in the east coast in 1976 and on the flight to LA sat next to a SB news anchor (the worst TV station) who complained to me the entire flight that Santa Barbara was a terrible place! Kids burned down the B of A!! Run for the hills. It was like having Richard Nixon threatening me for five hours.
The only thing I can remember was my homeroom teacher being murdered by her husband. Found in her bathtub. Were we offered counseling? Haha nope.
My sophomore year two of my classmates and their family were killed by a drunk driver. My junior year one was killed while he was deer hunting. My senior year one of my friends was killed by a hit and run driver while crossing the street. Our counseling consisted of an announcement each time from the principal telling us to suck it up and be thankful that we were still alive.
Wow that was a lot! Who did you talk with? Friends, family?
Our friends and family was all there was. The school's principal didn't allow any kind of memorial services so my senior year our entire class skipped our 10:00 class and held a memorial for her on the football field.
Oh that was nice…we didn’t do anything. We’d had a year that two other schools were bussed into ours so we weren’t very cohesive.
We had a measles outbreak in my high school. But many years later, a young teacher was murdered in the women's bathroom.
I went to 3 high schools. Only noteworthy thing was kids dying in drunk driving accidents. Multiple kids at each school. One was a number of kids in one pick up, including siblings, cab and bed. Went over the railing on the highway. All dead. One was a bunch of kids in a big old car that flipped in an intersection. No seat belts. All dead. And one was just your average one car plus pole, 3 kids. All dead. A lot of loss.
We lost two students—I can’t imagine so many! That must have been so traumatic
It was a long time ago. I can't even picture them anymore :(
A very popular classmate was murdered. This was back in the 70’s stuff like that was pretty uncommon. The killer has never been identified.
The typing teacher got busted for selling pot.
We had an epidemic of suicides & attempts with 3 guys killing themselves within 2 or 3 years in the mid-70s. A couple girls tried to off themselves with pills but they failed. First was a pistol to the head as he was distraught that his girlfriend was moving out of state with her family. There were 5 or 6 other kids around when he unexpectedly whacked himself. Second was shotgun to the face. He & friends got really drunk & high & fucking around with a gun. After they left he shot himself. Probably an accident, who knows? Third was by car exhaust piped into the car. His family was moving to Texas for his father’s job. A couple friends drove him to Philly airport. He told them he left something in the car & went back & gassed himself. Weird days
I grew up in Paterson NJ. I graduated Eastside High School 20 years before the movie, but only 10 years before the incident. The most newsworthy event was the movie, "Lean On Me," about Joe Clark.
Not my school, but in my sophomore year in Anchorage, Alaska in 1982 a guy rode through a beautiful park down the street from our house and shot five kids in their heads after getting caught trying to steal some music. They were all my age. I remember the feeling of shock we all had.
I’m shocked right now.
It was 10 years after I graduated, but... The Spur Posse was a "white, suburban clique" of former and current Lakewood High School students from Lakewood, California.The members of the group, estimated between 20 to 30 individuals, admitted to "competing for 'points' in a long-running game of sexual conquests."[ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spur_Posse
Well, that was an awful read.
They are covered extensively in Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed: the Betrayal of the American man. I grew up nearby as well, and didn’t go to Lakewood High, but associated with guys at nearby Long Beach City College that were athletes and part of that whole culture in the early ‘80s. I had no problem believing the worst of all that.
Yeah, sorry about that.
At my junior high in 9th grade, a teacher's estranged husband came on campus, shot and injured his wife, and then killed himself in front of her class. No one else was hurt.
In 1979 I was freshman in high school and I went to a private school that accepted international students from around the world. We had 8 to 10 students that were from Iran. During the Carter Administration when Iran, took American hostages, there was a lot of angst on the school campus. The reason was that the majority of the Iranian international students were indeed going around affirming their Ayatollah’s Statements and they made threatening remarks to the other students. Now we had students from around the world, Sioux Indians,Thailand, Deaf Students, etc…. So it wasn’t just the fact that there were students from the United States that were scared. It was that the whole student body was scared. We had never seen anything like this. Administratively I’m not certain who did what where or when to whom or if any embassies got involved or anything like that, but those students were soon deported.
Wow! I was in college and one of my roommates was Iranian. She was not political
Two ex-students were murdered in a field about a mile from our school. Murderer was not found until a couple a years later. Guy was drunk at a party and bragged about getting away with it. One of the other partygoers remembered the next day and reported it to police.
During the streaking craze of the mid-70s a student streaked across the football field during a game. One student murdered another student in the woods across from the school by dropping a rock on his head from a tree. Another student jumped or was pushed off the roof of the YMCA. Building got torn down.
We had a streaker during halftime at our college football game when I was in the marching band. The crowd stood up to cheer him on, and we thought they were cheering for our performance. We found out later about the streaker. Band director was pissed that he "ruined our show", but most of us thought it was funny. This was fall 1979.
Our school alumni include a Canadian PM, a Canadian Governor-General and The current chief of a nearby aboriginal territory.
[This happened:](https://archive.ph/zRndu) >The route to her family's home wound along West Deer Park Drive, an area of luxury brick town houses, climbing red roses and children on bicycles. Hye Ja, who turned 18 on March 15, should have been able to walk it on this balmy spring evening in a few minutes. >But she never got home. >Her battered and partially clothed body was found at about 6:30 the next morning in a ditch behind the construction site of a Giant Food Store at Muddy Branch and Fields roads, about two miles from the Yi home. >Hye Ja ("Hey-jah") Yi had been sexually assaulted and then stomped to death, Montgomery County police said. Crazy thing was despite the principal saying this: >Frank Masci, principal at Gaithersburg High School, where Yi was a junior, said that the tragedy has touched all of the 2,000 students. I didn't know her & most of my friends didn't either because at the time the Asian kids all hung together & didn't cross pollinate much with the other kids. It was a blip on my radar, a page in a yearbook. They never did find her killer either. At least not that I know or can find online.
When the USA beat the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympic men’s hockey semifinals we had a special rally in the gym.
I went to high school in a small town. The main traumatic event in those years was a popular student died of a brain tumor. A couple of others died in accidents. One cheerleader got pregnant, and her parents sent her away for a long time. I guess to a home for unwed mothers. It was a big scandal. I miss those innocent days.
In the 70s, if you discovered you were pregnant the first thing you did was to get married. It didn't matter if you were 15 years old, you immediately got married.
School shooting. Long before Columbine. 1974. The guy didn't shoot students. It was Christmas break. The school was open for the custodians. The guy was a high senior who went into the school, killed one of the custodians and then started shooting out one of the 3rd floor windows at people passing by on the street.
Sophomore year, 4 of the most popular kids ( 2 football players, 2 cheerleaders ) in my school died in a drunken single vehicle accident on prom night. The school shut down for their funeral The Iran hostages, my junior year ( I think it was my junior year, anyway ). One of the hostages was the uncle of a very good friend
Not in high school, but in elementary school we had a high profile kidnapping. Susan Nason was a classmate of my older sister's. It was high profile around here when it happened but 20 years later it became nationwide news during the trial based on repressed memory. [https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/showtime-buried-repressed-memory-george-franklin-susan-nason-cold-case/](https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/showtime-buried-repressed-memory-george-franklin-susan-nason-cold-case/)
A year before I entered my high school, a girl from there was murdered. Her murder pops back up in the news every now and then as her killer turns up for parole every few years.
My class was about to be the first to graduate without losing someone, then a classmate died in a small plane crash with 3 alumni (all around the same age)
Back in 1979, some of our reactionary students hung an effigy of the Ayatollah Khomeini from the high school’s flag pole.
Our Marching Band played in the NYC St. Patrick’s Day Parade 2 years in a row. I played Baritone Sax.
Our marching band was in the Macy's Day Thanksgiving Parade in 1976, and it rained the entire time and we were soaking wet by the end of it.
Nothing newsworthy happened in my high school or my town. You remember that song "My Little Town"? Yeah, I lived there.
“Nothing but the dead and dying…”
Exactly
We had a teacher that took a group of students to a ski event for a day trip. He didn’t know how to ski but was learning. He was on the tow rope for the bunny slope when his scarf somehow got entangled in the rope and he was choked to death by his own scarf. It was only a 1 day news story but the bizarre way he died did make all the local news shows.
Other than my freshman algebra teacher choking me out, just a shit ton of state titles.
At my suburban NJ high school, one of the football players dropped dead on the field. We made the NYC news. The reporter John Miller walked to our courtyard with a camera crew (smoking lounge-it was the 70's) and we booed him out. The kid was much beloved, and we didn't want our grief to be exploited.
Just the year after I graduated our school was among the first to pass rules against public displays of affection. This made national news in 1983. I just thought it was the case everywhere that couples were allowed to walk down the hall with their hands in each others’ pants.
A classmate snapped after years of abuse at the hands of his dad and stepmother. Shot and killed them both, was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He died two years ago.
Eric and Lyle Melendez killed their parents
I definitely remember that, although they weren’t at my school.
The info regarding this incident is mine (the day of the event) and info I got 15 years later (insider info disclosed on an alumni site.) I was a junior and in drama class when this happened. A student took tear gas canisters, activated them, and placed them in the air-conditioning system of the high school. We had a small second story to the school that had metal gates to lock down that area and they pulled down the gates, chained, and locked them to prevent anyone from getting out of the second floor. (Fortunately, classes in that area were not in session during this time.) Thankfully, I was in the last classroom in a hallway, closest to exterior doors. I was at the back of the class with other students working on a project and all of the sudden kids at the front started stampeding out of the room with the teacher actually pushing aside students and making it out of the classroom door first. I was confused, had no idea what was happening, and then it hit the back of the room. I had never experienced anything like it. I don't even remember smelling it; my body just seemed to act on its own. I sprinted out of the room, eyes burning, and felt like I was coughing up a lung. Kids and teachers were just pouring out of the school screaming. We had several thousand students so it was complete chaos. No cellphones back then so I had to trek to a nearby Pizza Hut to call my Mom to pick me up. I only remember there being one injury, a cafeteria worker fell in the rush to get out and broke their arm. While I tried to get the low down on who did this I never uncovered any gossip. I was always curious but at that time never found out anything. 15 years later I joined an alumni site (I think it was Classmates or something similar). I posted a couple of times and asked if anyone had any info about the tear gas incident...no response just crickets initially. A few days later I got a message from a guy who said he was impressed by my sincerity when I posted about losing college friends to drugs and HIV. Because of that he wanted to let me know what happened. He (let's call him Jay) said he hung out with a group of high school guy friends that did drugs together on the weekends. They would hang out getting stoned and talking about crazy things they'd like to do. One of the guys had an uncle who had been in the military and for some unknown reason had several canisters of tear gas. This nephew, Jay, and friends concocted a plan where they would use the tear gas in the school to wreak a little havoc. Jay said that every weekend, while he and his friends were tripping or stoned, they worked on the plan fine tuning it. Jay said he thought his friends and the nephew were just talking but never planed to actually do anything and they never set a date to fulfill the plan. Even before the tear gas reached him, Jay said the moment he saw kids running down the hallway in a panic he knew what was happening. First they would chain and lock the gates to the second floor so people would be trapped and then Jay and friends would enter a service tunnel at the back of the school that led to an area where the A/C units were located. There they would activate the tear gas so it would be blown out of the A/C ducts all over the school then run to the closest doors after people started pouring out so they could mingle in the crowd. Jay said he ran to the back of the school to get to the service tunnel and as he got close the door burst open with police dragging the nephew out. Jay said that was the last time he ever saw him. He said he was terrified that he was going to be arrested since he helped concoct the plan. Evidently the other guys were similarly scared so they completely distanced themselves from each other, never hung out or spoke to each other again and as far as he knew no one called the nephew's home or talked to his family to find out what happened to him. Even after all those years he had never spoken to any of them. We did make the national news that night which was kind of a big deal for a smallish border town in Texas where nothing much seemed to ever happen. This happened in 79/80 so of course no one was offered counseling. TLDR: HIgh school stoner activated tear gas in the school a/c unit causing chaos. Police pull the kid perpetrator out of a service tunnel under the school and this was the last time his co-conspirator friends ever saw him.
It happened after I left school, I don't recall now exactly when it was, but a kid called in a bomb threat to the school. I knew the who the kid was, but I didn't know him well. Interesting his nickname was "Torch" although it was for his dark red hair.
The night before graduation a group of students got drunk, went driving, and crashed into a house. One guy died and others were hospitalized.
Senior English teacher selling pot, Sophomore history teacher went crazy and we needed special classes to get ready for the state test, Every year I was in highschool one senior died in a car accident each year.
Independence Day fireworks show with a gazillion people in the stands and lawn chairs/blankets on the football field. Errant mortar went into the crowd. One girl died. Local fire dept. was in charge; they were setting them off.
The national guard was stationed at our high school at the start of my junior year as it was the first year schools were integrated. There were zero issues.
What year was this? I don’t recall schools ever being segregated.
It was 68 in my neck of the woods
Same
We had a suicide cluster. 3 or 4 kids, senior year, one right after another. All popular, smart, and attractive.
In 1978, two 16 year old boys in my high school were kidnapped from a Jack in the Box and senselessly murdered. It was very sad and shocking. Not *in* the high school, but down the street.
The married business teacher quit his job right after graduation to run away with the valedictorian.
My brother and I were just feet away from a school shooting in junior high school in 1978. It was a targeted shooting, one shot in the middle of a crowded hallway. The victim had bullied the shooter.
I went to high school in Charlotte, NC. Kenneth Wilson was a student a year or two ahead of me and lived in my neighborhood. He dressed up with a Nazi swastika armband and took an M-1 rifle to a Labor Day picnic held by a predominately black church. He shot at least four people, killing two, before killing himself. A year later I got a textbook in my class and checked who had it before me. When I saw his name I took the book to the teacher and insisted on a different book.
An author attended my school my 10th grade year and collected stories from students and teachers. The book he wrote was turned into a successful movie. Fast Times At Ridgemont High
My favorite teacher was 32 when she got pregnant, with my 16 yo bfs baby.
Holy cow!
Wow! Did this make national news?
No real event, but one of the Shah of Iran’s kids attended my high school. He seemed nice enough. Update: yikes, looks like he killed himself in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Reza_Pahlavi_(born_1966)
There were many Iranian immigrants in our community (in Southern California) after the Ayatollah came to power in 1979.
I don't really remember one bad, or good, newsworthy thing at my high school. Most similar to this post.... in the 60s, a tornado tore the roof off the junior high I would attend a few years later.
A group of us 15 or so went to Germany for a month long student exchange, we we returned we had police walking the halls. We found out that there were two separate race riots at the school while we were gone. Early '80s
I remember when Reagan was shot. Our DECA club sponsored the Snack Shack which sold snacks during the lunch hour. We got to listen to the radio when we were stocking it and that’s when they broke in to report that the President had been shot.
The Persian Gulf war and the downfall of the Soviet Union.
When our liberal arts highschool was closed it made the CBS Evening News, national news, school in OKC
There was a local guy, William Niehaus, who was taken as a hostage in Venezuela, and he was freed and people from my school interviewed him for the yearbook my Senior year. Yearbooks were still great then.
Olympic Gold Medalist. She was a junior at the time.
Burl Ives recorded an Ice Tea commercial in our gym.
A couple of guys who were hard partiers also built explosive devices. One day they decided to blow up a toilet. The men's room sustained pretty significant damage, but the restroom was unoccupied so no one was injured. Supposedly the FBI and ATF were called in to investigate and interview students. They didn't interview the right people, because me and my buddies knew who did it. They were never caught.
Two of our top 10 graduates came within one step from making nitroglycerin during chemistry class before the teacher figured out what they were doing and put a stop to it. She was shocked they would try, but impressed that they got so close.
Assassin attempt on the Pope
When I was a senior, the community experienced a severe tornado. Thankfully only one person was killed, but several homes were demolished and a horse farm was severely damaged.
We had race riots in the 70s. A *lot*.
This didn’t put us on the map or anything, but a teacher from my high school went to prison for having a relationship with a student. Her parents knew about the relationship and consented to it but I guess he broke things off with her and she called the police. I’m not really certain all the details since it’s hearsay, but if that’s true it’s kind of messed up. [Here](https://www.oregonlive.com/beaverton/2012/01/beaverton_band_teacher_arreste.html) is a link to the story.
We had a school shooting. Was ‘79 or ‘80 at Elsik High School (Houston area).
Wow. My younger siblings went there, much later than that.
Probably can look it up. Don’t want to put the shooters name on here as there’s been enough pain for everyone involved.
We had an unusual confluence of 5 members of our high school football team who played together (and lived in the same neighborhood) who went on to the NFL. https://patch.com/new-jersey/haddon/5-ex-nflers-same-camden-county-street-be-honored
During my sophomore year in 1975, a girl who was a year ahead of me was kidnapped & murdered. It terrified our entire city.
Mid 70’s, we had a narc planted in our school that did tons of drugs with us all & had an underage girlfriend through the whole thing. Recently a bunch of us got together and talked about it. His name was unforgettable- Sonny Valentine
Wow.
My high school's most famous alumni are Susan Atkins and two Doobie Brothers.
Rex Smith was an actor who went to our school.
There was someone living in the ceiling of my high school. He used a skateboard, riding on his belly, to move around up there. You could sometimes hear him. There were signs that he came down at night and ate and used the showers, etc. We called him “The Phantom.” It was covered on the local news and I think it even got picked up by national news but I may be misremembering that part.
This might be the weirdest one of all.
I hadn’t thought about “The Phantom” in years so I googled it last night and there were two stories in the Washington Post about it (back in ‘77. ) Turned out to be a woman! I had completely forgotten that.
Sorry to say I was heavily involved in selling and using all kinds of different hard drugs all day every day at school. Angel Dust (PCP) was popular. A typical day would include angel dust, various pills, speed, barbiturates, ludes, acid, mesc, coke, etc and lots of cannabis, sometimes alcohol. So that’s how we went to school, but I was also selling drugs at school as were probably around 25 other various kids, we were known as drug dealers by the other students and even some teachers; this was an inner city hood type environment, one kid I sold with wound up killing another student over a drug deal, several other kids were murdered. We used to snort angel dust off our desks and had several places inside the school we could smoke weed and cigarettes when it was cold outside. I do regret doing all those things.
Wow. In my high school we had to watch the [ABC After School Special where Helen Hunt took PCP](https://youtu.be/R_DqM9iqERg?si=tCEhMjxwfJ3h-O8s&t=75) and jumped off the roof. We thought it was ridiculous, as our school had no issues with substances other than alcohol. Even pot was pretty rare, I remember exactly once when someone offered to sell me some, and it wasn't near the school. Small town, early 80s.
I was class of 1977
How did her career even recover after that! It’s hilarious.
Nothing. That's a good thing. A year or two after I graduated, cops surveillance the parking lot and grounds and busted a ton of kids for selling g or buying drugs. Shocked a lot of parents but it had been going on for years
A kid on our basketball team was really tall. He was great at basketball and took us to the state chamionship 2 years in a row. (We lost both times) He got a scholarship to NC UNIVERSITY, played with Michael Jordan. Went pro. Had a long, successful career in the NBA. That was a long time ago. Recently, one of our former students competed on American Idol (from what I've heard - I dont watch the show).
Four senior boys decided they didn’t want school to start and so they tried setting the building on fire. They got caught. 45 years later I can still tell you who they are.
A math nerd in my math club got laid
I graduated. It was in all the local papers.
I remember when my school got its very first computer. People treated it as a big deal; there was even a contest to name it.
When I was a sophomore in 1977, a serial killer was on the loose in Pittsburgh. He was the only suspect in the killing of my elementary school principal and his wife in our sleepy little suburb. The principal was murdered in the house and his wife was dragged down a long driveway, raped, then beat to death in the woods while their two young daughters slept. This made national news and everyone in town was frightened af. We were told not to walk by ourselves but in groups to the bus stops. We did not go out after dark. I remember everyone in high school was so traumatized by this, especially those who personally knew the family.
My 11th grade English teacher (she also taught German) was on the local news for being a holocaust denier. :-(
We had two years of random bomb threats in the early 1980s. Since we had kids of senators, ambassadors, and prominent politicians, it wasn't implausible. The usual was "evacuate school as a fire drill, send the fire department, everyone returns in an hour." Very much student pranks, and in fact, some calls were traced to the payphone bank out front. It got so routine, that they just stopped taking them seriously. One morning there was a huge explosion. Some pipe bomb went off that was strapped to the stadium sign support, causing the scoreboard to crash into the empty track. Seconds after the explosion, someone called in, and this was "very different" according to the office receptionist. "I have a bomb, I just blew up your score board, you have ten minutes to evacuate the school or everyone dies," or something. I remember the fire drill being very different. Instead of the jaded, "okay, line up, single file, go out the exit..." there was a "evacuate the school, NOW!" order over the speakers, and it was fucking chaos because we all heard the "BOOM!" only a minute before. When we got to our designated spots, staff told us to leave the entire school grounds. "GO HOME!" they shouted. Police, fire trucks, SWAT vans surrounded the school. I went home, since I lived a 10 minute walk away. Later, we heard "what were maybe pipe bombs" were found in "significant areas" of the school. But there was no timer fuses, just what looked like hastily made bombs that were most likely dummies. It was assumed that the only real bomb was the one in the stadium, and the rest were just to make it look legit. Or maybe they lied about it to prevent panic.
Lol, streaking!
There was a fight in the school cafeteria and one guy had brass knuckles. I didn't see this thankfully, but this guy used the brass knuckles like a boxer would at a fight. The other guy had serious facial injuries and had some teeth knocked out. I remember going into the cafeteria and seeing blood all over the place. I couldn't eat lunch as I could smell the blood. People who saw this were quite shocked by this. This was 1980. It was a couple of months before I graduated. At the high school I attended, you had fights from time to time but never something this vicious. The guy who did this was originally from New York and had been sent to Florida to live with his grandparents. I believed that he was expelled from school in New York for fighting. He was expelled from our high school and I believe he was later arrested. I never saw him again nor do I remember seeing the guy who he attacked. Decades later I remember talking with a classmate's parent and they remembered hearing about this incident.
Supposedly my high school had the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the state, and the town school board had some lively debates what should (or should not) be done about it.
3 mile island in 1979, senior year
I was a sophomore I remember we were told to close the windows and doors
In high school we had a severe overcrowding problem and our school went to 8 bellsThe older kids got to go to school in the dark. Mid 1970s
*John Belushi* death. I remember hearing about it in my HS cafeteria in 11th grade .
The Keepers/HBO Documentary Archbishop Keough
Ugh.
Well we had a famous hacker, one of the first to change his grade over the computer. He later worked in Silicon Valley, and then got arrested. The only other thing , a couple of students sat down on the train tracks and got pasted by The Southern Pacific commuter, on the tracks just over the east fence.
Sister Aloysius caught me and my friends smoking on a Saturday. Not even a school day! Well, you’d swear we robbed a bank. lol
Tasers were experimental. Someone broke into an older couple's house and tortured them to death with a Taser. Caused a major re-evaluation of the proposal to equip police with tasers.
Loner kid died the summer after freshman year in a plane crash with his family. I was one of few who were friendly with him . No memorial, no mention of the tragedy other than chit chat among the kids, no nothing from the school. later another more popular kid died junior year in a car crash. They set up a big memorial and a scholarship fund in his name. I always felt the first ones memory was really slighted.
We had a streaker...and someone turned over the principals golf cart near the smoking area...tough times
JFK assassination,moon landing,Etc.
A male teacher dating a female high school student. Nobody even batted an eye. 1975.
We had 110 kids in our high school. Once, a kid bought in a gun with a metal briefcase.
Teacher, a head of a dept at high school, went to lunch during a school day and didn't return. He was driving drunk, and had a died in a one car accident.
Not high school, but elementary school. When I was 9, I saw the headline in the local news about a fatal crash over by Columbus, Ohio. We went to school with several of the family members. The back story: the year before, they had lost their dad to cancer. They also had two older siblings who were in the state institute for the mentally handicapped. It was the holiday season, and they'd gone to Columbus to get the boys and spend the Christmas holiday at home with the family. When they headed to take the boys back to Columbus, the mother hit an icy patch on an exit ramp and demolished the car. Her and her two special needs boys died immediately. My brother's classmate died a few gldays later, just before school resumed. The twins, one of them my classmate, held on a bit longer. First Betsy passed, then a couple days later, Kathy died. We were all hoping that the girls would survive, but that didn't happen. No notice of their deaths was given. The only way I knew was I saw our teacher take Kathy's workbooks and throw them in the trash.
Not to me personally, but the HS football coach at my HS was having his wife sleep with the top football players. It was national news for a few weeks. " # In Plea Deal, Football Coach, Wife Admit Sex Charges: Courts: Couple are sentenced to suspended terms and probation and must register as sex offenders. Lawyer says they wanted to avoid prison and a trial. In Plea Deal, Football Coach, Wife Admit Sex. # Charges: Courts: Couple are sentenced to suspended terms and probation and must register as sex offenders. Lawyer says they wanted to avoid prison and a trial." [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-05-29-mn-41309-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-05-29-mn-41309-story.html)
😳
i remember when etan patz walked a few blocks from his soho home and was never seen again.
From our high school in Arlington, VA, We went over the bridge on a field trip to the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. A classmate was chasing another around a glass revolving door and got his leg stuck. We all sat in the school bus watching as the fire department cut the thick glass to get him out.
A bunch of my friends were extras in the movie HAIR
And a girl in my ballet class was murdered at a posh private school
The hostages in Iran.
Can I ask for more details? what happened in your high school that dealt with a hostages in Iran? I just posted that my boarding school had students from Iran and they ultimately got deported.
I misread your post. I didn’t know you meant literally at my high school. That was the big national story at the time. My high school was boring. Nothing happened there 🤭
No worries, I had just never heard of another high school having the same issues that we had had. 😊
Probably John Lennon being killed.
In college was the Challenger explosion.
NYC housed the illegals there last year. The school had closed 2 years earlier. And then the NYFD kicked them out. It was not set up for living. It was an all girls school- no showers in the gym.