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Aaah, Those Were The Days

2016 Winning entry in storytellers-saloon School Memories Contest

My favourite school memory was my fourth and final year of high school.

I attended a technical school, which taught all the most popular trades as well as the regular academic subjects. About forty of us, including one girl who was taking auto mechanics, would take all the academic periods together then split up into our chosen specialties. 9:00am to 3:15pm was the day, made up of forty minute periods, including lunch.

Arrival after the 9 o'clock bell meant a detention, which in turn meant an hour after school painting football helmets. A teacher was posted at every entrance to round up the stragglers for this chore. The school population was around 2000, including about 300 girls, so there were plenty of painters. A detention for me was bad news, I lived two hours away outside the city.

We would arrive, go to our lockers and get everything we needed for the morning then get to our home room by 9:15. We weren't allowed to go to our lockers between periods so you carried everything you needed until lunch time, then did the same in the afternoon. No back packs in those days. We did have zipper binders that held several subjects with dividers.

My class was designated I4ACSTW and our home room was the carpentry shop. That funny name identified students that came from outside the city mostly. This was because you needed special permission to attend. There were no technical schools in the suburbs, heck, there were hardly any schools at all.

We began each day there with announcements from the principal, the national anthem and then off to our first class, lined up and marched in pairs.

Teachers lined the hallways outside the classrooms to make sure there was no talking and no stepping out of line at a fountains or washrooms.

Penalty . . . painting helmets.

The day's fun began in the trade periods. In machine shop it was squirting oil onto the chuck of the lathe so that when it was turned on, the user was sprayed liberally. In sheet metal, binder mechanisms were soldered so the rings wouldn't open. In auto mechanics, piston rings were crunched just slightly out of round so they wouldn't fit over the pistons during a test.

Architecture allowed for liberal use of graphite from the many pencil sharpeners, sometimes it looked like a minstrel show in class. Pattern making provided sand that found its annoying way into garments. Electricity was a no prank zone. The teacher, nicknamed 'Basher', didn't bother with detentions.

As a matter of fact, almost all the teachers were war veterans, even our principal was called Colonel, and there was a very military presence in the classrooms. One teacher in particular, ex air force, displayed unerring aim with chalk or a blackboard brush if he caught us not paying attention.

Academic detentions were normal. We did lessons and homework for an hour. Funny thing about detentions and washroom breaks. You got a little rectangular card that read 'hall pass' or 'detention'. Any time you were stopped by a teacher without your hall pass was another detention. And the detention cards were collected by your home room teacher at the end of the day. He entered it in a huge journal that, try as we might, couldn't get hold of to sabotage somehow.

We took target practice in the school basement with modified 22 rifles. It was a narrow concrete hallway with dim bulbs hanging from the ceiling and a target mount at the far end that you pulled toward you on a wire after your turn. We also did marching drills on the rugby field and physical training to the threat of an Indian club that rang painfully off knees and elbows. Our class was laudably named, The Limburger Guard. Gym was mostly basketball or floor hockey with rope climbing tossed in as an extra.

Swim was half free time half floating, and treading water, where the teacher shoved us away from the pool sides with a long bamboo stick until time was up. Drowning was the only option if you couldn't keep afloat. Diving from a low spring board, where we all tried our best to create a splash that would reach the chair the teacher sat on, and relay races. We also swam nude.

The girls swam after our class and we would cram into a tiny hallway to peer through an 8 x 10, wire mesh filled window, dismayed to find they wore swim suits. After showering we were allowed to put our wet towels and sweat soaked gym shorts and shoes in our lockers. Some guys never took theirs home and they would be stuck with rust to the locker shelf or door the next time we swam.

The change room had a door into the gymnasium and there was always some poor guy shoved naked out that door into the middle of the following class. We all painted helmets for that prank.

Back to our home room at the end of the day for roll call (which took place in every class) and then wait for the bell so that we could go to our lockers and leave for the day. As I mentioned, carpentry was our home room and when we took that class a favourite prank was to cut the page numbers out of the corner of somebody's text book with the band saw. Usually something like, The Elements of Physics, it was nice and thick.

We all knew the penalties for the pranks we played or the rules we broke and there was never any crying unfair when caught. We all paid the price and used extra caution the next time, because there was always a next time. Plenty of helmets just waiting to be painted. Our school team won many championships and I think it was because the helmets were so heavy from coats of paint, the wearer's momentum just couldn't be stopped.

At our commencement ceremony, roughly four hundred graduates filed across the stage in charcoal grey suits with 18" knees and 12" cuffs, accepting smug grins and crushing handshakes from the trade teachers, and bleak best wishes from the academics. In spite of all the nonsense, we came away with a lot of skills that served well down the years and our brains absorbed enough of the academic portion to provide a base for expansion.

When I graduated jobs were plentiful and I had tremendous choice because of all that training. My specialty was architectural drafting and while I never actually did any, I made a pretty good living in related fields.

At the celebration dance afterwards, since the girls attending the school were outnumbered by about 6 to 1, the stag line filled up most of the dancing space and the poor girls had no place to hide. They also had control.

We all said our goodbyes many times, reliving the odd, 'remember when . . .' story, then gradually drifted off to our various destinations. Technical schools closed much later and they all became collegiates. Now there are no trades people to fill the job needs so they are opening trade schools - imagine!

Too bad because I don't think they'll ever get to enjoy the rip roaring student council elections, with costumes and banners, the raids on the girl's gym lockers or the endless shop shenanigans we had.

. . .then again, they won't be painting football helmets either.