I was hired during Rodeo Week of 1982 to be the new Boys’ and Girls’ Tennis Coach (replacing Ed Olson, the previous tennis coach, who had become the Principal of Litchfield which was located on the site of and eventually replaced by Gertie Belle Rogers elementary school) as well as a Social Studies teacher at Mitchell High School. There was a clause in every teacher’s contract called “duties as assigned”. At the high school that meant chaperoning dances, riding herd on students at athletic competitions, attending things like parent-teacher conferences and graduation etc.
When I began at Mitchell High School (MHS) in the fall of 1982 the school was a sophomore through senior high school with 1100 students, in round figures, for enrollment. Mitchell Middle School was a Junior High then with grades 7-9 in attendance and the elementaries were 1-6. I can’t remember if kindergarten was a thing then or not, if it was it was only for half a day.
There were seven, fifty-minute periods and four lunch shifts then during the school day at the high school. MHS had nearly a dance a month then, a back-to-school dance of sorts, a homecoming dance, a Sadie Hawkins dance and the prom were the main events but there were “just because” dances throughout the year that “volunteer” teachers chaperoned usually after some home athletic event.
Proms forty years ago were held in the MHS gym and the “after prom party” consisted of the dusk-to-dawn showings out at the Starlite Theater (the drive-in) after the prom was over. Teachers followed a class then. When you shadowed sophomores, you had to chaperone a number of dances but not the prom, the prom was for juniors and seniors only. You then “followed” that class as they became juniors, at that point the prom was the major responsibility. When those sophomores eventually became seniors, the main obligation was baccalaureate and graduation.
The gym was shut down the week before the prom and physical education teachers Nancy Niebur and Gary Munsen were exiled to the bowling alley or outside for their PE classes. A giant ring, located in the center of the gym, was lowered to the ground and streamers were attached to it. Various placards and platforms denoting the theme (an Evening in Paris for example) were constructed and erected. The junior girls on the decorating committee always wanted to walk over a little bridge with a babbling brook underneath it to get into the gym. We never did manage that. It made no logistical sense and with the height of the some of the boys it would have been impractical even if it were possible.
The bleachers were pulled out so that parents could watch kids promenade into the gym for the Grand March. The times I was a chaperone, parents always tore the streamers down, like a pack of rabid hyenas, so they could get better pictures. This behavior, after the Juniors spent $1000 in 1983 (a little over $3000 in today’s dollars) and a week to decorate the place made me enraged and I vowed I would never attend another Grand March that wasn’t my “duty as assigned”. In case you’re wondering, I never did – not even when my own kids went to prom. Later in my career we didn’t follow classes anymore and each of us developed a specialty we stayed with for our careers at MHS (for example, I was the magazine sale guy raising money for the prom, Lori Schmidt and Tom Burg were the prom organizers, Bill Timmins and John Solberg were in charge of graduation etc.)
At my very first prom, I was given “bathroom” duty. A male and female teacher were assigned to troll the bathrooms in the hall across from the gym to try and catch any illicit alcohol drinkers in the stalls. I had outside duty. I went outdoors, along the outer wall of MHS by the lighted sign on the side of the building with some scissors. Kids would attach liquor bottles on string and hang them out the bathroom windows. I’d cut the string, take the bottles to my car and lock them up. On at least one occasion, we used the confiscated booze to provide the adult beverages for a teacher party at the end of the year.
One of the big debates of the students on the committee in charge of organizing the prom was, what would the theme be? Once the theme was decided then the colors and decorations fell into line naturally after that. Another big debate was, should the prom have a live band or a sound system? In my early days of the prom, there was always a live band. We eventually got away from that because they hardly ever played the songs kids wanted to dance to and when they did, the MHS prom band sounded nothing like the original artists who had made the song popular in the first place. Sound systems eventually became the default choice for all proms going forward.
Police were always present at prom. On occasion kids were subject to breathalyzers and sometimes rowdy students had to be removed. I will change her name slightly, in case she is a respectable grandmother by now, but at the prom in 1983 a girl by the name of “Aurora Padlock” showed the need for the police in attendance at the prom. Aurora, her pseudonym, was drunk as a skunk and swearing like a sailor. Mr. Bob Brooks, the MHS Principal then, asked her to quiet down and moderate her language. She did neither. He asked her again. She got in his face and suggested he do some things that I’m pretty sure are anatomically impossible for a man to do. So, he called in the two officers on prom patrol. She promptly laid out the firs officer. She decked him and he went down like a redwood in the forest. After seeing his partner cold cocked the second officer tackled Aurora, who was a very striking girl physically, to the ground. “Officer Rocky”, after having taken a dive in the first round, got up and joined the fray wrestling this senior girl, who was doing surprisingly well despite her full length formal against two of Mitchell’s finest. Aurora was handcuffed, jerked to her feet swearing once again like an old salt, however now in front of a crowd of fellow prom goers and escorted from the building to jail. While she was being frog marched out, she stepped on her own dress inadvertently dragging it off herself to reveal a scantily clad attractive and fetching figure disappearing into the night to a chorus of cat calls and wolf whistles.
There used to be a prom banquet and “party favors”. The party favors varied over the years and included memory books, mugs with the MHS mascot Cornelius on them, one year there were champaign flutes (that was a miscalculation never to be repeated) and so forth and so on.
The prom moved to the Corn Palace to accommodate all the Looky Lou parents and others who came for the Grand March. Decorations now go up on the Friday night before the prom. There are no banquets or party favors. Kids tend not to stay very long at the dance and a good number go through the Grand March and keep on going, right out the front door of the Corn Palace.
Things are certainly different now from what they were. We’ve lost something but this generation will never realize it because if you haven’t experienced the past, you really can’t appreciate what was and never will be again. Whatever form prom takes this year and into the future, I hope young people will make happy memories that last a lifetime. I wish all a safe, fun and unforgettable prom season.