Spring Break!

In the news this week are several stories about the upcoming spring breaks sweeping the college campuses. Images of wild parties involving beaches, bikinis and booze flood the consciousness. It seems that everyone is headed to warmer climates and a week of abandonment of studies, killing off a few brain cells and a few skin cells in the hot sun. Yeah Baby! It’s gonna be fun for them. I remember my spring breaks well.

Wait a minute; I didn’t have spring breaks in college, or fall breaks for that matter.

The fall semester ran from the week after Labor Day until the second week of January with a couple of days off for Thanksgiving and Christmas. In January we returned for Fall Semester Final Exams and the end of the semester. Whether or not we had time off between the Fall and the Spring semesters depended on the scheduling of the final exams. If our last exam was near the end of the exam period, we didn’t have more than a day or so before we were back on campus standing in line to register for the spring classes.

The Spring semester ran between the last week or so of January through the latter part of May. The only break we got in the Spring semester was Wednesday through Sunday of Easter Week. Not exactly the time to “party hearty” under the warm sun on a golden beach somewhere.

I can hear you say; “Oh c’mon now! The next thing you’ll be telling me is that you had to walk uphill in 3 feet of snow both ways between your dorm and classes.” Honestly, I’m not being a curmudgeon. There was little snow in this picture but the semester schedules were different for us back in the day. The worst part about those schedules was that with Final Exams looming in the first week of January, much of the Christmas break was spent cramming for exams instead of cramming cranberries into our mouths.

Here in South Carolina there is the tradition of “First Week” when the upper class students and graduating seniors in high school would travel en mass to the beaches to celebrate the upcoming summer. In Florida, where beaches and sunshine were easily accessible, we had class parties many Spring weekends as soon as it was warm enough to wear a bathing suit without the accompanying goose bumps. Even if the weather was still a bit chilly, seeing the girls in our class in swimsuits instead of the school uniforms kept us boys warm enough. Note: I’m talking about the early 60’s so I’m talking about one piece swimsuits. I’m not sure I could have taken much of the “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka dot Bikini” from the Brian Highland song. The few of those on the beach got a lot of male attention all right.

The biggest difference from these high school beach parties and the spring break wildness we see today was the lack of booze. The drinking age back then was 21, still 4 or 5 years in our future. And there were no Chinese web sites where you could buy fake IDs. Geesh, I’m starting to sound like an Annette Funicello – Frankie Avalon movie. It may sound corny but we had fun.

My walk from the parking garage at the University of South Carolina campus to the Russell House Studios of WUSC-FM will be a lot lonelier tomorrow without being surrounded by the 25,000 plus students crowding the walkways as they change classes. I will miss them. Mingling with them keeps me young. I’m always greeted with smiles and good mornings. Because I have my laptop computer containing my oldies in a roller bag, I think they suspect that I’m a professor or something despite my Monday rockin’ socks. It’s always fun when I run into a student or member of the faculty that I know and the conversation turns to rock and roll.

DJ Goat Guy (don’t ’cha love their DJ names) who has the show before mine is going to Texas to be with his family and DJ Fix who has the one that follows mine is planning to be off campus on a University based project. So unless someone fills in for them I am likely to walk into an empty studio and take over from the automation to do my show. Likewise, at the end of my show I’ll be restarting the automation for the rest of the day. If I’m lucky, someone from the faculty or the staff will drop by and chat during the show or I’ll get a lot of requests over the phone. I’d like that; we “old school” DJs love a studio full of people. Oh MY!