Smoking In The Boys' Room

Smoking In The Boys' Room

- jim Young

“Smokin' in the boys' room. 

Smokin’ in the boys’ room.

Now teacher don't you fill me up with your rules

But everybody knows that smokin' ain't allowed in school

Checkin' out the halls, makin' sure the coast is clear

Lookin' in the stalls, ‘No, there ain't nobody here!’” - Cub Koda and Michael Lutz from Brownsville Station

I was just 13 years old when I started high school in Grade 9 at Barrie District Central Collegiate. I was about a year younger than most of my fellow students but that wasn’t why I didn’t smoke. Most of my friends smoked and most of them were underage too. The age limit to purchase cigarettes was 16 in those days but all any 13 year old needed to get cigarettes was to have an older friend or a forged note from one of their parents. It was common practice for parents to send children to the store with a note to purchase cigarettes on their behalf.

So it had nothing to do with me being under age. I just never really had much interest in smoking.

Like everyone else's parents, my parents preached the pitfalls of smoking, calling it a “nasty habit” every time they lit up one of their Player’s cigarettes and asked one of my sisters or I to fetch them an ashtray. We weren’t really forbidden to take up smoking “when you’re older”, as my parents would say. It was just strongly recommended that we not.

“It’s a lot harder to quit than it is to start,” we were admonished along with the obligatory, “I wish I had never taken up smoking,” that many parents added to justify their hypocrisy in a feeble attempt to somehow lend credence to their advice.

My father’s favourite justification was simply, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Of course that proverb was always delivered with a slight smirk on Dad’s face and a twinkle in his eye as he clearly recognized this less than stellar advice would fall on deaf ears. It was just his way of saying, “I’m done talking about this, for now.”

 

What is of particular interest here is that out of a family of six children, with two parents who had been heavy chain smokers from an early age of about the time that they entered high school, only one of the six of us children ever took up smoking. I have to confess however, I did give smoking a shot once. My venture into the world of tobacco lasted less than twenty-four hours.

My peers, who ridiculed me for my feeble attempt at the time, would suggest that it didn’t count anyway, as the single pack of cigarettes I smoked that day were only Menthols.

And then there was my brief dalliance into cigars at a much older age. In my defence there, like Bill Clinton, I never inhaled. Unlike Bill, I have inhaled marijuana from time to time, but I’ve never really considered that as “smoking” in the traditional sense of the word.

Truth be told, while I did enjoy the “ritual” of lighting up and puffing on a good stogie while sipping on a Mojito on a sunny afternoon, I never particularly enjoyed any of the cigars I actually smoked. The allure had much more to do with the idea that I could smoke a fine Cuban Cigar that was valued at about $20 for the mere cost of about 10 to 25 cents each. Value like that makes my Scottish blood run warm and smooth.

But back to where my story really begins. In 1966 in high school in Barrie, I was an anomaly even at the tender age of 13. 

Almost everyone smoked in 1966. When people came to visit, they didn’t ask if they could smoke in your home. Instead, they asked where you kept your ashtrays. Smoking was permitted everywhere - at home, in the car, on public transportation, in the work place, in restaurants, in funeral homes, government office buildings and even in the doctor’s office, everywhere… except at school.

Just like today, smoking was prohibited on school grounds - except for teachers. Teachers were permitted to smoke on school property, but only in designated teacher’s lounges.

Unlike today however, where smoking is prohibited within 20 meters of school property for students and teachers alike, in 1966 smoking was prohibited within 2 BLOCKS of school property. 

The penalty for anyone caught smoking within 20 meters today is a $305 fine for the first offence increasing up to $5,000 for subsequent infringements.

The penalty for a student caught smoking within 2 blocks of school property in 1966 was a week’s suspension leading up to expulsion from school for repeat offenders.

I often wondered how closely this rule was enforced for students that lived within 2 blocks of the school.

Just 2 years later, I was transferred across the city to Eastview Secondary School. It was 1968 now. The Summer of Love had come and gone. Smoking was now permitted on school property even for students - outside only. (The teachers still had their faculty lounges for indoor smoking.)

Every exterior crevice and corner of the school building was soon littered with cigarette butts where students gathered during lunch break to huddle and seek protection from the cold, winter winds as they grabbed a smoke.

Risking detention, students would sometimes chance a quick puff in the washrooms or stair wells, leaving behind the tell tale squashed butt as evidence of the crime.

There were a lot of cultural changes going on in the world around me during that time. The voting age had dropped to 18 in 1970. The next year, in 1971 the drinking age followed suit dropping to 18 as well.

By 1972 I was attending my first year at Georgian College. Don McMillan, who was teaching the ways of hard core newspaper reporting, sat on the edge of his desk. With a lit cigarette tucked firmly where his index and middle fingers met, Don would pause his lecture as he placed his hand over his mouth to cover his face like a mask with his fingers wrapped around his cheek to take a puff of the cigarette and exhale a greyish-white cloud above the heads of the students in the first row. I looked to my right to see Scott, a fellow classmate, listening to Don’s lecture, with his chair tilted back, feet up on the desk, a cup of coffee in a cardboard cup in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Yes, the times they were a-changing.

Teachers and students alike had reached equal grounds in the smokey world of tobacco at school.

But the pendulum had reached its extreme position and was about to start back. The anti-smoking activists were beginning to speak out. This growing minority was beginning to take a stand.

But like most revolutions, the change began with baby-steps with each small incremental victory leading to the next.  

Having been in the work force for a couple of years, I found myself back in the hallowed halls of Georgian College for a night course just a few years later. Cigarette butts were now showing back up in the stair wells but now, instead of fearing being caught smoking in the stair wells, students gathered there in the open. The stair wells had become identified as the only designated smoking spot within the building. 

Smokers were soon kicked back outside and as we all now know, eventually they were once again banished entirely from school property, this time including the teachers.

It’s interesting how things often go full circle.

Yes, my friends… Those were the days.

- 30 -

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