High School Pranks

We were talking at dinner tonight, and the subject of pranks came up (somehow, I don't remember exactly why). Pranks and high school seem to go together well. Here are a couple:

That Locker Had Balls!

When my son Andy was in school, he and some friends decided to pull one that is still probably remembered even today. (My friend Larry would be proud; see below.) The guys went to a local driving range, loaded up with about 200 purloined golf balls and got into the high school (somehow; again, details are a little fuzzy here).

One of the guys held open the top corner of the locker while the others poured in the range balls . . . all of them. At the beginning of the day, with the halls packed with students, the owner of that locker opened the door, and, well it was off-to-the-races to try to pick up all the golf balls! I understand it was quite a sight!

The Cookie Stealer Gets His

Back in the 70's, at my high school, a bunch of us had fourth-hour gym class. Fourth hour was also the first of three lunch hours, so we used to detour through the cafeteria and get a large, 5-cent sugar cookie to eat on the way to class.

The trouble with that was that the shop classes lined the hall on the way to the locker room, and the shop teachers used to stand outside their classes, looking for students eating on their way to their next class. If they saw you with something, they'd take it from you and send you on their way. I lost a couple of cookies like that.

My friend Larry used to grab his sandwich from his locker and eat it as he walked to gym class. He got tired of having his sandwich taken, so he decided to get even. One morning, he made a "special" sandwich - bologna on white with very generous amounts of ketchup layered on both sides of the meat.

Larry grabbed his sandwich that morning and pretended to eat it on the way to class. The "Cookie Stealer" - I can't remember the teacher's name - seeing Larry's sandwich, demanded that Larry give it to him. So Larry pressed the sandwich into the teacher's hand and gave it a good squeeze, forcing out a river of ketchup. We left the instructor looking down at his hand and the soggy, sodden, ketchup-y mess Larry had given him. And what could he do? He demanded the sandwich, and Larry complied!