Slow Times at Amarillo High

When the seniors who would graduate from Amarillo High School in 1942 showed up for their first day of classes, they and all their underclassmates received an orange student handbook.

The 96-page publication reads more like a college catalog than any set of academic guidelines given to 21st century high schoolers. Printed in small type, the booklet covers almost everything a 1940s teenager needed to know, from an explanation of the school’s bell system to a listing of graduation requirements to the various school cheers. The handbook also included some things that would seem totaly bizarre to 12th graders today, like dating dos and don’ts.

I found a worn copy of the 1941-42 vintage booklet while going through some of my late father Bill Cox’s papers. He attended Amarillo High before deciding that hiring on as a cub reporter for one of the local daily newspapers would be a lot more interesting, and in its way, even more educational than the high school classroom. (He later earned a GED and went on to take some college level courses as well.)

A publication most students back then must have found boring, the handbook is sure fun to read today. Printed only a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that triggered U.S. involvement in World War Two, the booklet seems incredibly innocent by today’s standards. For instance, high schoolers in 1941 were expected to show up for class on time, turn in their homework and abide by other rules, but the school officials who had a hand in compiling the book would not have evisioned a time when schools would need to bar drugs and guns from the classroom.

The section on dating takes up a page and a half. It begins:

“This branch of etiquette which has to do with one of the most irritatingly fascinating perplexities, or perplexingly irritating fascinations – ‘the date’ – is, unfortunately, so new that every maker or breaker of dates must be, to some extent, his own authority in procedure. Hence, common sense combined with intelligent application of general conventionalities is the safest guide in this field.”

That said, the author – or maybe it was a committee – clearly had no hesitation in proceeding with suggested rules of conduct regarding teenage courtship.

And the handbook is singularly unambiguous in its stand on “snuggling, petting and goodnight kisses”: Those activities often associated with dating were, in the word of the handbook, “taboo.” Written law did not forbid such behavior on a date, the guide continued, but “by the far more potent factor of self-respect and student opinion.”

Then followed a sentence which a modern reader would have to wonder how someone could have been written with a straight face even in the 1940s: “The general sentiment, as revealed in discussions, is that they [“snuggling, petting and goodnight kisses”] are rather asinine performances, and though there is a provocative spice to the epithet ‘immoral,’ how many of us really enjoy facing the words ‘dumb,’ ‘slushy,’ or even ‘ludicrous?’”

Though the young woman who would become my mother did not go to Amarillo High School with my father, for obvious reasons I am glad Dad didn’t take this particular guideance too much to heart when he met her a few years later.

The booklet goes on with insight into how students should conduct themselves at teas, dinners, and dances. (Tips for the latter are broken down on a girl-boy basis.)

Some of the guidelines for boys include: