Copenhagen Chewers of America

When I was in high school back in the Jurassic Age, we had to endure “study halls”. Study hall meant that you sat in a huge old auditorium with a bunch of other kids, most of whom were doing anything but studying. I was always bored as all getout in study hall. I was too shy to interact with kids I didn’t know and I never had much trouble keeping up with homework so I mostly sat there feeling idle and very awkward.

Another thing that was going on at my high school, freshman and sophomore year anyway, was that the school had been built for 600 students and 1300-plus of us were jammed into it. As a clueless freshman, I did not realize that if I had study hall during the first or last period of the day or one of the periods surrounding lunch, I didn’t have to be AT THE SCHOOL. We had an open campus lunch situation, another function of over-crowding. You could eat lunch at the school and I often did but you had to sit in the gym bleachers and there were intramural games going on and having a basketball player wipe out and land in somebody’s tuna fish sandwich was not appetizing. You can be darn sure I rectified the study hall situation for sophomore year and scheduled mine for first period or whatever. Junior year it was a moot point because we moved to a huge new school building and a lot of things including study hall and the dress code went totally out the window.

One of the activities in study hall was chewing tobacco. Oh, not me! A certain contingent of male (I’m gonna guess mostly) folks of the “my posse don’t do homework” sort. We had a lot of those back in those days and nobody seemed to care if they chawed at school. I can’t remember if there were also smokers. I mean I *know* there were smokers. I dated a couple. I also know people smoked in the school building. I can’t remember if there were designated areas or not. For one thing, I’m not sure how safe that building was in terms of faaaar.

Years and years have passed. Smoking became taboo in more and more places and FINALLY in bars and restaurants. I sure hated waking up the next morning from dinner at the Oscar Tango or Knight’s or somewhere with my hair smelling like cigarette smoke. Ten years ago I was visiting The Commander in the Sault Ste. Siberia Hoosegow when I overheard a nurse taking away somebody’s chewing tobacco in the next room. I was kind of astounded. Do people still chew? I guess so.

The GG sent me this pic from Ohaaaao yesterday. Different brand but neat pic. Now, can he answer a couple simple, innocuous yes/no questions via text? Apparently not. (He doesn’t have enough service for a call.)

One Response to “Copenhagen Chewers of America”

  1. Margaret Says:

    The downstairs girls’ bathroom in my high school was for the smokers although it wasn’t officially designated that way and no one was supposed to be smoking. I was scared to go in there; the one time I was desperate and did so, I got my long hair pulled and a few threats.