School in the 80's

Every now and then I like to do a series of posts with a common theme. I'm not doing this to be particularly creative. I am doing it mostly because the information I want to post is too long for a single entry. This series is called "School in the 80's". It will take a look back at my days in elementary and high school from the mid 70's to the mid 80's. We all have memories of school because we all WENT to school.

Before there were copiers, there were ditto machines. Who doesn't remember doing worksheets that had been churned out in purple ink? Remember how they'd always be slightly smudged? Remember that chemical smell? Somebody should do a study on the fluid that was used to print dittos. They would probably find it caused brain damage. That would explain a lot of the behaviors of my classmates.

Remember when watching a movie in school was a big deal? Nowadays watching a movie/video in school is commonplace. It's not even a treat for kids anymore. But when I went to school, watching a movie was a rare, special event. You always knew when the teacher planned on showing a movie. First she had to drag out a projector that was the size of a Volkswagen. Then it would take about ten minutes to take the film (yes, actual film) out of the canister and feed it through the projector. Then the lights went out and you heard that familiar clicking of the film running through the projector. It was so much fun. The films must have been really expensive because our school didn't have that many. I remember watching the same movies over and over. We didn't care though. We knew it beat the alternative of sitting at our desks doing ditto worksheets.

We had one movie in particular that we watched all the time. It was called, "Homer and the doughnuts". In elementary school I know we must have watched it 4 or 5 times a year. Looking back as an adult, I think I know why the teachers showed it so much. I think it must have been the longest movie the school owned and therefore gave the teachers the longest break from the kids. Don't get me wrong. We kids loved it! It was about a kid who volunteers to mind a doughnut shop for a little while. Why an adult, doughnut shop owner would entrust his business to a 12 year old, I'll never know. Anyway, Homer decides to make some doughnuts and the machine goes haywire and uncontrollably pumps out hundreds of doughnuts. In a plot twist, a hungry, rich lady volunteers to help make the doughnuts (I never knew why she needed to help). Meanwhile she unknowingly drops a diamond bracelet into the doughnut batter and it ends up inside one of the doughnuts that are now piled to the ceiling. The rest of the movie had customers eating the doughnuts because a reward was offered for the safe return of the bracelet. This was QUALITY entertainment that never got old. I guess as kids we were okay watching the movie even though we had memorized every detail of it. Ah, school days!

Here are two screenshots from that movie. They are the only two I could find. Google did reveal the movie was made in 1963.