It had a lot to do with two things, really. One was where Samohi was located. It was situated on and around a hill four blocks from the beach. The tallest building was only two stories high but it was dead on top of Indian Hill. From the boys bathroom on the second floor the beach at the end of Pico Blvd could be seen. You could also see the surf.
The second was that Samohi, at that time, was one of only two high schools in California that had an open campus. That meant that you could come and go from campus at any time without question.
This is how it all started.
Every morning, especially during spring and fall semesters, when the weather and water was warm, one of us would go up to the second floor of the History building and check out the surf. If the surf was good we would ditch school and go to the beach.
This became problematic as too many missed classes would lead to your parents being called and then you would have to deal with trouble at home. In my case a very pissed off father, which was the last thing I needed.
So we started to check out the attendance system. We discovered a few interesting things. First the whole system centered on a document called, "The Master Absence List"
Teachers took attendance at the beginning of each class, each period. Teachers typically had multiple classes daily over the six periods of the school day. If a student was absent the teacher would fill out a preprinted absenence slip/form with the name of the absent student, class, date, etc. Then put the white 5 X 3 inch slips in a wooden box, made in wood shop by some previous class, fastened just outside the classroom door.
There were students, usually girls, after all that is what girls did, office work, right? They gained extra credit by working in the different school administration offices. One of which was the attendance office. Part of their duties was to walk around each period and collect the absent slips from the wooden boxes and return them to the attendance office. All in all a pretty good system.
We also discovered the true motive for this intricate system. The State of California payed the schools money for each student. And guess what that payment was based upon, you got itÖ attendance. But here we found the chink in the system's armor.
Now the Master Absent List was the key to the system. It consisted of all the students who had been marked absent the day before during first period. If a student had been legitimately absent he or she would report to the attendance office in the morning with their parental written excuse, Doctor's note, etc. then they would receive a excused absence slip.
When a student was listed on Master Absent List the teacher would see their name and ask them for their excused absence slip. The student would produce the little pink 5 X 3 inch slip and all would be well. If the student didn't have an excused absence slip, they were not allowed into class and sent to the attendance office to straighten the problem out.
Now the Master Absent List was made from the absent slips gathered from first period only. Because the list had to be compiled, typed and duplicated and stuffed into the teachers mail boxes so that they would be ready for them the next morning, first period.
So if the student attended first period he or she would not be on the Master Absent List the next day. So getting back into classes was not a problem.
We found out from girls who worked in the attendance office that absence slips from other periods during the day were stuffed into a drawer and considered redundant information. They were assuming that anyone absent would be adsent all day. Once in a while the drawer was dumped into the trash to make more room.
The system broke down because no one in the attendance office was checking the absence slips from the five other periods during the school day. Nobody caught the blatant anomalies. Just too busy I guess.
The Plan
There were about six of us involved in this plan. All surfers, all pretty smart and all smart-assed. So we would check the surf and go to first period. I had English first period, in the eleventh grade. A class I sort of liked. I had almost perfect attendance and a good grade average. Most of the rest of the day I was gone.
If by chance the surf was really, really good we would find the girl collecting the absence slips and she would tear up the first period absent slip for us. So we could skip first period and not be on the Master Absent List. If the first period teacher actually remembered you weren't there you could make up something like you had a school councilor appointment. And since you weren't on the Master Absent List everything was cool.
Then spring time really hit, the surf sucked. Typically the Southern California weather and the ocean temperature was warm but the surf had a tendency to be flat. Kind of a transition period between the huge, strong, cold water, north swells of winter and the big, warm water, south swells of summer. Since we had ditching down to a science, we were just sitting at the beach bored shitless. We had been successfully ditching for about a month.
Then one of us, I don't remember who, said,
"Hey why don't we go back to school and turn ourselves in for ditching?"
We all thought about it for a while.
I started to laugh, "They will shit bricks!" That made everyone laugh.
My friend Ray said, "Shit, there's nothing else to do, I'm in."
Actually it was a pretty smart thing to do. We couldn't keep getting away with it indefinitely. We had to graduate to our senior year and this kind of thing could get us expelled.
So we did. We walked into the attendance office, one afternoon, in mass and said we had been ditching classes for a month and wanted to turn ourselves in. Mr Sevlin, the attendance coordinator and real dick, looked at all six of us in disbelief.
So they started looking at the Master Absent Lists. We weren't on them. There was no record of our absences. Then one of the secretaries looked in the drawer where they kept the absence slips for the other five periods and there were slip after slip with all our names on them. We just smiled. Of course they were asking how we did it and we just said, "I don't know we just ditched," and smiled.
Except for Ray, every time they asked him a question he just said, "Eat a bone." Soon they stopped asking him anything. He cracked me up.
Then, of course, the shit hit the fan. We were suspended, obligatory letter sent home to the parents saying we were suspended from school for truancy. Until our parents and the student met with the dean of boys.
Needless to say my folks were livid. My dad was really pissed, as usual. I considered myself lucky he didn't beat the shit out of me.
The meeting for me was strained to say the least. The dean, Mr Delkner, who was a real dick to students, was really nice to my folks, the two faced prick.
Near the end of the meeting Delkner said. "We still don't know how this happened. Our system is fool proof."
My dad started to laugh and said, "Well obviously it isn't fool proof."
So the upshot was we were all suspended for two weeks and received a bunch of demerits. Demerits could be worked off by doing tasks around school.
My folks made my life miserable for a while, but I lived through it.
The one thing that seemed really strange to me was, here we had spent an entire month ditching school and our punishment was two more weeks off from school. This time legally. Really, was I the only one seeing the incredible irony in this so called punishment?
Epilog
When I graduated high school My friend Gil and I went to Hawaii to make our pilgrimage to island waves. We lived a great life, not much money, but oh man, We surfed everyday, snorkeled for food and partied in the paradise that Hawaii really is.
In those days there was a draft. If you were eighteen, and not holding a 3.5 GPA. in college, you were drafted into the U.S army. We choose to beat the draft by joining the U.S. Navy. At least we would be near the sea and not slogging through the mud somewhere with bullets flying around our heads.
My dad sent me my draft notice in bootcamp. I spent two years on active duty. More on that in future stories.
After my stint in the service, I came home to Santa Monica and enrolled in college. I was hanging out with a girl who was a senior at Samohi.
Again it was spring time in Southern California, warm air, warm water, beautiful. On a Sunday we were driving up the coast on highway 101 and I said, "This doesn't get much better than this."
"Boy I'll say," She said.
"Ok, let's do it again tomorrow."
She looked serious, "Oh man, I can't, I have school."
"So ditch."
"No I've ditched too many times, I'm on probation."
I said, "Why don't you try it this way?" So I explained the system to her.
"Tomorrow is Monday, you'll have to go to first period. I'll pick you up at school after the bell."
"Are you sure...?"
"Lets give it a try," I said
Guess what, it still worked.
The two things that immediately struck me was, one, the administration never figured out how we ditched. Maybe they thought it was an anomaly. After all we couldn't be smarter than they were. Ah hubris.
And number two is that not one of the six of us told them how we did it. Even though all of us had meetings with the dean like I did. Like me they just played dumb and said, "I don't know, we just ditched."
Like I've said before, in those days, you NEVER EVER snitched.