The Year of the Slam Book

It has been enjoyable reading the reflections about growing up in Danvers []. I’d like to share one of my own.

In the winter of 1957, the emerging teenage population in town became more and more swept up in the Rock ‘n Roll hysteria. The girls could not wait for Ladies Choice at Friday night Canteen while the guys knew just who they wanted to pick for the slow dances. And getting a booth at Cal’s Diner after the hop was the perfect way to top off the night.

Soon, an electric current began to run through the corridors and stairwells of Richmond Junior High School. Where this supercharge had started nobody really could say, but almost overnight it spread like wildfire and shook up the sleepy boredom of those cold winter school days diagramming sentences, multiplying decimals and studying about volcanoes in science class.

The phenomenon was the slam book.

A rallying cry went out to get your slam book put together. Everyone had to make up a whole series of questions, which friends and classmates would then get a chance to answer. Everyone took a number on the front page of the slam book and then used that number to put under every one of their answers. Suddenly the race was on to get as many people as possible to sign into your book. You also wanted to sign into as many other books as you possibly could.

The questions covered a lot of territory. They started with basic ones [such as], “What’s your birthday?” “What’s your phone number?” “What kind of car have you got?” or “Do you like snap-jacks?” And then they worked up to more personal preferences and opinions: “What’s your favorite TV program?” Answer: “Mickey Mouse Club, I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best.” “Who is your favorite actress? Jayne Mansfield,” “Who is your favorite actor? James Dean,” “Who is your favorite Rock ‘n Roll singer? Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, Little Richard, Fats Domino.”

“Do you like school? Silly question, does anybody?” “What would you do to improve the school? Demolish it!” “What age are you going to be married at? When I’m crazy enough to, when I haven’t got anything better to do, why didn’t you tell me I was getting married?” “If you were asked to go steady would you? Depends, no I don’t trust boys, you bet I would!”

Well, it was all innocent fun. Soon we were passing our slam book to the kid next to us in class and [he or she] would pass it on and then on to the next one. You tried to be very inconspicuous about handing it under the desk to your neighbor but inevitably a sharp- eyed teacher would catch the hand off and take it away – not confiscating, it but holding it until the end of the day.

The Slam Book was a neat way to build your social network; to find out more about your friends and to get them to answer something more personal, maybe even something a little more provocative about themselves. It was a way of reaching out to your classmates, some of who were not necessarily your friends to begin with but whom you might want to get to know a little better. Having the slam book did your traveling for you and let you become part of the bigger, all-important social scene. Sound familiar?

At a recent gathering of several Richmond Junior High classmates we had a chance to look back at the slam book I had held onto since 1957. It created quite a stir. Some had vaguely remembered its existence, but by the time everyone was hearing and reading the responses of their long ago junior high classmates, they were clearly delighted to recover this blast from the past.

Today we are eligible for Social Security benefits, but we had an early form of social security back then. We were actually becoming teenagers – an exciting but also a socially intimidating time. We had a way to reach out to our friends and to gather them into our slam book. We felt more secure knowing we had so many people for friends, or potential ones anyway.

The slam book has receded into history, but it took us right back to a signature time in our lives and turned on a light during another one of those cold winter days in a town which has given us great friends and great memories to go with them.