1 week Ago By Mike McFeely
FARGO — Naked and afraid before that was a thing. Yeah, I'm one of those guys Tracy Briggs wrote about who were subjected to baring it all in phy-ed class back in the 1970s. Sorry about the mental image.
It's painful for me, too. A literal 90-pound weakling with no clue and even less hormones. It was weird.
That I can say. Creepy, too, if memories recalled through nearly 50 years of fog are reliable. Other than that? Meh.
Swimming naked in gym class hasn't left any lasting scars. No harm, no foul. I turned out well-adjusted and normal, right? Right? Anybody? The 1970s.
New York City had Studio 54 and all the drugs, sex and debauchery that implies. The Robbinsdale school district in suburban Minneapolis had a bunch of prepubescent boys standing on the pool deck naked, shivering and embarrassed. Life on the edge in Minny.
This would've been the 1978-79 school year at Robbinsdale Junior High. (RIP. It's long since bulldozed and the land is now occupied by townhouses.
) But we weren't the only poor, unfortunate souls. It was apparently fairly common in Minnesota back in the day and, as I learned when the subject arose my old radio show, in some North Dakota locales, too. Somehow the talk topic that day turned to activities we used to do in gym class.
Kickball. Floor hockey. Dodgeball.
Volleyball. Swimming. I mentioned I had to swim nude in seventh grade, not thinking all that much of it.
My producer was mortified, which was probably the proper response. Listeners lit up the phone lines. Turns out there were plenty of 50-plus dudes who'd done the same thing.
We'd all been subjected to one of the strangest rituals of which you could think. Imagine in 2025 if kids were made to swim nude. "Welcome home from school, honey.
What did you do today?" "We swam naked in gym class." "Excuse me for a second, darling. I need to get a hold of Daddy at work and tell him to call a lawyer.
" But in the 1970s? Yawn. When we weren't jumping our bicycles Evel Knievel-style without helmets, we were climbing 15-foot high jungle gyms on asphalt playgrounds. We used to drive two hours to our cabin with nobody in our six-person family wearing seat belts while Mom and Dad sucked on cigarettes with the windows rolled up.
There were no rules. Not saying things were better or worse back then. Nostalgia is a dangerous drug.
But I don't even think I told my mom we were swimming nude. That's how little I thought of it. I don't think she asked.
I don't think she would've cared. I was the youngest of four kids. It's likely she was burned out on the kid thing by then.
But when you think about it almost 50 years later ...
it's super weird. There we were, a couple dozen seventh grade boys lined up on the concrete by the pool's edge — naked as jaybirds and no place to hide — while the (male) gym teacher paced back and forth in front of us like General Patton, giving instructions for that day's class. Sounds like a "Saturday Night Live" skit.
Or a "Seinfeld" bit. Although shrinkage was not a worry, as I recall. Then, into the water.
Which was better than standing around on the pool deck with a bunch of classmates you barely knew. Awk-ward. No, there were no females.
No, there were no windows. Yes, we were told all the doors were locked. There certainly weren't any cell phones.
But they had 12-year-olds strip down to their birthday suits in a public school and nobody gave it a second thought. Did not one person sitting in the teacher's lounge puffing on a lung dart between classes offer the opinion that having a bunch of naked kids in the school was just a touch odd? The justification was that fibers from swim trunks would clog the pool's filtration system, which seems 2% logical until you remember that the girl wore swimsuits for their pool time. At which point the justification becomes 0% logical.
Forced skinny dipping. In broad daylight. In a public school.
With a teacher watching. We survived with minimal PTSD (Post-Traumatic Swimming Disorder), but it's probably best to leave that relic of the past in the hazy brains of old men. The 12-year-old boys of today will thank us.
.
