Does Anyone But Me Remember Blab Books? by Karla Stover

 

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G APARTO DEEPER: DISCOVER WHAT SETS BITISH COLUMBIA SKIING APART

My youngest nephew just turned 13. Next year he will start junior high. Ah, In junior high, were, in my day, we did adult things. We wore special clothes for gym, learned a new game called dodge ball, and had access to a real stage for school plays. At lunch we could buy ice-cream bars for a dime, and we had lockers that we shared with a partner, and a combination lock that only the two of us knew. We carried our four or five schoolbooks on one hip as we changed rooms for classes. And those class rooms offered two terrific things: unknown boys with unfamiliar phone prefixes such as PR(octer), MA(arket), and the occasional LE(nox), and time for Blab Books. While Miss Barnes diagrammed sentences, and told us that Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by the Woods” really was about death, in spite of what the poet, himself, said, Blab Books made their stealthy rounds. In the seventh grade, when our hormones sprouted like plants in time-lapse photography, a Blab Book provided a way to flirt indirectly.

 To make a Blab Book, we put a dozen or so blank sheets of paper in one of those brightly colored folders that used to cost a dime, and had prongs in the middle to fit our three-holed papers. A folder such as this automatically said, “Something special is inside.”  They had the same importance as the ubiquitous Blue Book does in college, these days.  At the top of the first page, in large letters (using a stencil if possible, so the words looked important) we wrote My Blab Book, and underneath that we put our names. Page two had numbers down the left side. From then on, the pages were headed anyway the owner wanted, such as:  prettiest girl in school, cutest boy, best athlete, class clown, favorite movie, favorite TV show, favorite singer, favorite color, favorite hobby, favorite book, and then a list of least favorite movies, songs, TV shows, or anything else the owner wanted to include.  Then across the aisle or down the row of seats they went. The process went like this: Jerry W, who always sat behind me in those days of alphabetical seating because I was also a W, wrote his name after the number one on page two, then he wrote that number on the appropriate page and answered the question.  In reading the numbered answers later on, we learned that he liked spooky books. We discovered that most of the girls liked Tab Hunter, but the boys preferred Jack Webb, and that the girls loved Pat and Justine on American Bandstand, but the boys preferred The Red Skelton Show. Everyone liked a new TV show, Cheyenne, but we had all out grown (or said we had,) The Mickey Mouse Club. When Katie A thought Darrell Z was the cutest boy in the seventh grade, but that he didn’t reciprocate—well, that was just wrong because Katie was always written up as the friendliest girl in the whole class!  But for me, it was a heady day when Robbie G wrote “Karla, U. R. A. Q. T.” Since everyone read everyone else’s answers, which killed a lot of class time, and certainly took the pain out of conjugating verbs, that meant everyone knew what he’d written.  A red-letter day, indeed.

     Tacoma, Washington where I grew up, and where Blab Books were popular, is and was a medium-sized town. I regularly run into old classmates. Over the years, I learned who became a cop and worked with my dad, who in the not-so-distant future died in Viet Nam, and that the tall, skinny girl in music class, who wore glasses and looked like Popeye’s Olive Oyl, eventually went to Vegas and became a show girl. However, when I ask anyone from my seventh grade class at Mason  if they remember Blab books, no one does.

     In those innocent days, boys and girls gathered together on porches after school to compare the day's notes before homework; we went with same-sex friends to the local movie theater on Saturday afternoons and  then changed seats in the dark to be by a “crush,” and we spent entire school dances on opposite side of the floor looking at each other.

Blab Books did a lot to lead us painlessly into serious boy – girl stuff.