More about Karla Stover's books here
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.
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