My mother had warned me to be careful during lunch time at junior high because there were a lot of boys from the high school who would, during lunch, cruise along the stretch of road behind the school next to the playground. (Actually, it wasn't a playground. It was a big field where the junior high football team practiced after school, but I don't have a better way to describe it.) I wondered why anyone would want to waste gas driving around the junior high school for a half hour every day.
I found out why the first day. The high school boys were coming over to pick up on the junior high girls. They were always there, every single day. It didn't matter if it was raining or snowing, they would drive up and down that road, pull over from time to time and talk to any girls who would approach their cars. And there were always girls who would get in and ride.
The boys who would do the lunchtime cruise were not the best and the brightest from the high school. The Alpha males, like those who were on the starting and secondary lineups of the football team, did not need to troll the junior high to get dates. The ones who did were more apt to wind up as employees of the refinery once they graduated from high school or dropped out when they were 16. (Yes, back then, you could drop out of school at the age of 16.)
I actually regarded these guys as losers. That says a lot coming from me. I swore that I would never sink to that level to get a girlfriend. When I got to high school, I actually understood why those guys were driving around the junior high school. The girls in high school were either dating the Alpha males or dating older guys who were no longer in school because they had already graduated (probably because they picked them up when they were in junior high). I kept my promise to myself and during the three years I was in high school, I never once drove by the junior high during lunchtime. I kept that promise even though I only ever had one girlfriend all during high school.
Since my mother had warned me about the high school boys, this meant that this had been going on for some time before I started eighth grade.
The problem did not just end once those boys graduated or dropped out of high school. There were actually a number of what I call the scary punks from the refinery. These were the 16 to 22-year-old guys who never had to worry about school again. Unfortunately, they had to worry about getting girlfriends. Since most of them had done the lunchtime cruise while they were still in school, it was something they never got out of their system that this was how they were supposed to get girlfriends, especially since cruising by the high school was a waste of time because all the girls there already had cars and didn't stick around the campus for lunch.
So imagine that for at least for seven years, guys as old as 22 (maybe even older) could go over to the junior high school to try to pick up on girls who were as young as 13. Chris Hansen would have a field day with this. I don't know if the cruising situation had anything to do with this, but when I was in high school, some interesting changes took place. First, they started classes at junior high at 8:45am. This would put lunch at 11:45am. The high school lunch didn't start until 12pm. This cut the time for cruising by half. I wasn't around the junior high, so I don't know what, if any, impact this actually had. It likely meant less time for high school boys to stake their claim and cut down on the competition for the scary punks who worked the night shifts at the refinery and didn't need to heed by regular lunch hour restrictions.
I know that after I graduated from high school, they put up a fence around the field at Park and declined to let anyone leave the campus during lunch. I'm pretty certain the cruising came to a stop after that. They also put a fence around Zia and closed the campus there as well, even though they didn't have a predator problem.
But for a long time, parents and teachers seemed to put up with this behavior.
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